Overview

How outdoor industry marketing promotes an image of ""the wilderness"" as an unpeopled haven Marketing the Wilderness analyzes the relationship between the outdoor recreation industry, public lands in the United States, and Indigenous sovereignty and representation in recreational spaces. Combining social media analysis, digital ethnography, and historical research, Joseph Whitson offers nuanced insights into more than a century of the outdoor recreation industry's marketing strategies, unraveling its complicity in settler colonialism. Complicating the narrative of outdoor recreation as a universal good, Whitson introduces the concept of ""wildernessing"" to describe the physical, legal, and rhetorical production of pristine, empty lands that undergirds the outdoor recreation industry, a process that further disenfranchises Indigenous people from whom these lands were stolen. He demonstrates how companies such as Patagonia and REI align with the mining and drilling industries in their need to remove Indigenous peoples and histories from valuable lands. And he describes the ways Indigenous and decolonial activists are subverting and resisting corporate marketing strategies to introduce new narratives of place. Through the lens of environmental justice activism, Marketing the Wilderness reconsiders the ethics of recreational land use, advocating for engagement with issues of cultural representation and appropriation informed by Indigenous perspectives. As he discusses contemporary public land advocacy around places such as Bears Ears National Monument, Whitson focuses on the deeply fraught relationship between the outdoor recreation industry and Indigenous communities. Emphasizing the power of the corporate system and its treatment of land as a commodity under capitalism, he shows how these tensions shape the American idea of ""wilderness"" and what it means to fight for its preservation. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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9781517915117

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Reviews

""Joseph Whitson’s brilliant book—methodologically innovative and forcefully narrated—presents a stinging critique of the ‘recreation industrial complex’ and the methods by which it has perpetuated wilderness myths that serve the ongoing dispossession of Native cultures. This is cutting-edge scholarship and a powerful political intervention that centers Native resistance to neoliberal corporate capitalism and the thoughtless conflation of recreation with social justice and conservation.""—Mark Fiege, Montana State University  

Author Information

Joseph Whitson is a marketing strategist and earned his PhD from the University of Minnesota. His writing has been published in American Quarterly and The Public Historian, and he is founder of Indigenous Geotags, an environmental and decolonial justicefocused blog.

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