Sharon Wall's “The Nurture of Nature”

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Thesis statement

The history of camping suggests is that, if intellectuals had difficulty recognizing the mix that was modernity, so-called "ordinary people" did not.

Part I: Explanation

Summary of the book

Whatever the reality of the situation, to be modem in the twentieth century was to perceive oneself as divorced from nature, to lament this fact and to look longingly, if only occasionally and half-heartedly, for a bridge back. Summer camp was one product of this way of thinking. In short, the summer camp should best be read not as a simple rejection of modem life, but rather as one of the complex negotiations of modernity taking place in mid twentieth century Ontario.

Main evidence

In contextualizing the anti modem sentiment out of which the summer camp grew, previous studies have been invaluable. The seminal work in exploring the contours of this modem malaise is, of course, Jackson Lears' No Place of Grace. Born of anti modem sentiment, then, the summer camp was ultimately a modem phenomenon, a "therapeutic space" as much dependent on the city, modem expertise and anxieties to define its parameters as on that intangible, but much lauded entity called nature.

Main sources

As such, it contributed to a construction of nature as an entity existing apart from the machinations of the human world, a distinct and separate space, a place one could visit, indeed should visit, to reconnect with what it meant to be truly human. If previous generations had also felt themselves to be distinct from nature, in their eyes, this was as it should be. In fact, their ability to master nature, to increase their distance from it was considered precisely what made them human. Modems, on the other hand, the further they were able to insulate themselves from the forces of nature, the more they longed, in theory, to be in touch with them; the more advanced their scientific mastery of the natural world, and the more pronounced the popular desire to "protect" it .

Part II Evaluation

As the rise of youth culture suggests, models of childhood and childhood experience were not one and the same. While this study indicates that a more indulgent view of childhood was gradually affecting all classes, it does not point to an erasure of class differences. Indeed, if the summer camp contributed to the spread of "commodity environmentalism." it was different types of "commodities" that were marketed and sold to campers of different class backgrounds. More than this, camp not only reflected class differences, its culture at times helped to shape the self-perception of different classes. In the twentieth century how one viewed nature, wilderness, and "roughing it," in short, the extent of one's anti modernist leanings, came to form one aspect of modem class identities. Quite clearly, the latter were further complicated by gender. Indeed, this method of categorizing experience did not "wither away" under modem conditions. Rather as Keith Walden argues, "gender was one of the fundamental constructs imposed on the urban industrial environment to make it ...