Spurred by Richard Louv’s bestseller Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit-Disorder (2005), a popular movement composed of parents, educators, and researchers has increasingly called for the reconnection of children and the natural environment. This thesis interrogates the cultural assumptions at work in this call to reconnect, specifically how an American frontier imagination structures Louv’s ideal form of connection. Drawing on scholarship from the fields of ecocriticism, environmental history, and American studies I assess the implications of Louv’s frontier framing for the project of reconnecting children to nature and for the broader field of environmental education. I argue that a frontier vision of connection with nature is at times exclusionary and escapist, and more troubling, has the potential to enforce social hierarchies invested in whiteness and the U.S. settler state. / 2020-01-11