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This course offers an interdisciplinary study of the American landscape and the role it has played in shaping American identity. We anchor our study by looking at the way the idea of land has been constructed throughout our history as a kindred spirit by Native Americans, as a “howling wilderness” by the early colonists, as a school for spirit by the New England Transcendentalists, as a precious inheritance in need of preservation by 19th century conservationists such as John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, and in keeping with Manifest Destiny, as a rich resource that was "ours for the taking." Philosophically, we explore the influence on early colonists of Biblical and Enlightenment thought, of the European Romantic movement, the moral ambiguities of the slave experience of the American land, the ideas of Romanticism that gave rise to Emersonian Transcendentalism (America’s first homegrown philosophy), the competing theories behind the national park movement, and more recently the revival of Native American holistic values in ecological paradigms. Beginning with Thoreau, who “went to the woods to learn to live deliberately,” we read primary texts of American nature writing, arguably one of America’s finest contributions to world literature, and we experiment with keeping nature journals. Finally, we discuss the bridging of the two cultures, science and art, in the writings of paleontologist Loren Eiseley and conservationists Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Al Gore.