April 2014 – Page 2 – American Environments to 1893

April 14, 2014

Class Conflict in American Environmental History

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In Crimes Against Nature, Karl Jacoby looks at the American conservation movement in a more class-based way than many previous historians have. As he outlines in the epilogue, a big part of his argument is the way that the elites in control of ecological movements demonized and illegalized the environmental practices of poor, rural Americans in order to exert control over both them and the land. (194-195) As Justin notes in his post, the conservation movement seemed to create new norms of ecological practice that were favorable to those in charge. I also noticed something interesting about Jacoby’s research in the book’s preface. He says that he did not originally intend to focus on conflicts between those in charge of the state park movement and poor people breaking the law, but that he found so many instances of that happening in his initial research that he decided to change his topic around. (xv-xvi) He also says that his perception of such conflicts was that they only happened in third world countries in places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where the conservation movements were led by European colonists. (xv)

This peaked my interest because of an African environmental history class I previously took at Davidson, where we learned a lot about such movements in colonized countries in Africa. Many authors we read argued, much like Jacoby does, that the Europeans in control of these countries used environmental policies to oppress the native Africans under the guise of a desire to protect resources. For example, colonists in South Africa prosecuted poaching quite severely and enacted rules banning natives from owning hunting dogs, claiming that their efforts were guided by a desire to protect hunted animals. Like Jacoby, I find it especially interesting how easily comparable the conservation movements of Africa and the U.S. are in regards to what it points out about the relationship between elites and non-elites. If one accepts Jacoby’s argument, then in this particular aspect of environmental preservation, there are legitimate comparisons to be made between the way elites treated poor Americans and the way Europeans treated Africans. I believe most people would be quite surprised to hear such a comparison be made. And ultimately, that sense of surprise is why I enjoyed Jacoby’s book. It was very interesting to see the American conservation movement studied in this new light, and I believe it represents a big corner being turned in the historiography of American history, both environmentally and in regards to class conflict.

April 14, 2014

A Subaltern Environmental History

Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature is a history that strives to take a look at the underbelly of the Conservation movement in American history. His “bottom-up” approach chronicles the evolution of a moral ecology which straddles the fence between official conservation standards and traditional ecological practices. I would say that this reminds me of the populist politics class I took last semester, except the fact these areas being conserved by the government were too sparsely populated for effective populist action. As a result, the conflict was very one sided and Jacoby notes that the history reflects this as an environmental crusade waged by the “pantheon of Conservationist prophets” (1).

Like Wade, I was also reminded of our discussions about the role of capitalism in shaping environments while reading this book. What I found most interesting about Jacoby’s take on this, however, is the unconventional intersection of morality and capitalism. In this class, the focus when discussing capitalism has been primarily the economic and ecological aspects. Unfortunately, the chances of morality and capitalism working together to create a better method of conservation as they remain “separate guiding stars in a dark night sky” (198).

April 14, 2014

Crimes Against Nature: Conceptions of Nature and Morality

Karl Jacoby, in his Crimes Against Nature, discusses the land set-aside during the conservation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the “the law and its antithesis-lawlessness” (2). I found it interesting that the conservation movement began when American lawmakers redefined what was considered legitimate uses of the environment. The philosophies that shaped these lawmakers and their decisions trickled down to the ordinary folk and their interactions with the environment therefore changed. Jacoby refers to the moral universe that shaped the local transgression of conservation laws that gives historians a look into the beliefs and traditions of the people as “moral ecology” (3). Poaching, arson, and squatting take center-stage in Jacoby’s work on conceptions of nature and environmental crimes.

Jacoby argues that there is more to the traditional story about the elite imposing their ideas about nature on rural places and rural folk. The country folk did not ignorantly break the laws, but actually resisted conservation programs that threatened livelihoods and “fashioned a variety of arrangements designed to safeguard the ecological basis of their way of life” (193). Studying the formation of the Adirondack Park by New York State, the federal government’s attempts to manage Yellowstone National Park, and the Grand Canyon conservation plans, Jacoby shows how these actions impacted the resident peoples. With the involvement of the military, conservation schemes affected those living in and using the parks, such as those who desired to use the public land for hunting. Conservationists even opposed the supposed American rights to take timber, water, and minerals from the preserved lands. He points out that sometimes, “Americans have often pursued environmental quality at the expense of social justice” (198). In this way, the conservation movement challenged American republicanism and democracy, interfering with traditional conceptions of American rights and living.

An interesting myth that Jacoby also challenges is the myth that conservationists protected unchanging wilderness, when, in fact, conservationism transformed the countryside itself. Fire, hunting laws, and restocking wildlife helped transform the country in this way. With the transformation of nature, the Yellowstone Act of 1872, and the American obsession with claiming property, I agree with Anthony’s statement that these actions “reflect our obsession with fencing off and owning property and reflects our abuse of the world ‘natural.” Yellowstone Park, protected by conservationists, ironically prevented people from performing previously conceived “natural” actions. This irony echoes the discussion we often have in class: whether or not the actions of mankind can be considered natural or not. How do lawmakers and conservationists decide what is natural on one side of the fence when that action can occur without consequence on the other side? I find this absurd. Jacoby’s work made me ponder what is considered a “crime” and how “crime” is truly a man-made concept, easily impacted by lawmakers and evolving ideas about morality and the environment.

April 14, 2014

Capitalist Ideas of Land

Whether we realize it or not, we as a people have a specific way that we think about and view nature. This way is not the right or wrong way, but is different from the way other peoples might see it. We seem to have a fascination or an innate desire to separate and own land. The notion of ‘property’ is crucial to the foundations of democracy and thus the foundation of this country. John Locke, the founder of modern democracy, first established the right to life liberty and property. While we switched the words around to include “the pursuit of happiness,” the idea of property never left the minds of our founding fathers. As a people we have a desire to mark territory that we alone own. The idea of ‘fencing off’ what we posses is very prominent in our society.

This is never more transparent that in the Yellowstone Park Act of 1872. The wording for this act provided a legislative model for subsequent efforts for all types of conservation. The act stated that the land in the park was retained in “its natural conditions” and “set apart” for people to enjoy. Any person who operated against “the conditions of nature” was not allowed to touch the land. While this legislation was motivated by a positive good, its wording reflects our views about the environment. It reflects our obsession with fencing off and owning property and it reflects our abuse of the word ‘natural.’ This legislation suggests that our country knows what is truly natural. Yet how can we truly claim that anyone is acting against the conditions of nature? The way we define the conditions of nature may be different than the way a Native American would or anyone else would. Who are we to deem something against the laws of nature? Some people might even argue that fencing off any nature at all is inherently unnatural.

Karl Jacoby’s most captivating argument in the book for me was her argument that we often try to legitimize particular conceptions of nature and criminalize others. While I agree that this process goes on all the time, I don’t believe that it is just limited to the urban elite and kept separate from rural citizens. I believe that it stems from a fundamental capitalist and democratic understanding of land that was established by our forefathers. Jacoby talks about the elite because they are the easiest targets and they were the most successful at using our conceptions of nature for their benefit. I would love to see a study of this type of rhetoric among farmers and other rural Americans. I believe that it would be just as prominent. I think Justin makes an intelligent point in his post about the importance of binaries in this work. I think Jacoby seeks to set up this binary opposite between these two groups of people. While it effective for the argument I would love to see more.

April 13, 2014

Binaries, Language, and This Interlocking System

This weeks its back to the binaries with Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature. His research tells the rise of conservationism in American history. This is the story of the battle between law v. lawlessness, East v. West, urban v. rural–the transformation of once acceptable environmental practices into illegal acts. The nineteenth century saw a change in the manner in which language concerning environmental acts shifted. A battle erupted between those who lived in the rural West and rural areas of the United States. Jacoby’s work not only calls out those who attempted to colonize people and places disguised as environmental conservatism but also historians who have perpetuated environmental practices between urban and rural folk, the rural folk portrayed as the antagonists. He states, “Historians have largely concurred with such judgments, viewing rural folks as operating a flawed understanding of the world” (2). Jacoby acknowledges that primary sources authored by rural folk are extremely limited, but there are other routes to finding information about their lives and their interactions with the environment. He wants to debunk the following myth: “the belief that prior to the advent of conservation, rural folk, in keeping with the supposed rugged individualism of the American frontier, did as they pleased with the natural world” (193).

I like to think of people’s relationship in relation to Emily’s commentary from last week. She stated, “Finally, disasters were understood to be, though destructive, also creative of new life. In disasters, authors found a way to understand their local concerns about social change as possibly a good thing in the end.” Thus, is it not natural that humans have a destructive element in how they interact with the environment? Of course conservation is important to slow any process of degradation, but were/are not these actions inevitable?

As Jacoby states, “Conservation thus extended far beyond natural resource policy, not only setting the pattern for other Progressive Era reforms but also heralding the rise of the modern administrative state” (6). Thus, Jacoby’s story suggests more than just the rise of environmental preservation came with its supposed birth. Once the system was defined according to those in charge, each event was then (and continues to be) based off of the created “norm” or in this case “law.” These laws determined how society was “supposed” to be organized, not how it was supposed to be. The history of conservation in the United States is all about language and those who have the means to enact what they want to happen. If there is opposition, whether good opposition or bad, is irrelevant (at least to them). It is crucial to be aware of a system that has the potential to cause good but also cause bad–not only towards the environment but also towards different groups of, often marginalized, people.

April 13, 2014

Counterintuitive Qualities of Conservation

In Crimes Against Nature, Karl Jacoby aims to write a monograph that combines the fields of social and environmental history in the United States (xvi). To do this, Jacoby analyzes the conservation movement that took place at the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the book Jacoby attempts to illustrate a non-elite “moral ecology” – a perspective that “offers a vision of nature ‘from the bottom up’” – in order to complicate the narrative of the American conservation movement (1, 3). While Jacoby’s work focused on squatters, poachers, and thieves, it also reminded me of several themes that we have discussed from previous readings in class this semester.

Jacoby does a particularly effective job in demonstrating how capital has shaped the development of our natural environment. Although he writes on the lives and perspectives of the voices that often go unheard in the retelling of American history, Jacoby’s narrative still portrays how the flow of capital even guided the conservation movement. In the Adirondacks, the unsettled woods of the region, along with flourishing fish and deer populations made the region especially vulnerable to being overtaken by capitalists. This is seen in the rapid abandonment of farm homes and construction of estates in the Adirondacks, accompanied by a burgeoning tourist industry (26-27). Additionally, as tourism continued to grow in the region, more and more people living in the Adirondacks identified with multiple vocations. These jobs included being a guide, a hunter, or fisherman, and often combined lifestyles on the Adirondacks both pre- and post- conservationist intervention (28). In the Grand Canyon, Jacoby outwardly admits that there was a close relationship between business interests and forestry officials (169).These examples serve to show that while on the surface conservation claimed to protect the environment, its aims could very likely have been driven by the capitalist geography we see presented by Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis.

The second element of Crimes Against Nature that I found very similar to previous class discussions was the unnaturalness of the conservation movement. I liked the definition of “wilderness” Brandon posited in his post as being unadulterated by human intervention. I also agreed with his discussion of the wilderness as an artifact of modernity. However, after reading this book, I think Jacoby might be arguing that as a result of the conservation movement, wilderness is something inherently different than it was before. This can be seen in both the ways that conservationists try to preserve wilderness as well as how Jacoby writes about the spread of conservationism. One example of this occurred in the Adirondacks, when dozens of towers, taller than the tree lines of the forest, were constructed in order to maintain a watch on potential fires that could damage the “wilderness” (77-78). The placement of the U.S. Army in Yellowstone National Park for 32 years only bolsters this view the unnatural means by which conservationists “preserved” the wilderness (97). In addition Jacoby discusses how conservationists have developed a “new vision of nature” and a “touristic wilderness” as their influence spread throughout the United States (170, 191). With this in mind, the cordoning off of these spaces by conservationists has clearly made the wilderness an artifact of modernity. However, perhaps this has also destroyed the primeval quality that the wilderness before conservationism contained.

April 13, 2014

The Myths of Conservationism

After reading Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation I reached a similar conclusion as Brandon. In his post Brandon talks about how Jacoby was able to successfully present a viable alternative narrative to both the ideas of wilderness in relationship to mankind and the conservation movement as a whole. This alternative view was one that was put forward by middle and low income individuals rather than elites who had usually dominated the conversation. This dominance by elites was a major reason why the stories and beliefs of the lower class members of society were largey overlooked in historical analysis and is why Jacoby’s book was particularly attractive to me.

What I really appreciated about his book were the myths of the conservation movement that he presented in the epilogue. The conservation movement many times is labeled as an honorable movement. While many acknowledged that it was never as successful as was originally hoped, the original goals were pure. However, Jacoby with his myth busting aims helps the reader understand some of the flaws in the foundation of conservasionism.

The first myth was that the belief that rural folk who were squatting or poaching on the land “did as they pleased with the natural world.” (193) This was not true. Jacoby argued that these rural folk has a greater understanding of ecological preservation than those in the cities gave them credit for. They established systems so as not to harm beyond repair the environments on which they relied upon. This did not mean that rural folks did no harm or that their systems successfully brought order to chaotic situation. Instead Jacoby asserted that these rural folks should not be labeled as the enemy to the movement.

Another important myth that Jacoby tries to debunk is the idea of conserved spaces as natural. This is an idea that we have talked about on multiple ocassions this semester. Jacoby does a good job of revealing the manufactured nature of these “natural” conservatories. While conservationists argued that the protection of spaces from industrial and commercial interests would keep those spaces natural, Jacoby argued that the imposition of legal rules and the managerial role of state made the space inherently unnatural. The environment in these places was controlled and thus the natural processes of the area were not allowed to flow unimpeded.

The final myth that Jacoby discusses has to do with the belief that science and the state need to be used to protect the environment from the rural folk. Jacoby however, saw this flawed belief as revealing a hidden theme in conservation history. This was the promotion of environmental justice over social justice. The needs of people such as the squatters were overlooked in exchange for the protection of abstract notions such as wilderness and nature, ideas that can be perceived differerntly throughout the nation. It is also ironic that science was being promoted as a possible solution to natural degredation, for the rise of industrialism ( a result of both the natural and social sciences) was a major contributor to the deterioization of the environement that prompted a conservasion movement. With this perspective it should not have been the rural folk who were restricted but those who actually created the problem. By exploring these myths and presenting alternative perspectives Jacoby has done a good job of painting a greater picture of conservatism and revealing the unstudied aspect of the subject.

April 13, 2014

Supplementary Reading: American Indians and National Parks

Growing up on the East Coast made national parks a difficult concept for me to understand. A friend used to tell me about spending summers at her grandmother’s home in Grand Junction, Colorado, where her grandmother’s backyard was the Colorado National Monument. I only understood the word ‘monument’ as in a memorial, such as the Washington Monument, and was confused about why anyone would care to live near it, until I saw this picture:[1]

My ignorance about the West also extends to national parks. Reading American Indians and National Parks by Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek helped me understand the scale of national parks in that part of the country (Keller and Turek do not study only western parks, but most of the parks they study are in the West). For example, Glacier National Park in Montana is made up of 1,012,837 acres and contains 762 lakes.[2] While it may seem that there was enough land in the West for both parks and Indian tribes, Keller and Turek demonstrate why that is a myth and expose the complicated story of the United States government’s appropriation of tribal land. What Keller and Turek do for Indian tribes, Karl Jacoby does for “common folk” more generally in Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. After explaining Keller and Turek’s book, I will consider their history in light of Jacoby’s study.

Keller and Turek tell the story of the changing relationships between the Indian tribes who lived in or around the parks and the National Parks Service (NPS) and environmentalists between 1864 and 1994. They fill a void in scholarship by examining the formation of national parks through the perspective of the native people who lived in or around the parks in the United States. The authors assert that, though scholars have studied national parks and American Indians separately, the connection between them has largely been ignored, to the detriment of both fields. Keller and Turek focus their research on what they call the “crown jewels” of the parks system—including Glacier National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Yosemite National Park—nearly all of which have had disputes with native peoples concerning ownership and use of park land.[3]

Keller and Turek tell a hopeful story about the relationship between the NPS and Indian tribes; though the NPS has not always understood or treated American Indians well, policy and “awareness and sensitivity” have improved since the 1960s. Keller and Turek tell a less hopefully story about the relationship between conservationists and native peoples. By the end, the authors conclude, “honest dialogue can help idealists realize that protecting land is no simple matter.” Keller and Turek seek to “dispense with stereotypes of the Indian-as-ecologist/Indian-as-victim, and cease seeing tribal members as colorful, nostalgic versions of environmentalists themselves.” By understanding the culture and history of Indian tribes and the history of Indian tribes’ relationships to national parks, Keller and Turek demonstrate that fair policy is possible in theory: policy that takes into account not only the environment, but also the people who lived on and off of the land prior to the establishment of national parks. They also acknowledge that this is rarely, if ever, realized in practice.[4]

For sources, Keller and Turek rely on individual national parks’ archival sources, government documents, and a series of interviews the two authors conducted with Native Americans. The history is largely a bureaucratic one: the NPS, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Indian tribes—not individual people, but institutions—are the actors in the story. However, since Indian tribes were underrepresented politically, Keller and Turek gave them a collective voice by interviewing individual Native Americans.[5] The book’s focus on bureaucracy, though, makes reading American Indians and National Parks dull; quotations from the interviews are among the few highlights of the book.

In the conclusion to American Indians and National Parks, Keller and Turek list several general phases of relations between national parks and Indian tribes. The first phase started in 1864 with the beginning of the federal government’s seizure of land for parks and continued for fifty years after the establishment of the NPS in 1916. Keller and Turek note that this period was characterized by unfettered appropriation of land and “little genuine concern for native rights.” Next, there was a phase that was marked by Native American success in promoting their political interest, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Finally, the period beginning in 1987 with the NPS formulation of the Native American Relationships Management Policy, the service adopted a policy promising to “respect and actively promote tribal cultures as a component of the parks themselves.” [6] Although these stages indicate tidy progress in NPS and tribal relations, it was not a period of strictly upward progress. Keller and Turek emphasize the differences between each tribe and park, and include backward moments. No two situations were the same, but the authors tell a story of eventual progress. It would have been helpful if Keller and Turek had split the chapters into sections so these phases were clear from the beginning. Since they only explained the phases at the end of the book, the independent chapters had no context and it proved difficult to reconstruct Keller and Turek’s argument while reading the book.

Keller and Turek begin the book with the hopeful chapter ,“‘A Lucky Compromise’: Apostle Islands and the Chippewa,” about the 1970 victory of the Chippewa in protecting their reservation’s land on the national stage.[7] This chapter is contrasted with the next: “From Yosemite to Zuni: Parks and Native People, 1864-1994,” which presents a bleaker picture of relations between tribes and the NPS. In its infancy, the NPS was a flawed institution, according to Keller and Turek. The NPS “bequeathed distortions and ignorance about native history” in founding and maintaining its parks.[8] These chapters set the scene for the case studies that compose the rest of the book.

In summary, chapter three addresses the paradox of artifact preservation coinciding with ignoring the living native peoples through the example of the Utes in Mesa Verde National Park. Chapter four deals land usage rights among the Blackfeet in Glacier National Park. Chapter five explores the relations between Paiutes and Mormons in controlling Pipe Spring. Chapter six attends to the problems that arose because of multiple tribes in a locale, as demonstrated in Olympic National Park and the surrounding area. Chapters seven and eight examine the tensions between conservationists and native tribes in using and controlling the Grand Canyon. Chapters nine and ten tell the stories of the Navajo and the Seminoles, respectively. Though these chapters are full of information, the text wants a more analytic voice to drive the argument. As it is, Keller and Turek are content to describe, and rarely argue.

Since Crimes against Nature studies the case of the Havasupai in the Grand Canyon, I will summarize Keller and Turek’s history of the Havasupai in Grand Canyon National Park in chapter eight as a reference to compare the stories told by the two books (though they address different periods). After giving a brief history of the Havasupai in the Grand Canyon area, Keller and Turek describe the Congressional bill transferring land to the tribe. From 1974 to 1976, a political fight broke out between the Havasupai and environmentalists who opposed the measure. Environmentalists were concerned that “the Havasupai, being poor, would place economic development ahead of preservation” and that the Grand Canyon was a national park in that it belonged to the American people, not the Havasupai. The land transfer bill eventually passed, but it stipulated that “transferred land ‘shall remain forever wild’” without an indication of what “forever wild” meant. Keller and Turek analyze the relationship between native tribes and environmentalists. The authors posit that conservationists believed that “The Grand Canyon … transcends humanity,” which means that no humans, not even native tribes, belong there. Second, Keller and Turek debunk the “Indian as Environmentalist” myth, arguing that it “freezes Indians as an idea and artifact” instead of treating them as a dynamic people. Finally, Keller and Turek acknowledge that the Canyon could have been better preserved if environmentalists had their way, but that situation would have made it “no longer be an Indian community or homeland for its people.”[9] The authors reveal their belief in the impossibility of reconciling the interests of native tribes and environmentalists.

American Indians and National Parks addresses themes that Jacoby also addresses, including the concept of “national” parks versus local spaces and environmental versus social justice. Where Jacoby’s stances are clear, Keller and Turek’s must be teased out of the text. Analogs to Jacoby’s opinions can be found in American Indians and National Parks, though. “Americans have often pursued environmental quality at the expense of social justice,” Jacoby claims. [10] Keller and Turek’s book also demonstrates this: though the NPS has improved its policies since 1916, conservationists have resisted deeply considering human interests in forming policy. The idea of local versus national control is present in both books. Jacoby demonstrates this by contrasting common Adirondack land use practices with how wealthy sportsmen and the state of New York used the land. In Keller and Turek’s view, this played out through the NPS control of native tribal lands. In both, there is an implicit recognition that local control was often superior to national in terms of environmental health. This directly counters Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, which is necessarily a national story of “Americanization.” Finally, Keller and Turek agree with Jacoby about man’s place in nature: both books include humans as an unavoidable, if not ideal, part of the natural world.

Bibliography

Jacoby, Karl. Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden
History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Keller, Robert H. and Michael F. Turek. American Indians and National Parks. Tucson:
The University of Arizona Press, 1998.

[1] Sally Bellacqua, Monument Canyon, http://www.nps.gov/colm/photosmultimedia/index.htm.

[2] Glacier National Park Fact Sheet, http://www.nps.gov/glac/parknews/fact-sheet.htm.

[3] Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998), xv, xii-xiii.

[4] Keller and Turek, 232-240.

[5] Keller and Turek, 241-242.

[6] Keller and Turek, 233-234.

[7] Keller and Turek, 3-16.

[8] Keller and Turek, 17-29.

[9] Keller and Turek, 164-184.

[10] Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 198.

April 11, 2014

Wilderness as Artifact

Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation presents a view of the early conservation movement from the generally untold view of economically middle and low-class individuals. As Jacoby writes in his conclusion, “the powerful can attempt to advance their own visions of the past, dismissing those whose recollections they find threatening or inconvenient” (p. 193). Jacoby seeks to counter such attempts by unveiling the little known stories of the individuals affected by the conservation of the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon.

The issue of land ownership plays a prominent role throughout the book. In the past, I have often learned about Native Americans who lost their land to the US Government because of their unfamiliarity with white ideas of land ownership. What was interesting to me was the substantial discussion of similar experiences for white settlers in the Adirondacks. Even those families who had called the Adirondacks home for generations were declared squatters because they lacked the proper proof of land ownership. By depicting the shared experiences of whites and Native Americans, Jacoby’s work crossed ethnic and cultural boundaries and instead told a comprehensive story of the effects of the conservation movement on less privileged individuals.

Another aspect of Jacoby’s work that I found very thought provoking was his statement, “wilderness reveals itself to be not some primeval character of nature but rather an artifact of modernity, a concept employed by conservationists to naturalize the transformations taking place in rural America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (p. 198). In my opinion, wilderness is both a primeval character of nature and an artifact of modernity. Wilderness, as I see it, is nature without human intervention. Throughout the semester we have had many discussions about what level of human involvement in the environment can be considered natural. As Ian noted in an earlier post, even something as technologically advanced as a city can be described as the next phase of ecological evolution. There is no such ambiguity when describing the wilderness, as it is nature in its virgin state. Thus, it seems to me, the wilderness has always existed. While wilderness has always been a primeval character of nature, it is also now an artifact of modernity because of the conservation movement. The conservation movement, at its core, is an attempt to preserve wilderness. In order to justify the need for preservation, areas such as the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon have been portrayed as the last of their kind. In an effort to preserve such places for posterity, the conservation movement has essentially cast wilderness as an artifact that needs to be passed down to later generations. Areas such as Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon are now very similar to museums. They attract tourists because they hearken back to a lost age, when the landscape was not dominated by human creations. In this sense, wilderness has most certainly become an artifact of modernity. This does not mean, however, that it is no longer a primeval character of nature.

April 7, 2014

Chicago’s Purifying Flames

In “Faith and Doubt: The Imaginative Dimensions of the Great Chicago Fire,” Carl Smith discusses how two clusters of beliefs arose from the flames of Chicago’s great fire of 1871. From it came a belief in Chicago’s transcendent purpose as a sort of divinely sanctioned landscape with boundless potential and a special place in history. The other belief was a worry that at any moment, places like Chicago could explode into anarchy if the social order weren’t carefully guarded. After the Chicago fire occurred, residents and interested parties across the country recognized the needs for a city to have stable society. For many concerned citizens, the fire was an act of God purifying the city of sin and allowing those left to start anew on moral high ground.

This reading is strongly related to Henry’s in that natural disasters came to be an indication of God’s judgment in the American conscience. Though Smith didn’t mention it, I thought that Henry’s point about Bradford’s “City upon a hill,” and American exceptionalism would have been pertinent. Indeed some citizens believed Chicago to be this “City upon a hill.”: “Bright, Christian capital of lakes and prairies/Heaven had no interest in the scourge and scath;/Thou wert the newest shrine of our religion,/The youngest witness of our faith” (135). In this line of thought, Chicago is no longer unique, and the Great Fire fits into a larger narrative about the relationship between God and America rather than God and Chicago.