Ideas of nature were in transition on the eve of European colonization of America. Nature was popularly understood as a beneficent mother, alive and generally more powerful than human action, an understanding that included pagan as well as Judeo-Christian elements. An animist reverence for the earth as both alive and sacred, a living whole of which people were a part, shared a flexible definition of nature where human beings also held a special duty as stewards of a Judeo-Christian God's creation. The latter emphasis could justify improving nature or even justify hostility to nature in a desire to "conquer" it. Emerging seventeenth-century philosophies of science emphasized the potential for human control over nature, as such scientists as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton reconceived nature as an intricate but essentially lifeless clocklike machine wound by the creator. Nature as a machine became a resource to be studied, improved in productivity, and used for capitalist ends, mirroring the organization of developing industrial technology for farms as well as cities. In both Europe and America scientifically informed commercial elites imagined the sacred in an abstract realm apart from the physical world. They valued nature and wilderness only as raw material for civilization understood in newly secular, commercial, mechanist terms. Nonmechanist ideas of nature shaped rural life, where agriculture and manufacturing remained independent of the production of goods for commercial markets.
In North America colonists embraced the entire range of seventeenth-century approaches to nature, from remnants of pagan animism to close attention to the latest developments in European science. In New England literate, well-educated Protestant colonists were articulate inhabitants of this shifting ground between society and nature. They actively participated in the European revaluation of nature from sacred "mother" to "matter," created by a divine force that was separate from the physical world. Bringing the gospel to the wilderness and materially pressed to establish viable farms and towns, they saw the transformation of nature as a sacred and secular priority. Some Protestants' hostility to nature as the domain of the devil is well documented, including that of Cotton Mather and William Bradford. Alternative views were expressed as well, for example by Anne Bradstreet, Edward Johnson, and Mather himself: that nature was pure while society was corrupt, that the wilderness was a refuge for Protestants, and that the opportunity to study nature scientifically was an honorable form of celebration of God's work. All these possibilities prefigured the competing attitudes toward nature that would flourish among a wider public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a time of accelerating entrenchment of mechanist nature for both rural and urban people. The changing role of women and men in agriculture and urban manufacturing helped solidify the new paradigm. By the middle of the nineteenth century, farms (particularly farm women) produced a smaller variety of their own goods and required a greater amount of cash income to keep both farmlands and households operating. Growing urban populations depended on advances in farm productivity and transportation technology. Undermined by decreasing soil fertility and dependent on cash income for daily operation, rural communities lost both sons and daughters to western farms and eastern cities. Even though the majority of Americans still lived on farms, by the end of the nineteenth century all Americans lived within the outlines of a mechanist nature. The older maternal nature, and the range of rural work around which it had flourished before the seventeenth century, lay at an increasing distance from ordinary people's experience.
As European American settlement moved west, popular culture, science, and public policy emphasized nature's distinction from culture and civilization, justifying widespread transformation of landscapes and contradictory approaches to people associated with nature. As the origin of human development, all forms of nature were supposed to give way to progress and improvement over time, but belief in nature as a permanent hierarchy of development could justify the oppression of nonwhite Americans and women. White male explorers, developers, and settlers evoked nature's feminine associations when they described it as "virgin" land awaiting transformation through male work (an image of nature white women did not always share). Women themselves were understood as closer to nature than men, the natural and unchanging complement to white men's rationality and enterprise, but unlike nature they were not expected to be transformed over time by taking on male values, activities, or accomplishments. Indian men and women alike were by turns animal-like residents of the wilderness to be exterminated or "backward" people in need of education. African Americans' "natural" inferiority justified slavery and their employment as unskilled laborers, but they could also be seen as "backward" people ready and eager for progressive improvement. Nature's strict hierarchy became less culturally compelling throughout the nineteenth century, but belief in progress as a force of nature remained deeply entrenched.
As cities and their industries grew in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a Romantic movement emerged in response to urban and industrial noise, filth, and social tension. American Romantics like their European counterparts were literate, urban people. Colonist-surveyor William Byrd II, botanist John Bartram, physician Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Jefferson were among those early Americans who, like poets Lord Byron and William Wordsworth and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, celebrated wild scenery, understanding nature as the uncorrupted source of human happiness and the purest expression of God's wisdom and love. Romantics believed that contact with nature stripped away the superficial and debilitating influences of civilization and that the use of nature as mere resource for material gain degraded both nature and human beings. However, Romanticism did not necessarily imply refraining from shaping nature or studying it scientifically. Dramatic revelation could be found amid the sublime power of wilderness, but everyday virtue and appreciation could be gained by respectful agrarian cultivation recreating an Edenic garden on earth or immersion in the study of nature's variety and complexity. In America, celebration of nature's beauty took on especially patriotic significance, as Jefferson and others described nature and wild scenery as monuments to American national identity.
Overall, Romantic nature provided a basis for an ongoing though incomplete critique of industrial, capitalist society. Celebration of nature, often including its feminine and maternal associations, offered an experiential retreat for many major nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers dissatisfied with the materialism and narrow masculinity demanded by "productive" urban life and work. Examples include Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism, Henry Thoreau's subsistence experiment at Walden Pond, and John Muir's immersion in and advocacy for wilderness. Belief in the redemptive or therapeutic power of nature inspired city parks movements and the design aesthetic of Frederick Law Olmsted. Sublime nature, particularly in the West, captured on the large canvases of Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt and in the photographs of William Henry Jackson fostered support for establishing the nation's first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872. Theodore Roosevelt so valued rugged encounters with wilderness as essential to maintaining American manliness and the expression of American character that his progressivism included conservation of wild places and game animals (if not predators). Popular romanticism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sent middle- and upper-class Americans "back to nature" in suburban living, national park vacations, nature study, Boy Scouts' woodland outings, rustic- and Native American-inspired home decoration, and consumption of innumerable literary evocations of arcadia, a phenomenon that persists to this day.
The mechanist-romantic tension inherent in European American attitudes toward nature was expressed in the early twentieth century in the conflict between conservation and preservation of natural resources and wild places, often focused on public land in the West. Conservationists, including Gifford Pinchot, first director of the U.S. Forest Service, championed "wise use" of nature, believing that truly superior civilizations do not squander their material resources. Nature was not to be left pristine but managed by trained scientific specialists to guarantee continual material benefit from the land. Preservationists, including Muir, the first president of the Sierra Club, argued that wilderness had value of its own, possibly greater than what could be extracted, processed, and sold. The two men clashed over a proposed dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in California in 1908, and preservation lost this battle. But these two points of view, heirs to generations of mechanist nature-conquest and romantic nature-appreciation, continued to clash throughout the twentieth century. Preservationists' early appeal to the moral and spiritual value of wild places could not combat the scientifically informed justifications for managed use of nature. Science, not spirituality, was increasingly called on to justify both approaches to nature.
The growth of social, biological, and physical sciences in the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century provided more complex descriptions of human and nonhuman nature, often, though not always, in the service of sophisticated management of both. Industrialists' demand for efficiency in resource extraction and production fueled this growth. So did the perceived need to educate, assimilate, and control the growing population of nonwhite, non-Anglo workers and residents in American cities. Broadly evolutionary in outlook, twentieth-century descriptions of nature reflected longstanding beliefs in progress, although their definitions of progress could differ dramatically. Scientific forestry as promoted by Pinchot was part of this development. Frederick Winslow Taylor's time and motion studies were immediately applicable to increasing industrial workers' efficiency on new assembly lines. Eugenicists including Frank Lillie and Horatio Newman sought to establish a scientific foundation for race and population control, by studying what they believed were the natural tendencies of various classes and races to reproduce, and the societies naturally characteristic of each. Their work was not unlike that of plant and animal ecologists, for example, Frederic Clements and Warder Clyde Allee, who documented distinct "communities" of organisms and their development over time. Scientists used information from nonhuman nature to justify a wide variety of forms of human social organization. Lillie's eugenic science, for example, justified authoritarian hierarchy, whereas Allee's Quaker commitments led him to describe the natural state of human (and animal) society as cooperative interdependence.
Serious social, economic, and environmental upheavals in the twentieth century presented significant challenges to entrenched ideas of nature. After two world wars and a major economic depression, people's belief in "progress" as the ruling principle of nature was shaken. Though scientists still carried the burden of describing nature for purposes of official public policy, it was not clear that they could deliver on their promise to control nature, human or nonhuman. Industrial discipline and scientifically managed workplaces did not prevent labor unrest or the threat of accidents and poisoning to workers. Neat eugenic plans for the perfection of the (white) race and control of all others lost adherents with the display of the National Socialist program of extermination in Germany and continued to fray in the face of civil rights movements on behalf of non-Anglo groups. The "natural" role of women as caretakers had legitimated their nineteenth-century public work as reformers, but twentieth-century advances in women's education opened other fields, including science, to more of them. The spectacular plains dust storms of the 1930s undermined the belief that nature under cultivation was under control. Technology developed for World War II, which harnessed the power of nature most dramatically in the creation and detonation of the atomic bomb, unleashed unprecedented threats to human and nonhuman health. Postwar Americans for the first time lived with the immediate threat of the destruction of all of nature and society as well.
Many ecologists, such as Barry Commoner and Rachel Carson, used their science to document the effects of radioactive fallout and synthetic chemicals and actively questioned the pretensions of science and technology to perfect nature or control its processes. The publication of Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and the subsequent ban of the use (if not manufacture) of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) in the United States signaled a turning point in Americans' confidence in the value or even the possibility of fully controlling nature.
Ideas of nature at the end of the twentieth century were as contradictory and contested as ever. Always a repository for romantic images of living "close to nature," popular conceptions of Native Americans inspired hippie style in beads, braids, and "tribal" living, as many young people in the late 1960s and 1970s rejected militaristic, industrial society and sought alternative sources of value in nature. Ethnic and racial identity movements turned formerly racist strategies on their heads, recuperating "essential" natural qualities as antidotes to white, middle-class values. Native Americans themselves might appear as "children of nature" for their own purposes, even as white environmentalists used Indian images to move Americans to pity Indians' damaged natural homeland. Some feminists rejected women's "natural" roles while other feminists developed women's association with nature into new forms of ecofeminist spirituality. The beat writers, particularly Gary Snyder, introduced American audiences to non-Western philosophies of nature and spiritual health that privileged "the wild" in all experience, not only retreats into remote wilderness. Mainstream environmentalist groups, dominated by white men, moved the preservation of nonhuman nature successfully toward the establishment of wilderness areas and endangered species legislation. Grassroots environmental groups, more often organized by women and people of color, fought for the protection of environments where people lived and worked, understanding nature to include all human and nonhuman activity. Mechanist science remained central to both environmentalist and antienvironmentalist definitions of nature and claims regarding the best use (or nonuse) of given landscapes and technologies. No consensus in the definition or value of nature emerged by the end of the twentieth century.
It may be the hallmark of contemporary nature that new and competing definitions emerge all the time. They all bear some resemblance to one element or another of a past nature (pagan, pastoral, romantic, or mechanist) but bear as well the rupturing urgency of having emerged in an era preoccupied with global environmental catastrophe. The rapid recombination and generation of ideas of nature could be described as "postmodern," appropriate to a society cut loose from simple stories of progress and the nature from which it emerged. The fertile variety of ideas of nature also mirrors late-twentieth-century developments in science and mathematics, which describe complex, open systems characterized by self-organization and unpredictability. Chaos theory and the science of dissipative systems have begun to reinvest nature with organizational and creative agency on a scale not seen since the seventeenth century.
Conservation and Conservation Movements
Environment and Environmentalism: An Overview
National Parks and the National Park Movement
Nature in Literature and the Arts
National Agricultural Library: Natural Resources and Environment
Lewis and Clark as Naturalists (Smithsonian)
Cultural Politics: Environmental Justice Cultural Studies
Archive of Early American Images: Natural History
Economic Research Service (U.S. Department of Agriculture)
Western History/Genealogy Digital Collections
Explore Nature (National Park Service)
Language of the Land: Journeys into Literary America (Library of Congress)
Making of America (U Michigan)
Green Facts: Facts on Health and the Environment
Thomas Jefferson (Library of Congress)
Nature Transformed: The Environment in American History
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Nature, The Idea of" (by Frieda Knobloch), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=577 (accessed August 23, 2018).
TOP
Save/Email Citation
