MARKETING THE WILDERNESS

How outdoor industry marketing promotes an image of the wilderness as an unpeopled havenMarketing 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