American Scientist

MARKETING THE WILDERNESS: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle Over Public Lands. Joseph Whitson. 240 pp. University of Minnesota Press, 2025. $22.95.

Joseph Whitson’s newest book, Marketing the Wilderness: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle Over Public Lands, is a deeply necessary book that unsettles some of the most comfortable assumptions embedded in American environmentalism and outdoor recreation. Whitson traces the deep and ongoing connections between the conservation movement in the United States, the outdoor recreation industry, and settler colonialism. Drawing on a wide range of respected Indigenous scholars and environmental justice researchers, the book situates contemporary debates about public lands within a much longer history of dispossession in North America. Whitson’s writing is precise, careful, and impressively well-cited, moving seamlessly between historical analysis and cultural critique, resulting in a text that is both intellectually rigorous and accessible, capable of speaking to scholars, students, and practitioners alike.

The book begins by questioning the very concept of wilderness. Whitson argues that wilderness is produced through colonial ideas and land control. He writes that “unpeopled wilderness is not a natural state of land in North America. The ecology of the land had coevolved under the management of local cultures—most notably maintaining certain ecosystems with fire, including all kinds of human–nonhuman relationships.”

Although this idea is important, it is not new; numerous other scholars have written about the myth of wilderness for decades (interested readers can check out Mark David Spence’s Dispossessing the Wilderness or Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s As Long as Grass Grows, among others). What is unique about Whitson’s contribution, however, is the way he examines the outdoor recreation industry’s role in sustaining this idea of wilderness.

Brands such as Patagonia and The North Face frequently position themselves as champions of conservation, aligning their marketing with images of untouched landscapes and ethical environmental stewardship. As the author observes, “The outdoor industry's current wilderness narrative, that there needs to be natural spaces separate from the rest of human activity, form the ideological foundation for the American recreation landscape based on public lands. Wilderness was land for visiting, not staying, not making a living off of, and certainly not exerting sovereignty over. It is a fundamental colonial construction of space that precludes Indigeneity.” This framing exposes how the celebration of pristine, unpeopled landscapes has functioned to erase Indigenous presence while legitimizing federal authority over vast territories.

Whitson asserts that outdoor recreation companies are invested in maintaining the myth of wilderness, because their business model relies on selling gear and products to visit and explore public land. Outdoor recreation often takes place on conserved public land (e.g. state and national parks, municipal conservation areas such as town-owned forests, and protected waterways). Without such spaces, there would almost certainly be fewer opportunities for people to engage in outdoor recreation, and thus less need for the purchase of outdoor recreation equipment and technical gear. Further, Whitson describes in detail the ways in which marketing campaigns promote the concept of exploring natural spaces when selling a product, such as a jacket, which the consumer may likely use instead for daily tasks like walking the dog or pumping gas. He writes, “By invoking the figure of the explorer, The North Face is tapping into a powerful archetype . . . To dress like an explorer is to become one.”

Methodologically, Marketing the Wilderness stands out for its use of digital ethnography. Whitson pays close attention to the role of social media in perpetuating the myth of wilderness, analyzing how companies and content creators circulate aestheticized images of solitude, adventure, and escape. These images reinforce the notion that wilderness exists apart from human society. At the same time, Whitson shows how digital spaces have become powerful tools for Indigenous activism, allowing Indigenous communities to contest dominant narratives, assert ongoing relationships with land, and expose the colonial underpinnings of mainstream environmentalism. I teach college students in a Parks, Recreation, and Tourism program, and they are increasingly interested in and aware of the overlap between social media and outdoor recreation.

Marketing the Wilderness should be mandatory reading, especially for college students studying environmental studies, recreation, geography, and related fields. The concepts explored in the book are also essential knowledge for anyone who recreates outdoors, especially on public land. Early in the book, Whitson describes an experience he had while attending an event hosted at a Patagonia store in St. Paul, Minnesota. As part of the event, the audience heard from Len Necefer, a professor of both Indian Studies and public policy, as well as the founder and CEO of NativesOutdoors, about the connection between outdoor recreation, public land, and the violent treatment of Indigenous people. Whitson describes the audience’s shock at learning about these connections, writing that it "stemmed from an assumption that conservationists and Indigenous environmentalists had shared goals when it came to public land.” He goes on to say that this is assumption is “both widespread and demonstrably false” because of the “ideological foundations of conservation, the structure of American settler colonialism, and the ways they support each other.”

The book closes with a reminder that wilderness has always been a fantasy, and that clinging to such a fantasy limits the possibilities for just relationships with the land and with one another. Whitson writes that “wilderness as we know it was not inevitable and is not set in stone.” To illustrate the impermanence of the wilderness myth, he outlines possible futures if people insist on keeping the fantasy: In one imagined future, people attempt to make wilderness more accessible to more people, but fail to address colonialism; another possible future involves abandoning the idea of wilderness but risks opening currently protected areas up to exploitation.

Ultimately, Whitson advocates for land reparations for Indigenous communities and he asks outdoor enthusiasts, scholars, and policymakers alike to consider their own roles within conservation and the public land space. He does not offer easy answers, but instead provides a clear-eyed framework for grappling with some of the most enduring myths of modern American environmentalism.