“The Entheogenic Landscape” examines the development of the idea that dissolving one’s ego provides access to a primary sense of identity with one’s ecosystem. This notion formed the backbone of two experiments in “consciousness expansion” that dominated the American counterculture of the 1960s: psychedelic drug tests and neoprimitivism. These fads dovetailed in ecological meditations such as Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), which foregrounds the extent to which both traditions drew on the same psychoanalytic source material. A number of predominantly white gurus employed a shaky psychoanalytic vocabulary to claim that, like infants, Indigenous peoples lack advanced symbol systems, and that by evaporating linguistic faculties, psychedelic substances might serve as a threshold into an expansive psychic condition that Indigenous communities ostensibly enjoyed. Native American writers such as Simon Ortiz have long argued that such narratives obscure native peoples’ lived sociopolitical and environmental conditions. Ortiz’s Woven Stone (1992) argues instead that language and narrative construct and enrich ecological affiliations rather than obscure them.

Wild Abandon’s introduction establishes the book’s methodology, introduces key terms (identity politics of ecology, ecological authenticity, and dissolution), and traces the origins of environmentalist identity politics to the American New Left. Movement radicals sought “natural” alternatives to the “artificial” postwar liberal order, often articulating this opposition in terms of repression and elevating self-liberation to the forefront of their program. However, ecology’s simultaneous political debut, and the field’s attention to the biophysical interrelationships that both constitute and undermine individuals, challenged selfhood’s apparent sanctity. For some radicals, ecology suggested that self-identity merely constitutes yet another repressive formation to discard. Because selfhood is socially constructed, the ecosystem as a whole comprises one’s most essential identity. This appeal to ecological rather than personal authenticity constitutes the identity politics of ecology, which is less a movement than a rhetorical tendency. Conversations between adherents to this perspective and a variety of other identity positions play out in literary texts from the 1960s to the present.

“The Universal Wilderness” argues that environmentalist appeals to self-dissolution constitute a uniquely universal form of identity politics. It does so by situating these appeals in the context of identity-based movements that flourished in the 1970s through a reading of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977). The novel pointedly juxtaposes two characters: one who caricatures the era’s Black nationalism and another who identifies with the ecological intricacy of his environment. This arrangement effects a comparison between two accounts of authenticity: the racial and the ecological, the particular and the universal. Such a reading enables a reevaluation of certain facets of postwar environmentalism. Appeals to self-dissolution join the rhetoric of authenticity that characterized Black Power with the sort of political universalism that such movements called into question. However, though Morrison represents ecology as a universal condition, she also critiques the notion that it might constitute an identity position. That position might serve only to enshrine as universal the colonial attitudes of white men, erasing the perspectives of women and people of color.

“The Death of the Supertramp” examines the extent to which psychoanalytic concepts inform contemporary expressions of the American wilderness myth. It does so by focusing on the much-publicized death of Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996), as well as his cult following. McCandless takes to an extreme an idea popular within the deep ecology movement: that by quitting human civilization one might recover a repressed, authentic sense of wholeness. McCandless equates this lost unity with the expansive scope of the ecosystem as a whole rather than a bounded sense of self. Krakauer’s account demonstrates the centrality of Freud’s developmental schema to the young man’s logic: McCandless believes that his civilized ego represses a natural, more expansive psychic condition. It also suggests that this influence introduces a certain political quiescence to both wilderness discourse and mainstream environmentalism in general. In dismissing the importance of his self-identity – the ego that gives him reason to stay alive – McCandless does the most authentically ecological thing possible: he dies, consequently allowing his bodily matter to circulate.

“The Essential Ecosystem” considers how environmentalist appeals to self-dissolution have influenced and undermined a number of identity movements and academic paradigms in the 1970s and after. Specifically, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) dramatizes and ultimately compromises the ideals of contemporary “nature feminists,” those who viewed reproductive capacity not only as the cornerstone of essential womanhood, but also as a privileged means of ecological awareness. The narrator’s own attempted identification with her biology broadens her idea of reproduction to include all material functions, from nutrient consumption to decomposition. This fixation on network disorients gender rather than shores it up. However, far from undermining identity, it also illuminates the extent to which social thought has at times rendered whole systems as a matter of essentialism. Reading Surfacing alongside Atwood’s later work illuminates lines of rhetorical continuity between the essentialist “all women” position in nature feminism and a potential “all matter” position in contemporary new-materialist writing.

Wild Abandon’s conclusion contends that an identity politics of ecology is not only impossible to sustain but also politically undesirable, given its erasure of difference and its implicit nihilism – its suggestion that individuals and communities do not matter in the grand scheme of ecological change. However, the question driving the identity politics of ecology – how does one reconcile self with system? – continues to govern contemporary scholarship as well as mainstream representations of wilderness. Specifically, questions regarding the subject’s role in vital networks, its material heft or ephemerality, and the ontological and epistemological forces that center and decenter it remain the focus of scholarship in new-materialist philosophy, queer ecology, and material ecocriticism. In the process, these paradigms participate in the same circuit of ideas that gave rise to the identity politics of ecology. Keeping this point in mind, this conclusion considers how current reading practices might help or hinder environmentalist goals, and recommends that environmentalist thinking eschew the notion of authenticity altogether, in favor of a pragmatic politics of consistency.

“The Ecological Alternative” examines the intersection of appeals to ecology and authenticity among the American New Left and its environmentalist affiliates. The chapter also considers how literary representations of this alliance dramatize its contradictions. Many student radicals, especially those receptive to Murray Bookchin’s philosophy of social ecology, sought to structure alternative social arrangements that would liberate the individual psyche, the institutions that repressed it, and the environment itself. However, Bookchin’s writing, like that of the New Left’s primary theoretical influences, drew substantially on a psychoanalytic narrative that, when grafted to ecology, framed the self prized so highly by student radicals as yet another repression – one that obscured the reality of ecological interconnection. Edward Abbey, especially, documented this subjective confusion in Desert Solitaire (1968). Far from uncritically celebrating nature’s purity, Abbey and other nature writers of the decade established a representational tension between self and ecosystem that would characterize postwar literary treatment of ecology.