definition of nature – American Environments to 1893

May 4, 2014

My Interpretation of Environmental History and Nature

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Looking back on this past semester, I realize how little I knew about environmental history before I began this class. I have never been to a state park, and I only went on my first hike, to the top of “Arthur’s Seat,” when I was abroad. I had always thought of the definition of “natural” as something untouched by mankind, mysterious in its sheer expanse, and beautiful. I looked at nature the way Henry David Thoreau viewed nature, as something mystifying and necessary:

We need the tonic of wilderness… at the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. (From Walden: Or, Life In the Woods)

This class and the works that we have read, however, have completely changed my perspective on how I view nature and the wilderness. Nature does not encompass solely the peaceful and tranquil sceneries I once associated with the term, but now I include devastating tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, and floods as natural. To me now, nature includes things not touched and touched by man, because we as humans are as much a part of this natural ecosystem as any other animal. We interact with our environment, affect it, change it, help it, and hurt it, just as other creatures of this world. The environment influences us in the same ways. Our interaction with nature often impacts our decisions, our lifestyles, and our future. Whether the environment dictates military strategy of the Civil War or makes scholars wonder why Los Angeles was placed in a danger zone, mankind’s balance with nature tips back and forth throughout time. This tipping of the scale is certainly natural.

But to what extent? Will there ever be a point where we as humans will tip the scale too far in our direction and forever upset the world as we know it? Will there be a point at which we cannot go back, when nature is forever affected without the capability to recover? These questions are a few that environmental historians study as well as wonder if, perhaps, we have already crossed over the point of no return. Mike Davis believes there is no helping Los Angeles from disaster. William Cronon studies the rise of Chicago as a metropolis and its positive contribution to our American way of life.

American capitalism and market economy contributes to our destruction of our wilderness, yet also contributes to our survival. The line remains blurry between protecting our environment and protecting our American values and way of life. Justin’s comment, that “the environment has the potential to destroy humans as well,” resonates with me because many of the conversations we hear are one sided, placing mankind as the “evil” destroying “good” nature. This course has taught me that there is no duality when it comes to environmental history. Historians analyze this gray area and determine at what points in history men or nature have tipped the scale. I will forever look at nature and study environmental history with a more encompassing and expansive definition while trying to answer who the actors at play are and who appears to be at “fault.” This course has taught me that the answer to that question might not ever be solved, but that environmental history can help us make better and more intelligent decisions about how we interact with the world around us.

March 9, 2014

The Flawed Methodology with Mythological History

Richard Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment is a study of the myth of the American frontier, as Slotkin analyzes the myth extensively using 19^th century literature, setting the frontier up as a divider between Metropolises and the native wilderness. The study is convincing enough, but Slotkin runs into the same issue that any historian has when studying a cultural myth: how to prove that the myth had an impact over an entire culture rather than specific sections of society.

This is a problem I encountered while writing my thesis last semester. I attempted to argue that the collapse of the mythological aspect of baseball with the reveal that the Yankee hero Mickey Mantle was an alcoholic and a womanizer, that that helped propel the festering cynicism in the 1960s that began with the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations as well as the Vietnam War. As I began researching, I immediately regretted my undertaking, as proving the cultural impact that a myth has over society is not easy. Relative to my study, I tried to argue that because of baseball’s place in American culture, the collapse of the mythology affected the greater American public, yet clearly there were Americans who could care less about baseball, or who could care less about the mythological aspects of the game. For Slotkin, his argument is solid and easy to accept as fact, yet it is also easily contestable because of how he uses literature as representative of American culture. This undertaking is impossible to do completely, as there were sections of society who had no interest in what was happening in the west (and as Henry pointed out, who could not read), yet Slotkin claims that with the literature, the frontier mythology is encompassing of American culture.

This point is reaffirmed in Henry’s below post, as he concurs that just a snapshot of a culture cannot interpret the national consciousness of America. I also did not consider the era, as Henry smartly points out the illiteracy in America made the novels and stories of the time even less influential, further weakening Slotkin’s contention.

Unfortunately for Slotkin, if he lessened his claim and stated instead that the literature had some influence, his argument becomes weak, yet because his claim is encompassing, it is currently flawed. Slotkin does a good job of providing as much evidence as possible, but regardless of how many stories supported his argument, someone could still say that assuming that the frontier mythology represented the whole nation’s consciousness is an over-the-top claim.

While flawed in its methodology, looking past these concerns I found the work rather convincing, and its approach as an environmental history intriguing. Slotkin adds an interesting wrinkle to the definition of nature, as he creates a polarizing distinction between the wilderness full of savage Indians and the metropolis expanding into the wilderness. While creating the distinction, as Ian states below it allows for male heroics within nature, therefore allowing humans as actors within nature.

February 23, 2014

Of Bison and Men (And Environmental Factors)

Understanding the narrative components of Andrew C. Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison helps me understand the book better. This story is a tragedy, chronicling the downfalls of several characters: the bison, the environment, the Indians, and the Euroamerican hunters. The bison’s story is, perhaps, the saddest. At the beginning of the story, the free and wild bison covered the plains. At the end, they suffered two fates. First, they “had become an imprisoned species only by the constant intervention of human keepers” (165) and then almost all the American bison ended up domesticated, privately-owned, and raised only to be killed for meat (189).

Looking from beginning to end–without the all-important middle–the losers in this story were also the environment, the Indians, and the Euroamerican hunters. The environment suffered as the destruction of the bison upset the diversity of life on the plains environment, causing invasive plant life to overtake the places where the shortgrass used to grow. The Indians suffered along with the bison as Euroamericans sought to control the Indians by cutting off their their only trading asset–the bison. Even the Euroamerican hunters suffered as they failed to receive the bulk of the payment and Euroamerican merchants and industrialists accumulated wealth.

Isenberg’s view, however, is that the middle of the story is the most important part. In the middle, the story gets complicated (because humans, human society, and ecology are all complicated and dynamic): the destruction of the bison “was a consequence of the encounter between Indians and Euroamericans in the Great Plains — an encounter in which the interactions of indigenous and Euroamerican ecologies were as significant as, and inextricably bound to, economic and cultural exchanges” (12). Isenberg spends the rest of the book working out those inextricable exchanges, elucidating the ways in which these exchanges reciprocally influenced each other.

A compelling part of Isenberg’s argument is where he places humans in the story. He emphasizes the dangers of holding the view of the dualism of humans and nature (the insistence “that whereas human culture is dynamic, nature is essentially stable” [195]). But Isenberg does not discount human influence. He explains human societies as “embedded in the complex ecology of the region” (194). Humans, in Isenberg’s view, have agency, but human decisions are influenced by (and cannot be understood apart from) the complex workings of their physical and social environments.

I agree with Ian’s assessment of the definition of nature in the book. He writes, “By noting how the buffalo were actually devastated by other factors outside of human hand, it offers a perception that humanity’s alteration of the environment is a natural progression of the world.” Similarly, a passage in Isenberg confirms this view: “A bison hide did not cease to be part of nature when it had been removed from the carcass and sold. The hide continued to flow through the environment like all energy and material” (196). Though procuring a hide also meant killing the animal, Isenberg glazes over that to show that a hide’s movement from an animal to a vat of lime to a leather belt in a machine was a natural movement.

February 15, 2014

Chicago and Its Hinterland

In the Preface to Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon explains how he will use the word “nature” in the text. He writes about how difficult it is to use the word “nature” while also trying to suggest “that the boundary between human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural, is profoundly problematic” (Cronon, xix). I think Henry is correct to say that Cronon’s argument only makes sense in light of his definition of nature. Cronon states, “Nature’s Metropolis and the Great West are in fact different labels for a single region and the relationships that defined it” (19). This wouldn’t make sense without allowing for human action as a part of nature (this is what Cronon calls “second nature”).

Based on the readings from the first section of The Great Wilderness Debate, I concluded that wilderness is necessarily uninhabited. I also considered whether or not nature has to be an uninhabited space since the definition of nature is related to definition of wilderness. Cronon’s argument convinced me that the line between the natural and unnatural worlds is not as distinct as I thought. Ian appropriately characterizes this blurry line by saying that Cronon “perceive[s] cities as the next evolution of a natural ecosystem.” I agree with Ian’s assessment of Cronon’s argument, but I have a visceral reaction to it–how can the big, scary, immoral city be an extension of the “first nature” world?

I think this is difficult for me to accept because I just finished reading Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter. The narrator, Hannah, describes her life as a farmer in rural Kentucky. Then, Hannah mourns for the loss of her way of life because her three children grew up, went away to college, and never returned to their hometown. This novel made me want to move back to northcentral Pennsylvania (where I grew up) and become a farmer, because the narrator is obsessed with belonging to a place. Despite my gut reaction that this can only happen in the country, maybe a person can truly belong to a city, too.

Cronon importantly brings time into the equation of Chicago’s history. “Before the city, there was the land,” Cronon writes (23). Using von Thünen’s Isolated State theory to help explain the continuity between urban and rural areas, Cronon explains the limitations of the theory: von Thünen “made no effort to place his city-country system in time. The lone city in the midst of the featureless plain had no history, and so poses real problems when one tries to apply it to the extremely dynamic processes that reshaped city and country in the nineteenth-century West” (52). I appreciate Cronon’s critique. Cronon helpfully places Chicago’s (and its hinterland’s) emergence squarely in time, allowing the reader to understand “the city’s place in nature” (8).