View From This Wilderness
In 1836, nearly half a century before Congress began debating the idea of wilderness preservation, artist Thomas Cole captured the tension that to this day characterizes Americans’ attitudes toward the great outdoors. In Cole’s painting “The Oxbow,” a meandering river divides the canvas into two opposing views of nature. On the left is a raw, storm-lashed scene of untamed countryside, and on the right a sunny, pastoral vision of cultivated fields and tidy farmhouses.
Cole was part of a new breed of artists and writers who gave romantic expression to a young nation’s passionate attachment to its land. His work celebrated the American landscape in both its wild and domesticated forms and did not take sides. Still, the romanticists were setting the stage for epic land-use battles to come. Influential American thinkers, including Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, were ascribing a value to wilderness, to trees and rocks and free-flowing water, that had nothing to do with their worth as commodities. In wild forests and mountains, as nowhere else, Emerson believed, humankind is confronted with the signature of the Almighty. “In the wilderness,” he wrote, “we return to reason and faith.”
Over time, “The Oxbow” became emblematic of a deep rift in American society, between those who thought like Emerson and those who believed, as the Puritans had, that wilderness is a Godforsaken place and that though the Almighty may have sent his people there, he expected them to turn it into an orderly and productive abode.
Americans’ complex, often contradictory relationship with nature is the subject of a number of recent books about some of the places where explorers, missionaries, adventurers, settlers, entrepreneurs, environmentalists and government officials have acted out dreams of empire that the geography of the New World inspired. In the Adirondacks, along the Hudson and Columbia rivers, in the Rocky Mountain region and in lands that now make up the national park system, the authors follow people driven by a moral vision--Jefferson’s, Emerson’s or others’--and examine the consequences it had for the land.
In his rich social history of America’s first wilderness, “The Adirondacks,” Paul Schneider argues that despite a century-old commitment to conservation, society remains deeply divided over what is the highest and best use of its remaining undeveloped land. “The story of this century has been the struggle,” Schneider writes, “ . . . to find an acceptable definition of wilderness that can survive our culture’s seemingly insatiable desires. . . . The proper meanings and uses of wilderness are not yet settled.”
Though echoing “Wilderness and the American Mind,” Roderick Nash’s influential study of the same intellectual territory, Schneider’s shared conclusions are grounded in an original account of a place that fostered many of the material and spiritual ambitions Americans have had for their land since colonial times. Six million acres of rivers, lakes, mountains and forests in upstate New York, the Adirondacks looked no different from the rest of the land west of the Hudson River. With thousands of savage souls to be saved and a fortune in beaver hides to be made, the New World was a land of boundless opportunity for early missionaries, trappers and traders who could endure its torments. To the European colonists, it was “hideous and desolate,” “a thick, anti-Christian darkness . . . inhabited by Iroquois ‘demons.’ ”
Yet, barely half a century after the Iroquois had been driven out, Schneider writes, Americans were viewing the wilderness through the beatific gaze of Cole, Emerson and other romantics, and the Adirondacks had become America’s first outdoor salon, attracting painters, philosophers and assorted visionaries. John Brown, the abolitionist, ran a farm there in 1848 that was a haven for freed men and fugitive slaves.
Writers of the time likened their wilderness experiences there to being in church. Schneider quotes from Joel Headley’s 1849 paean to the Adirondacks as a place where “Nature and the Bible are in harmony.” The romantics were the spiritual precursors of John Muir and other wilderness champions who would use much the same language to ennoble the politics of preservation. But as Schneider points out, the region’s remarkable durability has had less to do with the stirrings of a new wilderness ethic than with the intractability of land that would not yield to the plow or to the pastoral yearnings of settlers, who bypassed it for flatter, more fertile country to the west.
When devastation finally did seem to be at hand, as loggers laid waste to more than 1 million acres within the Adirondacks, the reprieve came in the form of an economic decision to protect a forested watershed that was the natural reservoir for cities downstate. “The creation of the Adirondacks Forest Preserve in 1885 and the Adirondacks Park seven years later,” Schneider concludes, “was justified in purely utilitarian terms.”
At roughly the same time the New York state legislature was debating the creation of the Adirondacks Forest Preserve, the U.S. Army was promoting a very different vision of wilderness to the Indians of the Columbia River Basin. “Captain MacMurray found a small checkerboard in his kit and explained how, seen from above, the land might be divided into townships, ranges and sections, like the black and white squares of the checkerboard.” The anecdote is recounted in Robert Clark’s “River of the West: A Chronicle of the Columbia,” a sad, haunting retelling of the conquest of the Northwest tribes and the manipulation of a wild river system that came close to destroying its special treasure, the salmon, along with the people who depended on it.
The social and environmental costs of harnessing America’s great rivers for hydroelectricity figure prominently in the growing body of revisionist histories of the West. In Clark’s hands, it is the story of people imposing a myth of agrarian independence on a land that cannot support it. Without the heavily subsidized water and power that flowed from the region’s vast network of publicly financed dams, turbines and reservoirs, farmers could not have survived (and cannot today), and Clark has woven together a poignant series of narratives about the people who believed in the myth (and some who didn’t) and about the disillusionment and tragedy that awaited them and those who got in their way.
“River of the West” is also about the incantatory power of nature, the spell of the river on all concerned. When the Indians lost control of the land, they found solace in a new “dreaming” religion that transported the practitioners through songs and dances to a future world much like the old one before the white man arrived. Years later, river songs of a different sort lifted the spirits of Depression-weary Americans. The music of Woody Guthrie portrayed the damming of the Columbia as a triumph of popular will over natural adversity in which, according to Clark, “the wild and mythic river of the West tamed by democracy in action . . . [became] a river of hope for the nation’s destitute and dispossessed.” It was the old Puritan admonition to rise up and subdue the wild forces of nature recast in Populist verse, and it captured the nation’s imagination:
We’ll farm along the river and work from sun to sun.
I’ll walk along the river and listen to the factories run.
I’ll think to myself, Great Goodness, look what Uncle Sam has done. . . .
Roll on, Columbia, roll on.
With the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, Congress for the first time enshrined conservation values in law and directed an arm of the federal government to conserve scenery and wildlife for their own sake. Or so it seemed. As Richard West Sellars makes clear in his history of the park system, “Preserving Nature in the National Parks,” the vision of Congress was as ambivalent as Cole’s painting of “The Oxbow” nearly a century before. The mission seemed a contradiction in terms: “The principal concept, to leave parks unimpaired, was left open to sweeping interpretation that would allow extensive development. . . .”
From the outset, Sellars writes, the Park Service took the position that nature was to be “manipulated deliberately through the control of animal and plant populations” in order to create “a vignette of primitive America . . . a kind of wilderness pastorale that had enormous appeal to many in the Park Service.” The romantic settings that the Park Service envisioned called for the profligate applications of pesticides, the filling of wetlands, the destruction of wildlife habitat and the suppression of natural fire in areas where the rebirth of native plants depended on an age-old fire cycle.
Today, many parks resemble caricatures of Cole’s painting, bifurcated landscapes, with crowded villages and congested roads impinging on a forlorn back country, much of it bearing the scars of pollution and heavy-handed management.
A historian for the Park Service, Sellars has written a carefully documented, unblinking critique of bureaucratic self-aggrandizement by the agency that employs him. But whistle- blowing can be an inward-looking exercise, and reading Sellars becomes an adventure in white papers and vision statements. The book lacks a window on the wider world of social and political forces that influenced Park Service policy.
As Schneider points out in “The Adirondacks,” the American public has rarely been content to leave wilderness alone. If the Park Service was slow to adopt a hands-off approach, it is, after all, a public agency.
The wilderness movement has enjoyed limited public appeal and for good reason. Originally championed by intellectuals and adventurous aristocrats, it is a cause that has often seemed anti-democratic, critical of rural people for being too hard on the land and hostile to policies that have made it easier for the masses to experience the wilds. Wilderness is for those who appreciate it, wrote Olas Murie, naturalist and president of the Wilderness Society in 1940. Quoted by Robert Gottlieb in his essay in “Out of the Woods,” Murie went on to say that “there would be an insistent demand for more facilities and we would find ourselves losing our wilderness and having these areas reduced to the commonplace.”
But snobbery does not readily beget public policy, and more than 100 years elapsed between the time the romanticists first sang the praises of wilderness and the enactment of a wilderness protection law with teeth. It happened in 1964 only after the middle class had come to value natural environments as an integral part of its rising standard of living.
At the same time, the emerging science of ecology established a vital link between nature and humans of all social strata. Gottlieb points out that with the publication of “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson’s 1962 expose of the pesticide industry, the public awoke to a new environmental vulnerability: their own, and human self-interest has since become a powerful tool in the struggle to protect the environment. It is now understood that disturbances that occur in the recesses of a remote stream, such as the runoff of acid from mines or insecticides from farms, can be felt all the way up the food chain.
“We protect nature, not so much for nature’s sake, but for the sake of humanity,” write John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in “The Riverkeepers,” the story of the restoration of the Hudson River after years of industrial pollution. Uniting professional environmentalists, commercial fishermen and the Hudson Valley’s landed gentry, the struggle to save the Hudson River has emerged as a national model of environmental real-politik, though it is perhaps not an easy one to imitate: It cost millions of dollars and decades of litigation to bring the Hudson back to life. Moreover, waterways such as the Hudson can be restored only where people are still willing to work the land or the water, and there are fewer of them all the time. From the Adirondacks to the Rocky Mountains, the heirs of the pioneers are selling out, convinced that the pastoral life is more pain than profit.
There are those who take a curiously different approach to wilderness preservation that almost embraces the encroaching urbanization. In “Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies,” economist Thomas Michael Power argues that as city dwellers continue to move en masse to Montana’s river valleys and Colorado’s high country, such places are bound to be better off. As Americans recognize the value of nature as an amenity, Power argues, they will be more likely to leave it alone: “Landscapes stripped bare, silted streams with dead fish, fragmented ecosystems devoid of wildlife--this isn’t what draws people and business.”
However, people drawn to the sheer lonesomeness of the wide open spaces may find it hard to share Power’s enthusiasm for the new rural subdivisions, office parks and resort communities that are casting an urban shadow over much of the old West. Moreover, recent election results suggest that many of the new residents are turning out to be avid proponents of development and are not at all the constituency for the wilderness that Power imagines.
But Power has little good to say for the frontier pastorale: the tableau of far-flung farms and ranches that are as much a part of the popular imagination of the West as the mountains and the forests. The ranchers’ livestock tore up the countryside, Power reminds us, while their survival has depended on tax subsidized water and feed. From Power’s point of view, Cole’s beguiling evocation of the wild and the pastoral clearly missed the fundamental incompatibility of the two.
Today, there is not a lot of room left for Cole’s vision or for any healthy interaction between the pastoral and the wild. Wilderness and adjacent lands once served a variety of practical and spiritual needs and still can, as Schneider makes clear in his portrait of the Adirondacks: a place that remains a living environment and not merely an outdoor museum, a pretty backdrop for a real estate ad, an amenity. Such places are becoming increasingly hard to find. The American Farmland Trust estimates that about 1 million acres of cultivated land are being lost to urban development every year. As Schneider reminds us, even Thomas Cole worried about the impact of urbanization more than 100 years ago. In his epic five-part painting, “The Course of Empire,” wilderness succumbs to civilization in one panel only to fall prey to savages in the last.
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THE ADIRONDACKS: A History of America’s First Wilderness. By Paul Schneider . Henry Holt: 334 pp., $25
RIVER OF THE WEST: A Chronicle of the Columbia. By Robert Clark . Picador: 390 pp., $15 paper
PRESERVING NATURE IN THE NATIONAL PARKS. By Richard West Sellars . Yale University Press: 364 pp., $35
OUT OF THE WOODS: Essays in Environmental History. Edited by Char Miller and Hal Rothman . University of Pittsburgh Press: 400 pp., $50 hardcover, $22.95 paper
THE RIVERKEEPERS. By John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Scribner: 279 pp., $25
LOST LANDSCAPES AND FAILED ECONOMIES: The Search for a Value of Place. By Thomas Michael Power . Island Press: 316 pp., $32