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After reading Lisa Brady’s War Upon the Land, it’s hard to believe this statue of William Tecumseh Sherman was installed in Central Park in 1903.
Aside from that, I think the blog posts so far show an interesting engagement with Brady’s definition of nature. Ian and Sean helpfully point out why it may be limiting to exclude humans from a definition of nature. I agree with them on a theoretical level. But on the practical level of writing and thinking about environmental history, it makes it easier if we define nature as Brady does: “the nonhuman physical environment in its constituent parts or as a larger whole” (13). But maybe easier isn’t better.
Brady’s notion of “landscape” is a helpful way to think about about how humans shape the environment. So much of Brady’s book deals with designing and manipulating nature that her idea of landscape as “shaped land, land modified for permanent human occupation, for dwelling, agriculture, manufacturing, government, worship, and for pleasure” is useful because it allows for human alteration and usage of the land as a reasonable, and not a negative, process (13).
Brady mentions the proliferation of weeds as one of the consequences of Union armies marching through the South (131). This mention of weeds reminded me of Crosby’s book, when he points out that weeds are among the first plants to populate an area after it has been destroyed. Those weeds make way for longer-lasting plants. This means that, perhaps if we take a larger view of the environmental consequences of the Civil War (as Crosby takes a very wide view of ecological history in his book), the results are less dismal. The combination of the destruction of the land and the dismantling of the institution of slavery, though, spelled doom for the Southern way of life and ensured that the South could not return to how it was before the war (134). Even taking a larger view of history could not help return the South to its previous agroecosystem.
I also appreciated how Brady depicted nature as a historical agent insofar as it has “power to shape human decisions” (6). Brady relied on nineteenth-century Northern ideas about nature as an entity that was able to be conquered, civilized, and improved. Those ideas were the driving force in the book. I think the ideas themselves, carried through by the agents of Union generals (many of whom were trained as engineers at West point) helped bring about the destruction of Southern landscapes. For Brady, these ideas had consequences in the hands of Union generals and their massive armies.