"In Invention of the Wilderness, Bruce Bond explores the wild as a spiritual, psychological, and ecological realm-a territory that, depending on our tolerances and affections, calls out for order, exploitation, expansion, or preservation. Wilderness thus figures as emblem and example of the universe out of which our consciousness and cities have arisen. As such, it is the prima materia of the world as we encounter it, both individually and culturally. Although to talk of "inventing" the wild seems paradoxical, the book seeks to reclaim the etymological root of "invention" as a "venturing in." To invent a wilderness is to go inward, to deepen our experience of the unfettered and unknown, to empower it with a sense of debt and awe, responsibility and wonder, speech and attention to what must go unspoken. At times meditative and melancholic, though also vibrant and hopeful, Invention of the Wilderness proposes an embodied and reflective way of being in the world. Bond shows that, in times of gratitude or loss, to enter a wild that in turn enters us is to affirm our own imaginative life as no mere mirror of nature, but a force of it-a participation in the strange and intimate powers that touch every corner of our lives"--.