Roderick Frazier Nash is a professor emeritus of history and environmental studies at the University of California Santa Barbara.
His dissertation, "Wilderness and the American Mind," done under the supervision of Merle Curti, became what has come to be seen as one of the foundational texts of the field of environmental history.
After teaching for two years at Dartmouth College, he was called to the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he joined historians such as Wilbur Jacobs, Robert O. Collins, Frank J.
After witnessing an oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969, he and a number of other faculty members became active within the university and founded an environmental studies program there in 1970.
Specifically, Nash describes the evolution of American wilderness conception through Transcendentalism, Primitivism, Preservationism, to Conservationism.