Natural Mystic

When Perdita, the shepherdess in “The Winter’s Tale,” disdains “carnations and streaked gillyvors” as “nature’s bastards,” the King of Bohemia counters by arguing that cross-breeding and grafting cannot be viewed as artificial or unnatural if we take a broad enough perspective: “This is an art / Which does mend nature--change it rather--but / The art itself is nature.” The Oxford English Dictionary entry for “nature” rivals the entry for “real” in length and complexity. Is human activity a part of nature’s process? Its product? Or its violation?

Whatever level of sophistication you favor, “Flight Maps” will provoke and excite you. In five loosely connected essays, Jennifer Price plays engagingly with definitions of the natural as Americans have revised and renewed them for more than 200 years.

To link her diverse subjects, the author keeps us constantly in pursuit of birds. “Missed Connections: The Passenger Pigeon Extinction” is followed by a wonderful account of the fledgling Audubon Society, “When Women Were Women, Men Were Men, and Birds Were Hats.” Feathered friends (and foodstuffs) abdicate to plastic icons, however, in “A Brief Natural History of the Pink Flamingo,” the volume’s flagship essay. Light irony deepens to paradox with “Looking for Nature at the Mall: A Field Guide to the Nature Company.” And by Chapter Five, the controversy between nature and artifice is moot; “Roadrunners Can’t Read: The Greening of Television in the 1990s” offers cartoon birds whose habitat, once celluloid, has become limited to the TV screen.

Price’s subject is ideas, and she gives us plenty to think about. But her methods are those of the ethnographer and modern historian, for whom no lode--restaurant menus, millinery inventories, bumper stickers, cartoons, television commercials, lawn ornaments and their lineage--is too humble for mining. Practicing a historiography that might be called ruminative rather than narrative, Price has a gift for animating the everyday. Her erudition and enthusiasm provide a vivid model of applied curiosity, both informing and, simultaneously, initiating the reader into habits of observation and reflection.

For example, Price reports that it took five hours for a flock of passenger pigeons--2 billion birds in a flock 240 miles long--to pass over the ornithologist Alexander Wilson, wide-eyed on the banks of the Ohio River at the beginning of the 1800s; yet by 1914, that myriad population had dwindled to a solitary captive bird. On the death of “Martha” in the Cincinnati Zoo that September, the species became officially extinct. In her entry about the passenger pigeon in John James Audubon’s “The Watercolors for The Birds of America,” the art historian Carole Anne Slatkin notes that this species of wild dove was “at one time more numerous than all other species of birds in this country combined.” What American attitudes, Price urges us to ask, what casts of mind, permitted--determined--this outcome?

Rather than follow physical clues like nest sites, courtship rituals and breeding grounds, Price tracks patterns of thinking. Her focus is on the popular notions of nature that allowed the American everyman to build a society that, by turns, slaughtered wild birds for pie-meat and feathers, then passed the Migratory Bird Protection Act. Exploitation can become idolatry, she suggests, at the speed of thought. As consumers, we flock nationwide to buy plastic flamingos--stylized, garish, non-biodegradable--and at the same time snap up the “anatomically correct” inflatable penguins, authentic geodes and “wilderness CDs” stocked by the Nature Company (“the Nature Company” Price wonders) and its imitators. These contradictions, Price argues, are neither hypocritical nor rationalizing. Instead, our ahistorical perspective allows us to accept overlapping, even conflicting, valuations of nature as motives for action. “Natural” never fails as a hallowing reference, no matter how ill-assorted the values it is made to subsume.

Natural history buffs taking “Flight Maps’ ” subtitle seriously may feel a bit let down. This is not nature writing. Although Price, who lives in Los Angeles, identifies herself as a birder, hiker and camper, her attention in “Flight Maps” is far from the literal facts of bird life, tree succession or surface geology. She does not enlighten us on how living flamingos get their pigmentation (from the tiny, pink crustaceans on which they feed); instead, she does chronicle the rising fortunes of lawn flamingos--sold, touchingly, by the pair--right from liftoff in 1957 at a plastics factory in Leominster, Mass. “The story of the pink lawn bird is the tale,” Price maintains, “of . . . the meanings of Artifice. And that is a history, at the same time, of the meanings of Nature.” As her capital letters signal, Price explores a biome not of organisms but of conceptions.

Thoreau and Muir took Walden Pond and Yosemite for texts; a fern, a bird song or an erosion pattern became the specimen--the occasion--for their analysis. Price, by contrast, is not reading the North American landscape but poring over what people wrote about it, said about it and thought about it: the changing concepts on which their consumption of American nature was founded (or foundered). As does Wordsworth at the end of “The Prelude,” she affirms that “the mind of man” is “[a] thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which he dwells”--or, at any rate, more enthralling. Her question is always “What were we thinking?” and her answers are always to be sought by speculating on what we were doing to and with nature. Meet the East Coast society matrons who vied with each other, in the 1880s, over the iconic medium of massive, multiplumed headgear; 20 years later they “burned their feathers” (like the bras and draft cards of later political movements) in a general protest that rendered such hats at first despicable and eventually unlawful. The reversal, which Price documents, was exclusively in habits of thought. The aigrettes themselves--the glorious dorsal mating feathers of the snowy egret--had remained the same; but their widely accepted social meaning had been dramatically revalued.

The subtle evidence of such conceptual shifts is so abundant that readers of “Flight Maps” can immediately join the quest. This dig is in our own backyards, magazine racks, television screens. Our collective habits of thought, generated by the metamorphic forces of class, status and the market economy, are the “hidden pictures” that Price teaches us to distinguish in the fascinating litter that the city or suburban anthropologist--the Muir or “Thoreau of the mall”--can collect as readily as their 19th century counterparts gathered fallen leaves, empty seashells, the spots and whorls of hatched-out eggs.

Forty-three pages of notes and citations (“Flight Maps” had an earlier incarnation as a Yale doctoral dissertation) and close to 70 black-and-white illustrations offer samples of the facts that Price contemplates, and the index is tantalizing with its entries from “Allen, Woody” and “Astor, Mrs. John Jacob” through “Blue Velvet (film),” “Christo (artist)” and “Cover Girl make-up commercials” to “zoo gift” shops. Nothing in the notes and index will put off the common reader, who can safely use them as a gauge of Price’s style. Part of the fun is that Price exposes many strange bedfellows; as in the index, you will find in the cheerful, unpretentious prose of these essays “Sontag, Susan” juxtaposed with “Sears catalog,” “Siegel, Bugsy (Benjamin),” “squabs” and “Sundance Film Festival.”

If “Flight Maps” is inclusive and accessible, is it encyclopedic? No, but the things you miss will depend on who you are. Freud, Marx and Darwin are absent, as well as Walter Benjamin, Thorstein Veblen and Claude Levi-Strauss. High thinking and high art get token acknowledgement: “Walden” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Mill, Hume and Gainsborough each rate just a clause or two. Sloppy editing masquerades, almost, as wit: “John Jay [James] Audubon,” “Michael Pollen [Pollan].”

In a study in which Nature, Artifice and Reality announce themselves in capital letters, it’s frustrating that Price never resolves the relationship among these competing terms. Definitions of “man” and “nature” ricochet, refract, melt from contradiction to identity and back again. Certainly this is realistic as individual or group psychology, but for those of us who crave order, Price neither invokes nor establishes a stable context for these shifts. She’d rather observe than classify.

Instead of the rigor of philosophy, however, Price offers us something at least as rare: Her intellectual democracy has its own charm, and her processes are not only appealing but infectious. Humor, self-scrutiny and a passion for ideas light up her pages. “Flight Maps” more often charts our cultural flight from nature, in the service of historical or economic imperatives, than it does imaginative engagement with the actual migratory flocks and noisy rookeries of wild America. But it finally lives up to the promise of its subtitle, making us mental travelers, even if the safari ends before a wall of mirrors.