Roadside haiku! Putting a fresh twist on an old tradition, John Morse uses poetry as social commentary. For more on roadside haiku, check out Morse's web page here. Read more!

Summertime and the livin’ is easy. Bye everyone! I leave you with this year’s Grizzly@Adams Super Summer Classic: George and Ira Gershwin’s lullaby “Summertime,” from Porgy and Bess. To hear Billie Holiday sing this standard, click here. Ella Fitzgerald also has a fine version of the song. Amy Winehouse’s version is not quite in the same league, but still worth a listen. For an acid-rock version, try this one from Jim Morrison and the Doors. And for the 1959 film version, click here.

“Your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin.’” Now that’s poetry.

Previous Super Summer Classics include “Summersong” by the Decemberists and “Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly and the Family Stone. Read more!

American Studies. Here you go, folks: final exam questions after the jump. Remember, the exam is 3-4:50 p.m. Thursday, May 7. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the questions.

Gregg Porter: In one of your comments you cited Mount Rushmore as a particularly obvious instance of the cultural construction of nature. After directing us to this clip of Superman II’s General Zod doing to the United States what the United States did to the Sioux, you reminded us of the Crazy Horse Memorial, which, in the words of Chief Henry Standing Bear, aims to remind “the white man…that the red man has great heroes, too.”

That got me to thinking about the 1990s controversy over the placement of a large Christian cross just outside of Auschwitz. Please read this excerpt from Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll. Then compare and contrast the cross at Auschwitz to the sculptures on Mount Rushmore as examples of the geographical inscription of cultural hegemony.

Matt Felton: In one of your posts you lamented that kids today seem “disconnected from nature.” But why is that disconnection a problem, exactly? Given that most forms of outdoor recreation cause at least some harm to nature, isn’t it better if people just connect with nature via the Discovery Channel?

Erin Throckmorton: You’ve written that “consumers will never be able to be green completely.” Sure, not completely green — but there are plenty of people who believe consumers should at least try to be more green. Please read up a bit on consumerism, anti-consumerism, green consumerism, and Green America and report back to us on the current prospects of saving the planet by harnessing the powers of the marketplace.

Dorothy Medina: In one of your comments you described the beauty of the “pristine, rugged mountain country” surrounding the San Luis Valley. You wrote also of the local shepherds who graze their flocks here every summer. Please draw on your own experience and compare and contrast local sheepherding today to that described 150 years ago by John Muir in My First Summer in the Sierra. Pay particular attention to Muir’s description of the shepherd Billy — does that description strike you as accurate and fair?

Jacob McClure: You’ve indicated that you think “[c]onservatism, in its true meaning, would seem to be the most congenial to environmentalism.” Please read up on the political philosophies of conservatism and green conservatism, then check out Republicans for Environmental Protection, and then come to the final prepared to discuss the prospects for a conservative environmental politics in America. Why do you think environmentalism has for so long been seen almost exclusively as a “liberal” concern? Is there something intrinsic to American conservatism or the Republican Party that prevents them from going green? Read more!

American Studies. Dave Foreman is not your stereotypical treehugger. Wikipedia introduces him as follows:

The son of a US Air Force career officer, as a young man Foreman supported the Vietnam War. He received the highest honor of the Boy Scouts of America, the rank of Eagle Scout. Foreman first became involved in political activism as a college student, supporting Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1964 and founding the New Mexico branch of the conservative youth organization Young Americans for Freedom. After graduating from college in 1968, and attending the Officers Candidate School of the US Marine Corps, Foreman’s radicalism began to take shape.

Nowadays environmentalism is so completely associated with the left that it surprises us to learn of Foreman’s conservative roots. But are environmentalism and conservatism really at odds? Which political philosophy — liberalism, conservatism, socialism, libertarianism, anarchism — seems most congenial to environmentalism? While we’re at it, which religion seems most congenial to environmentalism? Read more!

American Studies. Semester’s end is approaching fast, and it’s time to start thinking about your final paper/project. Whether presented as paper or project (e.g., PowerPoint presentation or poster display), your work should analyze one or more of the texts or authors we’ve read in class in a way that helps readers better understand both the text itself and its relation to environmentalism.

You might consider working with one or two of your classmates to examine how various authors and texts approach a single cultural-environmental theme, such as the discursive construction of nature, the gender politics of environmentalism, or the ethics of direct action.

If you do work with a group you might consider a division of intellectual labor, with one person synopsizing and situating the text, another summarizing its critical responses, and a third advancing a new argument about it.

What I’d like you to do in your replies to this post is to get started thinking about possible topics by going back over the syllabus and combining one critical essay and one primary text with one “real world” environmental issue, and then indicate briefly why the resulting combination might lead to a good paper/project.

Here’s an example of what I have in mind:

Critical essay: “The Social Siege of Nature”

Primary text: Ecotopia.

Real-world issue: Clear-cutting on La Sierra above San Luis.

More detailed guidelines for the paper/project are available here. Read more!

American Studies. There are many ways to approach The Monkey Wrench Gang. You might treat it as a classic of environmental literature (and compare it to Ecotopia). You might treat it as a Western (and compare it to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), as a post-Vietnam novel (and compare it to Rambo or the novel First Blood), as a precursor of, and how-to manual for, the Earth First! movement, and so on.

Then again, you could focus solely on a single character — say, Hayduke, who could be compared to Will Weston, Butch Cassidy, John Rambo, and Dave Foreman respectively. Or you could focus on the use of a single element — such as theme or setting — in one or more of these works. Or you could do a men’s studies project, tossing Hayduke, Weston, and John Muir into the hopper and analyzing them as exemplars of different styles of masculinity.

The sky’s the limit. The intellectual world is all before you, where to choose.

The illustration above juxtaposes two iconic images: Hayduke and Rambo. In what ways are these two essentially the same character? Read more!

American Studies. By now you should be well into that classic of environmental literature, John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra. Reading this book again after many years makes me think that the summer of 1869 was a key moment in the history of human consciousness, an altogether new alignment of the stars of perception and sensibility.

There’s John Muir — with a mind trained in both botany and Christian creationism, and a literary taste built by Emerson and Wordsworth on a foundation of the Psalms and the Book of Job — set loose in an unspoiled Yosemite at precisely the moment when he could see the possibility of its spoiling, under this precise combination of influences creating a great book and an environmentalist sensibility, all while sitting on the ground, his back against some log as he wrote in his journal.

At the same time, he was accumulating evidence in support of a theory about Yosemite Valley’s creation that would eventually prevail over the competing theories of California State Geologist Josiah Dwight Whitney. He also seems to have spent his entire three months in the mountains on a more or less uninterrupted natural high.

It’s worth spending a moment to admire the suppleness of Muir’s prose. As a representative sample, consider this bit about one of the Sierra Nevada’s monstrously large ants (whose painful bite he has just finished describing):

This wonderful electric species is about three fourths of an inch long. Bears are fond of them, and tear and gnaw their home-logs to pieces, and roughly devour the eggs, larvae, parent ants, and the rotten or sound wood of the cells, all in one spicy acid hash. The Digger Indians are also fond of the larvae and even of the perfect ants, so I have been told by old mountaineers. They bite off and reject the head, and eat the tickly acid body with keen relish. Thus are the poor biters bitten, like every other biter, big or little, in the world’s great family. (46)

Note first the frequent, metrical use of consonance, assonance, internal rhyme, and other techniques more commonly associated with poetry than prose (“spicy acid hash,” “so I’ve been been told by old mountaineers”). Note also how the description moves steadily outward, from the ants themselves, to their place in the natural world (as food for bears), to their place in the human world (as food for Indians), to their place in the cosmos (“the world’s great family”).

Good stuff. But what can My First Summer tell us about environmentalism as culture? Can you find places where the cultural-environmental theory we’ve been reading can help us appreciate the contemporary significance of Muir’s writing? You might want to look particularly at his description of the Merced River headwaters and the lily (16-17), of the poisoning of the sheep (22-23), of shepherds generally (23-25), of the bear hunter David Brown (27-31), and of Native Americans (e.g., 54-55 and 58-59). Read more!

American Studies. In “Wet, Dark, and Low: Eco-Man Evolves from Eco-Woman,” Andrew Ross observes that, at the same time feminism was calling masculinity into question, environmentalism was offering men new ways of being masculine. Perhaps more accurately, environmentalism was offering men new rationales for continuing to indulge the same old fantasies and enjoy the same old privileges of patriarchy:

Among the so-called new social movements, the ecology movement has been exceptional in ceding a leading role, in theory and in practical activism, to heterosexual white men. It has been one of the few spaces in post-New Left politics where such men have felt that they can breath freely and easily, while indulging in the wilderness cults traditionally associated with the making of heroic white male identities: the frontiersman, the cowboy, the Romantic poet, the explorer, the engineer, the colonizer, the anthropologist, the pioneer settler, and so on. (220)

Environmentalism might prompt men to question their impact on the environment and their implication in an environmentally destructive economic system, but it didn’t require them to think very deeply about their gender. Keep this in mind later in the semester as we read works by John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Dave Foreman.

Toward the end of his essay Ross argues that the “wild man” phenomenon was closely tied to the yuppie generation and was giving way to the cyborgism of the young:

For tourists of the soul like the Wild Man and the goddess worshipper, the forest is a place of white flight, a traditional location for regrouping and for recharging spiritual batteries with the exotica of Amerindian and ancient European myths. For their sons and daughters, the all-night sweatfests of the rave were semi-outlawed events, throwing up retrofitted memories of their parents’ pastoral hippie gatherings, once the creative social crucible for new forms of sexual and familial behavior. (235)

Is Ross basically right? Are we now seeing the replacement of the organic hippie ideal with an increasingly technological youth culture?

Update: Per popular request, I’ll set aside 30 minutes or so before the exam Thursday so we can finish the discussion of environmentalism, gender, and social class in WALL-E. There’ll still be plenty of time to finish the exam. Let’s meet again in the Haynie Center — if you need desks for writing your exams we can use the computer tables. Read more!

American Studies. Carolyn Merchant’s “Reinventing Eden” contrasts two creation stories, both of which turn on the actions of a woman: a Penobscot Indian “Corn Mother” myth that “mov[es] from desert to garden” (leaving humankind in a happy, stable position) and an old Israelite myth that moves from garden to desert (leaving humankind in an unhappy, unstable position it must struggle to rectify). Merchant proceeds to frame all of western culture — at least its patriarchy, Christianity, science, capitalism, and imperialism — in terms of a furious and ongoing attempt to recover the lost garden (132-133). Hence the “recovery narrative” of her subtitle.

Opposed to the main western story, says Merchant, are two counter-stories: feminism and environmentalism. The first opposes patriarchy and attempts to recast Eve as a Corn Mother. The second opposes the capitalist-technocratic-imperialist attempt to transform wild nature into human-friendly garden.

Richard White’s essay is not quite so ambitious. White notes that environmentalism tends to see wild nature as a place for recreation, a place where one goes to play, rather than to work. Environmentalists tend to

equate productive work in nature with destruction. They ignore the ways that work itself is a means of knowing nature while celebrating the virtues of play and recreation in nature. Whereas mainstream environmentalism creates a popular imagery that often harshly condemns all work in nature, this second group is apt to sentimentalize certain kinds of farming and argue that work on the land creates a connection to place that will protect nature itself. (171)

One result of these habits is the familiar conflict between urban middle-class environmentalists and rural working-class people of the sort whose cars bear the famous bumper-sticker that asks, “Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?” Note how the bumper-sticker implies that if you’re not working out in nature, you’re not really even working. To work is to work outdoors, with one’s hands — not indoors with one’s brain. In this view ranching and logging count as work, but not, say, approving loans or teaching American studies courses.

I’d like you to put these two essays in dialogue. What do you suppose Merchant and White might have to say about each other’s ideas? Also, feel free to provide examples of how their ideas are (or aren’t) reflected in popular culture. Here’s my example: Joni Mitchell’s justly famous song about getting caught up in the “devil’s bargain” of patriarchal-technocratic-capitalist-imperialism and trying to recover the garden, Woodstock. And what the heck — I'll throw in Merle Haggard singing the Working Man Blues. Read more!

American Studies. With his now-classic essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon introduced the field of environmental studies to postmodernism. He did so by problematizing the seemingly straightforward concept of wilderness. To problematize a concept is to question the fundamental premises that lie beneath it and demonstrate that it’s not as simple as everyone had been used to thinking — to show, as Cronon puts it in the case of wilderness, that it “is not quite what it seems” (69).

In the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, wilderness denotes “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” “Untrammeled by man” means something like “not significantly altered by humans.” The Wilderness Act’s definition (which has the force of law) is problematic because in fact, as environmental historians have demonstrated conclusively, many of the landscapes we think of as wild have been significantly altered by humans, in particular by Native Americans, who for thousands of years had been deliberately altering the ecosystems in which they lived — by hunting animal species to extinction, by setting fires to clear out underbrush and foster the growth of certain kinds of trees, and so on.

To point out such historical facts is not exactly to deconstruct wilderness, however. Cronon comes closer to actually deconstructing wilderness when, first, he reviews just how decisively the term has been shaped by centuries of changing ideologies of nature and, second, when he analyzes the binary oppositions (human-nonhuman, artificial-natural, impure-pure, etc.) in terms of which wilderness has been defined.

Cronon argues that the deconstruction of wilderness has practical implications. He argues that environmentalism’s near-deification of wilderness has left us with a tendency to value pristine landscapes at the expense of the “impure” landscapes in which most of us actually live. (And what happens when people discover that those pristine landscapes are not really so pristine after all? Will they cease to protect them?) And, because wilderness by definition is a place where humans do not live, our idealization of wild nature makes it difficult for us to think clearly and creatively about how we should fit ourselves into the rest of nature, as inevitably we must do.

It’s fine to preserve wilderness landscapes as human-free zones, as places we visit but do not inhabit, but we still need to live our everyday lives somewhere, and the ideology of wilderness doesn’t tell us how best to do so. Wilderness ideology grounds an environmentalism for our vacations, but how are we to live the rest of the year? “Our challenge,” writes Cronon,

is to stop thinking of such things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others. (89)

Cronon’s essay, and the other essays collected with it in the anthology Uncommon Ground, provoked angry reactions from biologists convinced that, by deconstructing wilderness, a bunch of scientifically illiterate know-nothings in the humanities were denying the seriousness of environmental crisis and the very reality of nature itself.

A counter-anthology, Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, was put together by Soulé and his colleague Gary Lease and published as a response to the essays in Uncommon Ground. It was touted as a refutation of the postmodern position, but many of its essays turned out to be pretty postmodern themselves and could have just as easily have been included in Cronon’s volume (see, for example, Lease’s “Nature Under Fire” and David Graber’s “Resolute Biocentrism”).

One exception was Soulé’s contribution, “The Social Siege of Nature,” which claimed not only that the idea of nature as a social construct is wrong, but that it amounts to a “social assault” that justifies the exploitation of nature (137). Basically he was saying that people like Cronon (and me) were collaborators with the bad guys.

Given its thesis, you might expect Soulé’s essay to cite instances where developers justified their environmental destruction with the idea that nature is socially constructed. If you’ve read the essay, however, you’ll notice that Soulé never quite gets around to doing that. I’ll go over this essay’s many shortcomings in class; for now, it suffices to say that Soulé lost and Cronon won.

Here’s your question: What are some of the human values you’ve been taught to associate with wilderness? Can you provide examples of wilderness ideology or imagery in popular culture? Read more!

American Studies. Jennifer Price’s essay “Looking for Nature at the Mall” is typical of the deconstruction-of-nature-style intellectual work being done during the 1990s. Price suggests that environmentalism, like pretty much everything else, has been captured by the ideology of consumerism. Rather than defining themselves as “green” by living like Thoreau in the woods or actively working to save the planet or whatever, people do it by buying stuff at the Nature Store, whose basic product is not nature itself but the signifiers of a green identity. “We graft meanings onto nature to make sense out of modern middle-class life,” writes Price, “and then define ourselves by what we think nature means.”

What are some of those meanings we “graft onto nature”? “Authenticity, simplicity, reality, uniqueness, purity, health, beauty,” and so on (190). (The irony of the fact that we go looking for authenticity and reality at a shopping mall, of all places, is not lost on Price.)

Anyway, the upshot is that “we approach the natural world, like everything else, instinctively as consumers” (198). Here’s this morning’s discussion prompt: Given that consumerism seems pretty deeply entrenched and is not likely to go away just because we kvetch about it, is there any way environmentalism might co-opt it? Is there any way we might save the planet as consumers? Read more!

American Studies. You might be wondering why I’m having you read that hefty excerpt from Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage. It’s because I believe it can help us understand an intellectual event crucial to this course: the controversy, which took place during the 1990s, over the deconstruction of nature. Think of Jacques Derrida’s infamous dictum, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” which is usually (and misleadingly) translated as “there is nothing outside the text” but actually means something like “there is no escaping textuality,” which in turn means something like “there is no escaping the fact that our understanding of reality is always mediated by signs,” which is important because signs always have to be interpreted.

As you’ll recall, a sign is made up of a signifier and a signified, and there’s no intrinsic relationship between the two. There’s no intrinsic relationship between, say, the signifier cat (the sound or the marks on a piece of paper) and the signified cat (the mental image of a cat that comes into our minds when we hear or read the word). The relationship between the two is basically arbitrary. The relationship does not exist in nature; it exists only because human beings have invented a code (in this case, the English language) linking the two together.

Back to deconstruction and “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” The basic idea here is not that objects do not have their own objective reality, but that we humans always encounter objects through the mediation of some human-devised code (that is, some semiotic system). For us, a sunset is never just a sunset. It’s something we understand symbolically as part of a larger symbol system of meanings, the all-encompassing “textuality” from which Derrida says we cannot escape.

Note that to call the sunset a sun “set” is to name it not simply in reference to what it is “in itself,” but in reference to a larger set of understandings in which the sun “rises” and “sets,” rather than a framework in which, say, the sun stands still and the earth rotates. We might call the first of these sets of understandings a geocentric code and the second a heliocentric code. (If we were approaching this issue by way of Michel Foucault instead of Jacques Derrida, we might speak instead of the geocentric and heliocentric discourses of astronomy.)

A deconstructionist would note a fundamental conflict in Interpreting Our Heritage. On the one hand, Tilden stresses the value of bringing national park visitors face-to-face with the “thing itself.” On the other hand, being in direct contact with the Thing Itself is never quite enough for the visitor to comprehend that thing’s significance. Even when visitors are confronted by the Thing Itself, they still need the park ranger to tell them what it means. But wait — it’s not the Thing Itself that has a meaning; only signs have meaning. The Thing Itself has no meaning; by itself it is only — the Thing Itself.

Once you have something that can be interpreted you’re no longer dealing with the Thing Itself, you’re dealing with a sign, the entity that appears after the yoking-together of the thing and the meaning you’ve assigned to the thing. And once the thing has in this way become a sign, whose meaning depends on its place in a larger system of signs, it has entered the realm of textuality. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.

Okay, so “natural” landscapes are texts. In my essay “Canonizing Landscape,” I argue that the national parks function much as conservative literary critics would like the western literary canon to function: as a collection of the most profoundly beautiful and meaningful texts which must be preserved for the edification of future generations. In the language of traditional lit-crit, the canon is the best that humans have thought and said; in the language of natural theology (think of Thomas Paine’s argument in The Age of Reason), the national park landscapes are the best that God has thought and said (or revealed).

In the same vein, the national park service interpretive ranger becomes analogous to the literary critic. Each, in this essentially conservative view, is responsible for transmitting their respective texts’ intrinsic meanings to the masses, who are too illiterate to draw out those meanings without professional help. Here’s Tilden:

Thousands of naturalists, historians, archeologists and other specialists are engaged in the work of revealing, to such visitors as may desire the service, something of the beauty and wonder, the inspiration and spiritual meaning that lie behind what the visitor can with his senses perceive. This function of the custodians of our treasures is called Interpretation. (3-4, my italics)

A bit later, Tilden adds that interpretation is

[a]n educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information…. Interpretation is the revelation of a larger truth that lies behind any statement of fact. (8, Tilden’s italics)

I argue that if park interpreters perform the same function as literary critics, then their work is vulnerable to the same critique that has been leveled against traditional literary criticism since the 1960s, namely, that it pretends to be an objective revealing of the intrinsic meanings of the works themselves but is actually a decidedly subjective exercise in discursive construction shot through with unconscious biases (including racism, sexism, nationalism, and the like).

I included this post’s illustration as an example of what Tilden calls “the genius of the revealer — the man or woman who uncovers something universal in the world that has always been here and that men have not known…. To take a slice of a tree like the giant sequoia, and to associate its growth rings with a time chart of human history, was an idea that occurred to some master interpreter” (5). Well, that was a clever idea. I would add, however, that it requires killing a tree, which we may take as a symbol of what happens to the Thing Itself — to “real” or unmediated nature — when it into enters the realm of textuality. There’s a kind of violence involved in turning the Thing Itself into a sign.

So, any comments on the deconstruction of nature? Read more!

American Studies. In the preface and opening chapter of The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860, Annette Kolodny argues that a “psychosexual dynamic of a virgin paradise meant…that real flesh-and-blood women — at least metaphorically — were dispossessed of paradise.” Therefore the women who settled the American frontier “struggled to find some alternate set of images through which to make their own unique accommodation to the strange and sometimes forbidding New World landscape” (3). For women that image tended to be the garden (a real garden, not the Garden of Eden) as opposed to the favored male image of the virgin bride or nurturing mother. The upshot is that “men sought sexual and filial gratifications from the land, while women sought there the gratifications of home and family relations” (10).

In the remainder of The Land Before Her Kolodny explores how the garden and other images of “home and family relations” structured women’s writing about the frontier during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Does this fantasy structure persist in green culture today? I suspect so. Consider how blatantly Bambi appeals strongly to “the gratifications of home and family.” Can you think of other examples of green culture that fit Kolodny’s model? Read more!

American Studies. For class today I asked you to read two essays that have become classics in American studies: Perry Miller’s “The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism and the Concept of Nature” and Henry Nash Smith’s “The Myth of the Garden and Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis” (a chapter from his book Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth). Let’s talk about Smith.

Smith argues that Frederick Jackson Turner, when he wrote his famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” got suckered by America’s pastoral ideology. He draws a distinction between the use of metaphor as “a rhetorical ornament” in an argument that has “a rational structure” (254) — which he says is fine — and the use of metaphor “as a structural principle or a means of cognition” (253) — which is decidedly not OK.

It’s one thing to be thinking logically and grounding one’s argument in facts, and then occasionally use a metaphor to help illustrate this or that point; this use of metaphor Smith terms “rhetorical.” It’s another thing entirely to unconsciously let the metaphor distort the facts or otherwise shape one’s argument; this he terms “poetic” (253). Smith goes on to argue that in many places in “The Significance of the Frontier” Turner uses metaphors poetically rather than rhetorically. And to the extent that Turner does so, he is not writing genuine history but merely perpetuating a myth (namely, the myth of America as pastoral utopia).

Smith also makes a nifty argument about the conflict between pastoral and progressive ideologies. The pastoral idea equates virtue with nature and therefore says that the closer a society is to nature, the better that society is. By contrast, the progressive myth says that societies improve as they evolve out of savagery into higher and higher degrees of civilization (255).*

Because America was historically “behind” Europe, it tended to favor the pastoral myth, which allowed it to claim superiority over Europe. Unfortunately, however, Americans could not completely escape the power of the progressive myth, even when thinking about the frontier. After all, however much of an ideological buzz they might have gotten from being “close to nature,” the average pioneer always worked hard to achieve greater and greater degrees of…civilization!

Smith argues that Turner’s essay, in addition to misusing its pastoral metaphors, finds itself trapped in the ideological double bind of primitivism vs. progressivism, nature vs. civilization. He also argues more generally that America’s fixation on pastoral myth prevented it from understanding its increasingly industrial reality. In particular, he writes, “the notion of democracy born of free land” available on the primitive frontier “is not an adequate instrument for dealing with a world dominated by industry, urbanization, and international conflicts.”

The philosophy and the myth [of agrarianism and pastoralism] affirmed an admirable set of values, but they ceased very early to be useful in interpreting American society as a whole because they offered no intellectual apparatus for taking account of the industrial revolution. A system which revolved about a half-mystical conception of nature and held up as an ideal a rudimentary type of agriculture was powerless to confront issues arising from the advance of technology. (259)

Hmm — a mode of thought “which revolved about a half-mystical conception of nature” and finds itself “powerless to confront issues arising from the advance of technology.” Is American environmentalism also such a mode of thought? If so, in what ways?

*Perry Miller, in “The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism,” also has much to say about this theory of social progress, and illustrates its power over the nineteenth-century American imagination by referencing “The Course of Empire” (1834-36), a series of paintings by American artist Thomas Cole. See all five paintings in the series here. Read more!

American Studies. In 1893, in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the long-term existence of the American frontier was the single most important factor in shaping America up to that time. He argued in particular that the strength of American democracy derived principally from the frontier experience. That experience, said Turner, transformed the servile, dependent European personality into a new kind of self-sufficient, freedom-loving citizen that we recognize as specifically American.

Because the Census Bureau had declared the frontier “closed” in 1890, just a few years before Turner first presented his paper, he suggested that a crucial “first period of American history” had ended, and that perhaps the nation’s future would see the undoing of some or all of the benefits of the frontier. Without a frontier to democratize American politics and empower its citizens, perhaps America would cease to be exceptional and would become just another nation.

Turner’s frontier thesis became extremely influential in American historiography and American studies. It also provoked considerable dissent. Among the critics was the economic historian Louis M. Hacker, who held that “Turner and his followers were the fabricators of a tradition which is not only fictitious but also to a very large extent positively harmful” (61). For Hacker,

[t]he free lands of the West were not important because they made possible the creation of a unique “American spirit,” that indefinable something that was to set the United States apart from European experiences for all time, but because their quick settlement and utilization for the extensive cultivation of foodstuffs furnished exactly those commodities with which the United States, as a debtor nation, could balance its international payments and borrow European capital in order to develop a native industrial enterprise.

In this view the importance of the frontier is not that it developed character but that it “served…the capitalist development of the nation” (63-64). Hacker claims that the frontier further served the interests of American industrial capitalism by forestalling resistance on the part of labor:

[T]he presence of the frontier helps to explain the failure of American labor to preserve a continuous revolutionary tradition: class lines could not become fixed as long as the free lands existed to drain off the most spirited elements in the working and lower middle-class populations...and to prevent the creation of a labor reserve for the purpose of thwarting the demands of organized workers. (64)

Hacker specifically rejects Turner’s claims for American exceptionalism:

The historical growth of the United States...was not unique; merely in certain particulars and for a brief time…. With settlement achieved — that is to say, the historic function of extensive agriculture performed, class (not sectional!) lines solidified, competitive capitalism converted into monopolistic capitalism under the guidance of the money power, and imperialism [became] the ultimate destiny of the nation — the United States once again was returning to the main stream of European institutional development. (64)

Finally, note that Hacker insists that Turner’s thesis was not merely wrong, but also harmful — because it functioned as a red herring that distracted historians from other, more appropriate forms of analysis:

What is of greater concern is the perverted reading Turner gave to American history in his insistence upon the uniqueness of American experience…. The unhappy results, for forty years, were the following: a turning inward of American historical activity at exactly the time when all trained eyes should have been on events going on beyond the country’s physical borders; an accumulation of supposed evidences of the development of American institutions entirely in nativistic terms without an understanding of how closely American institutional growth paralleled the European; an almost complete disregard of the basic class antagonisms in American history; and a profound ignorance of the steps by which monopolistic capitalism and imperialism were being developed in the country. (63)

It might be a good idea for American studies to avoid what Hacker said happened to American historiography. Even though it’s called American studies, in our search for insight we should not neglect “events going on beyond the country’s physical borders,” and in our concern with what makes America unique we should not lose sight of “how closely American institutional growth parallel[s] the European.” Nor should we ignore the tremendous importance of economics.

Thanks for reading this far. Here’s your question: What are some ways in which what we’re calling “environmentalism as culture” seems to be determined not so much by local considerations but by global economic forces?

Source: Hacker, Louis M. “Sections—Or Classes?” George Rogers Taylor, ed. The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1949: 61-64. Reprinted from The Nation 137 (26 July 1933): 108-110. Read more!

American Studies. If you ask me, Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance” (1860) is a nifty little story. It suspensefully describes a young frontier woman who endures a terrifying night in the clutches of a cougar and survives by singing to the animal, keeping it preoccupied until her husband arrives at dawn to shoot the big cat. When the couple returns home they find their cabin has been burnt down by Indians, which calamity, I would argue, is framed in the language of the Fortunate Fall:

There is no home there. The log-house, the barns, the neighboring farms, the fences, are all blotted out and mingled in one smoking ruin. Desolation and death were indeed there, and beneficence and life in the forest. Tomahawk and scalping-knife, descending during that night, had left behind them only this work of their accomplished hatred and one subtle foot-print in the snow.

For the rest, — the world was all before them, where to choose. (704)

Thus do the couple and their infant child end up collectively as R.W.B. Lewis’s American Adam, standing at the beginning of a new history, set free from Eden by the work of Satan and liberated into an unknown but potentially limitless future. The Fortunate Fall theme is quietly underscored by Spofford’s use of the word “subtle” — an allusion to the Bible’s reference to the serpent as the subtlest of all the animals — and by the much more obvious plagiarism of Paradise Lost (1667).

Here are the relevant lines, from the end of Milton’s great poem, when Adam and Eve are forced to leave Eden:

They looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng’d and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through EDEN took thir solitarie way.

The American Adam theme is deepened by Spofford’s depiction of the American frontier landscape in postlapsarian terms:

The green depths were utterly cold and silent and stern. These beautiful haunts that all summer were hers and rejoiced to share with her their bounty, these heavens that had yielded their largess, these stems that had thrust their blossoms into her hands, all these friends of three moons ago forgot her now and knew her no longer. (699-700)

Once edenic, nature now withholds the bounty it once gave away freely.

Okay, so Spofford’s story draws heavily on Milton and the Bible. But it doesn’t mechanically reproduce either; as with any retelling, it changes the originals. What are some of the significant ways it does so? What does it add to and what does it take away from Paradise Lost and the Garden of Eden story?

Update. Here are some of the key passages in which R.W.B. Lewis outlines his classic theory (in his extremely influential book The American Adam). According to Lewis,

the American myth saw life as just beginning. It described the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race, after the first chance had been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. It introduced a new kind of hero, the heroic embodiment of a new set of ideal human attributes. America, it was said insistently from the 1820s onward, was not the end-product of a long historical process...it was something entirely new. “Our national birth,” declaimed the Democratic Review in 1839, “was the beginning of a new history...which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only.” “American glory begins at the dawn,” announced Noah Webster in 1825. Edward Everett found an acceptable prescription for national health in the simple italicized phrase, separation from Europe — separation from its history and its habits.

The new habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources. It was not surprising, in a Bible-reading generation, that the new hero (in praise or disapproval) was most easily identified with Adam before the Fall. Adam was the first, and archetypal, man. His moral position was prior to experience, and in his very newness he was fundamentally innocent.... All this and more were contained in the image of the American as Adam. (4)

Lewis points out that not all early American writers concurred in this Adamic conception of the American. Those who did concur he terms the “party of Hope”; the dissenters he terms the “party of Memory”:

As an index of the “hopeful” strand on national morality, I cite the editorial (of 1839) which hailed the birth in America of “a clear conscience unsullied by the past.” The national and hence the individual conscience was clear just because it was unsullied by the past — America, in the hopeful creed, had no past, but only a present and a future. The key term in the moral vocabulary of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and their followers and imitators consequently was “innocence.” To the “nostalgic” — that is, to the party devoted to Memory — the sinfulness of man seemed never so patent as currently in America. As the hopeful expressed their mounting contempt for the doctrine of inherited sin, the nostalgic intoned on Sundays the fixed legacy of corruption in ever more emphatic accents. (7)

As Lewis says, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman exemplify the party of Hope; key members of the Party of Memory are Jonathan Edwards and Edgar Allan Poe.

Lewis also identifies a third category, an “ironic temperament” that

was characterized by a tragic optimism: by a sense of the tragic collisions to which innocence was liable (something unthinkable among the hopeful), and equally by an awareness of the heightened perception and humanity which suffering made possible (something unthinkable among the nostalgic) (7-8).

Perhaps the supreme example of this ironic temperament in an early American writer is Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose great creation Hester Prynne is not allowed to partake in the American myth of innocence yet whose humanity expands through her suffering.

One goal in this class is to examine what role, if any, this myth of the American Adam plays in shaping American environmentalism.
Read more!

American Studies. Environmentalism is a capacious term. It refers at once to a political movement, to the philosophies and ideologies underpinning that political movement, and to a set of subcultures, sensibilities, and identities. Let me give some examples.

The creation of the national parks, the banning of DDT, and the passage of the Endangered Species Act are examples of environmentalism as a political movement.

Arne Naess's famous Deep ecology is an example of a well-thought-out environmental philosophy. The deep-seated (and mostly unconscious) sense that “nature knows best” is an example of an environmentalist ideology.

Someone who only wears clothing made from organic hemp, spends their vacation backpacking, and is a vegan has an environmental sensibility and is a member of an environmental subculture. This person might identify very strongly with John Muir or Edward Abbey or some other famous environmentalist, in which case it is fair to say he or she has a green identity.*

In this course we’re mainly concerned with the latter. It will help us to know something about environmentalism’s other aspects, but our main focus will be on how environmentalism manifests itself culturally rather than politically or philosophically.

In class we’ve already brainstormed a few examples of green culture; what are some others? It might help at this point to think of green movies (e.g., Bambi) and songs (e.g., Marvin Gaye’s Mercy, Mercy Me.)

* Because I have a lot of trouble typing environmental, I’ll use green to mean the same thing. Read more!