Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform by Finis Dunaway

Author:Finis Dunaway [Dunaway, Finis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), History, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Nature, General
ISBN: 9780226454245
Google: uiNCDgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 1250966
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2005-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

5.3. William Garnett, cleared landscape, Lakewood Housing Development, © William Garnett, used by permission of the artist.

Divided into six chapters, This Is the American Earth follows a chronological narrative, from Creation to contemporary America. It repeats the biblical story: the genesis of human beings occurred in paradise. “Ah,” Newhall announced, “we remember Eden!—the radiant vernal earth to which we waked as king!” But sin led to the expulsion from Eden. Cast from paradise, humans wandered through the wasteland, hoping to reinvent the original garden. Following the fall from Eden, a single page of Newhall’s text covers thousands of years of human history, culminating with the emergence of ancient civilizations. But all of these societies—Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome—eventually disintegrated. From the loss of Eden to the decline of civilizations, Western culture appears as a story of fall and recovery, of trying to recuperate paradise.41

The North American continent, according to Newhall and Adams, represented a return to paradise. “Here still was Eden” the text declares, eliding the presence of indigenous inhabitants, reinforcing the myth of pure wilderness. Like the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Newhall viewed the frontier as a landscape of freedom. “Here in this rich continent,” she wrote, “we found no man need serve another.” Newhall described American history as a succession of frontiers, a story of continual expansion westward. Like Pare Lorentz in The River, though, she criticized the idea of boundlessness, the belief that America contained infinite resources. Her text suggests that ecological irresponsibility went hand in hand with the transience of American settlers: “When settlement came too close, . . . we moved on West, again to fell, burn, plow, kill.”42

In contrast to their articles in Arizona Highways, which merely celebrated the scenic wonders of the West, Newhall and Adams fashioned This Is the American Earth as a kind of secular sermon. Following the style of New Deal documentaries, they borrowed from the jeremiad tradition to judge and condemn American culture. Throughout the book, Newhall used the pronoun “we” to narrate the nation’s history. “We found no man need serve another.” “We moved on West, again to fell, burn, plow, kill.” American history appears as a story of carelessness, a story of people turning a rich continent into a wasteland. Like other works in the American apocalyptic tradition, the book suggests the rapidity of change, the brief period in which the nation destroyed its natural abundance. “Moving from a paradise lost in the old World,” an advertisement for the book explained, “our fathers brought forth upon this continent not only a new nation, but also an ability to change, at an ever-increasing rate, the face of the earth.”43

Moving into the contemporary moment, into the America of 1960, the book takes an apocalyptic turn, comparable—the text claims—to the writings of Dante and Milton. A series of photographs by William Garnett portray the landscapes of contemporary Los Angeles. The first image shows smog covering the city. Then aerial views record the building of Lakewood, a new housing development. Flying in an airplane, Garnett looked down upon a vast area where beets had once grown.

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