Jonathan Edwards, was a Puritan preacher with a widely acknowledged preeminent place in Euro- American intellectual history.  The "wilderness condition" of North America was certainly a preoccupation of the Puritans.

For the first generation of Puritan colonists, it was, understandably, a wholly negative condition, something to be feared, loathed, and ultimately eradicated—something to be replaced by fair farms and shining cities on hills. The very success of their immigrant forebears in transforming the New England landscape into something resembling the landscape of the mother country, however, bequeathed prosperity to subsequent generations of Puritans.

A cornerstone of Puritan Presbyterianism is the doctrine of original sin, which seemed to Edwards to express itself, in his own time, less in the reduced and pacified Native American population and the thoroughly domesticated countryside, and more in the prosperous populace of New England towns and cities.

By contrast, the wild remnants of pre-settlement America that could be found here and there in Connecticut and Massachusetts appeared innocent and pure; to Edwards they seemed even to portend the divine.

To some modern commentators the colonial and eventually postcolonial received concept of wilderness is first and foremost an artifact of the sharp dichotomy, in Puritan thinking, between humanity, on the one hand, exclusively created in the image of God, but also fallen and depraved, and nature, on the other.

The first generation of Puritans thought of themselves primarily as God's emissaries in the New World— which, to their perfervid, religion-besotted imaginations, was the wild, unruly stronghold of Satan.

In the no less vivid imagination of Jonathan Edwards, the true stronghold of Satan had become the sinful human heart in the breast of his Euro-American neighbors, and the pristine American landscape had become Edenic.

Interestingly, many of the most notable and most passionate subsequent defenders of the wilderness faith have a direct connection to Calvinism. Two stand out especially. Muir, famously, was brought up in a strict and austere Presbyterian household; and environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III, among the most stalwart contemporary defenders of the wilderness idea, is an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Gilbert White was also immersed in religion, but in the heavily tamed English rural landscape of Hampshire.  He too thought of his environment around the village of Selborne as Arcadia.  His life was preoccupied with trying to answer some of the basic questions of natural history at that time, such as, Where do swallows go to in the winter?

Both Edwards and White are icons marking the beginning of thoughts about the non-material values of nataure.  They may be regarded as the fore-runners of modern environmentalists.