Nostalgia Reader’s Reviews > Beasts at Bedtime: Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature > Status Update

This tries to confine wilderness to nature, but really wilderness is more of the unknown. Anything--a new city, a new house, or, indeed, a new trail--can be wild the first time you encounter it, but if you visit it continuously, you become more attuned to it--knowing the steps that creek, the sounds of wind, the cycle of traffic and transit--and it becomes known and "tame" even if only to you.

Whether wilderness really exists (i.e. it's very white-washed in the US, as "wilderness" to settlers was home to tribes), and how WtWTA plays to our evolutionary predisposition towards certain landscapes, and how wilderness is more of a personal "unknown" that needs to be learned/conquered to become un-wild.

Peter Rabbit as a pastoral, gardens as a setting, and HCA's outcast stories as a parallel to the forgotten things in nature.

New words suggested for use in environmental psychology (ecopsychology):
Endemophilia: "homewellness"; being truly "at home within one's place and culture."
Solastalgia: "the desolate feeling associated with the chronic decline of a homescape."
Toponesia: "loss of connection with a place, especially a natural one, that happens as we grow older."