Episode 8: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America with Dr. Rachel Gross

Reckoning with Jason Herbert

What are you wearing this fall? Or rather, why are you wearing what you're wearing this fall? Those are the questiond Dr. Rachel Gross and I are pondering in this episode of Reckoning. Dr. Gross joins in to talk about her new book: Shopping All The Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America. We talk about the rise of outfitters as outdoors marketers, and just exactly why I can't decide between Patagonia, L.L. Bean, and Columbia.
About our guest:
Dr. Rachel Gross is an environmental and cultural historian of the modern U.S. and an assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver. In 2019 she was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and a Postdoctoral Teaching, Research, and Mentoring Fellow at the Davidson Honors College of the University of Montana.

For her doctoral research, she wrote about the history of outdoor clothing and gear in the U.S. from the Civil War to the present. The project was awarded the 2018 Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History from the Business History Conference. She works with university and community partners to bring history into the public realm. In 2019, She curated an exhibit at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula on “Outdoor Gear Stories From the Treasure State.” From January – July 2017 she served as the managing editor of Wisconsin 101, a collaborative history project that uses material culture to tell stories about Wisconsin’s past. Read a recent post she edited. In 2016-2017, she also served on the editorial board of Edge Effects, the digital magazine of environmental humanities of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.