Marketing the Wilderness: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands

How outside business advertising promotes a picture of “the wilderness” as an unpeopled haven
Advertising and marketing the Wilderness analyzes the connection between the outside recreation business, public lands in the USA, and Indigenous sovereignty and illustration in leisure areas. Combining social media evaluation, digital ethnography, and historic analysis, Joseph Whitson presents nuanced insights into greater than a century of the outside recreation business’s advertising methods, unraveling its complicity in settler colonialism.

Complicating the narrative of outside recreation as a common good, Whitson introduces the idea of “wildernessing” to explain the bodily, authorized, and rhetorical manufacturing of pristine, empty lands that undergirds the outside recreation business, a course of that additional disenfranchises Indigenous individuals from whom these lands have been stolen. He demonstrates how firms resembling Patagonia and REI align with the mining and drilling industries of their must take away Indigenous peoples and histories from helpful lands. And he describes the methods Indigenous and decolonial activists are subverting and resisting company advertising methods to introduce new narratives of place.

By way of the lens of environmental justice activism, Advertising and marketing the Wilderness reconsiders the ethics of leisure land use, advocating for engagement with problems with cultural illustration and appropriation knowledgeable by Indigenous views. As he discusses modern public land advocacy round locations resembling Bears Ears Nationwide Monument, Whitson focuses on the deeply fraught relationship between the outside recreation business and Indigenous communities. Emphasizing the facility of the company system and its remedy of land as a commodity below capitalism, he reveals how these tensions form the American thought of “wilderness” and what it means to combat for its preservation.

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Writer ‏ : ‎ Univ Of Minnesota Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ Could 20, 2025
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print size ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1517915112
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1517915117
Merchandise Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches