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Article Excerpt
The idea of nature is--or, rather, was--one of the fundamental American ideas. In its time it served--as the ideas of freedom, democracy, or progress did in theirs--to define the meaning of America. For some three centuries, in fact, from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the closing of the Western frontier in 1890, the encounter of white settlers with what they perceived as wilderness--unaltered nature--was the defining American experience.
By the end of that era, however, the wilderness had come to seem a thing of the past, and the land of farms and villages was rapidly becoming a land of factories and cities. By 1920, half the population lived in cities, and as the natural world became a less immediate presence, images of the pristine landscape--chief icon of American nature--lost their power to express the nation's vision of itself.
Then, in the 1970s, with the onset of the ecological 'crisis,' the refurbished, matter-of-fact word environment took over a large part of the niche in public discourse hitherto occupied by the word nature. Before the end of the century, the marked loss of status and currency suffered by the idea of nature had become a hot subject in academic and intellectual circles. Reputable scholars and journalists published essays and books about the 'death'--or the 'end'--of nature; the University of California recruited a dozen humanities professors to participate in a semester-long research seminar designed to "reinvent nature"; (1) and the association of European specialists in American studies chose, as the aim of its turn-of-the-century conference, to reassess the changing role played by the idea of nature in America. (2)
What are we to make of the purported demise of nature? Can it be that the venerable idea is no longer meaningful? If that seems improbable on its face, it is because nature is our oldest, most nearly universal name for the material world, and despite the alarming extent of the transformation--and devastation--we humans have visited on it, that world is still very much with us. But why, then, is the general idea of nature--nature in all its meanings--falling into disuse? What other reasons might there be for the seeming end of nature? With these questions in mind, I want to reconsider the idea's changing role in American thought.
But, first, these preliminary caveats. I do not mean to suggest that the imminent disappearance of nature--if that is what we are witnessing--is a peculiarly American development. But in view of the crucial role played by the idea over the course of American history, a reassessment of critical stages of that history may prove to be revealing. I say 'stages' because limitations of space--the subject calls for a long treatise rather than an essay--make it necessary to focus on a few significant points along the historical trajectory traced by the idea of nature in American thought.
But it also should be said that the word nature is a notorious semantic and metaphysical trap. As used in ordinary discourse nowadays, it is an inherently ambiguous word. We cannot always tell whether references to nature are meant to include or exclude people. Besides, the word also carries the sense of essence: of the ultimate, irreducible character or quality of something, as for example, 'the nature of femininity' or, for that matter, 'the nature of nature.' When this meaning is in play, the word tacitly imputes an idealist or essentialist--hence ahistorical--character to the particular subject at hand, whether it be femaleness or nature itself. The word's multiple meanings testify to its age: its roots go back (by way of Latin and Old French) to the concept of origination--of being born. As Raymond Williams famously noted, nature is probably the most complex word in the English language. (3) And when, moreover, the idea of nature is yoked with the ideologically freighted concept of American nationhood, as in the historian Perry Miller's sly allusion to America as Nature's Nation, the ambiguity is compounded by chauvinism. (4)
Contemplating the nature of nature in America has led many scholars, of whom the historian Frederick Jackson Turner is the exemplar, to adopt the contested idiom of 'American exceptionalism.' (5) And not without good reason. However wary of chauvinism one might be, it would be foolish to deny that when Europeans first encountered American nature, it truly was, and to some extent still is, exceptional--perhaps not unique but, like Australia, a continent even less developed at the time of contact, surely exceptional. It was exceptional in its immensity, its spectacular beauty, its variety of habitats, its promise of wealth, its accessibility to settlers from overseas, and, above all, in the scarcity of its indigenous population. Hence the remarkable extent of its underdevelopment--its wildness--as depicted in myriad representations of the initial landfall of European explorers on the Atlantic seaboard of North America. In that stock image, the newly discovered terrain appears to be untouched by civilization, a cultural void populated by godless savages, and not easy to distinguish from a state of nature.
In the beginning, then, Europeans formed their impressions of American nature in a geographical context: it was a place, a terrain, a landscape. But they invariably accommodated their immediate impressions of American places to their imported--typically religious--preconceptions about the nature of nature and the character of indigenous peoples. Thus all of the significant American ideas of nature are hybrids, conceived in Europe and inflected by New World experience. And each ideology that served as a rationale for one or another colonial system of power contained such a hybrid Euro-American conception of nature and of the colonists' relations with it.
A revealing example is the Pilgrim leader William Bradford's well-known description of the forbidding Cape Cod shoreline as seen from the deck of the Mayflower in 1620. He depicts it as "a hidious and desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts and wild men." Here the bias inherent in the Christian idea of nature as fallen--as Satan's domain--effectively erases the humanity of the indigenous Americans. To Bradford they are more like wild beasts than white men.
The concept of satanic nature provided a useful foil for the sacred mission of the Puritan colonists. (6) In 1645, for example, John Winthrop, lieutenant governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, used it as an ideological weapon to defend his theocratic authority. His enemies had charged him with infringing on their liberty, and in his uncompromising response in the General Court he develops the distinction between two kinds of liberty: natural and civil. Natural liberty, "common to man with beasts and other creatures," is the liberty, he argues, we enjoy in a state of nature, namely, to do...
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