Nature's Metropolis

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: WW Norton, 1991)

Here, Cronon looks at Chicago as both a product of and a shaper of the "first-nature" environment surrounding its metropolitan areas. This is the best possible example of how environmental history could integrate the urban and the rural and downplay the concept of "wilderness," a goal that everyone is always talking about. Cronon shows how Chicago used its position on Lake Michigan to attract railroads, which in turn attracted trade from the "great West"'s hinterlands, which in turn located Chicago as a gateway city: raw goods would enter the city and exit as value-added commodities, with Chicago performing the work of abstracting the commodity from its original context. Chicago was dependent on the strength and financial capital of New York and Philadelphia, which financed the railroads and established Chi-town as the broker of Midwestern ecological capital.

Commodities that Cronon looks at include wheat, lumber, and meat. In each case, Cronon argues, manufacturers in Chicago figured out how to use economies of scale to aggregate these goods into mass quantities and to abstract their value from their physical presence. This last happening worked especially well with wheat, which created the modern concept of the "exchange," at which people traded wheat without ever even seeing the wheat in question. (Here is where I figured out what a "futures market" is - it's more fascinating than one could ever imagine.)

Cronon writes that Chicago's effect upon the rural sites which came within its orbit was both positive for people's lives (easier selling of their goods; better access to cheaper things) and negative (they were at the mercy of distant forces for their livelihood; if they were merchants, they were undercut by cheaper Chicago prices). Cronon shows how certain small-potatoes merchants and farmers resisted the pressure of the giant Chicago firms through associations (sometimes more effective, other times less).

I've been waiting to read this one for a long time, and it was definitely un-disappointing. Cronon's ability to be both a good storyteller and a "man of infinite research" (as TR said about Henry Adams) is a thing to envy. His inclusion of financial records, technological analysis, and cultural productions (novels, esp. in the World's Fair chapter) makes this book a model of enviable American Studies practice.

Natural Visions

Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Dunaway's book looks at imagery of environmentalism in the twentieth century, examining how photographers and filmmakers participated in and were funded by organizations both governmental and non-governmental whose mandate was to foster environmental awareness. Dunaway moves from looking at a Progressive-era photographer, Herbert Gleason, who created romantic-sublime imagery of the West; to the New Deal-era documentaries of Robert Flaherty, who lamented the death of the farm family, and Pare Lorentz (whose "The Plow That Broke The Plains" provides this image of a baby with the implement in question, which Dunaway argues exemplifies Lorentz' belief that the early pioneers were like prodigal children who wrecked the land without thinking); to the Sierra Club coffee-table books by the likes of Eliot Porter, which were the brainchildren of David Brower, whose vision of a nature outside of technology and humanity directly contradicted the New Deal technophilic imagination.

Throughout, Dunaway argues that environmental reformers who used art in their appeals passed over Benjamin's anxieties about the efficacy of the mechanically reproduced work of art, choosing instead to believe that their art could create a new "ecological sublime" (shades of David Nye) which would "rejoin beauty and sublimity, turn the ordinary into the astonishing, find awe in the diminutive, seek wonder in the everyday" (212).

But my question is: does it work? Do people change their minds after seeing pictures of bugs or cows? Nye's argument was that the technological sublime operates in part by bringing people together to witness something that exemplified human progress. How could the ecological sublime take advantage of this same dynamic? Nye also argues that the technological sublime always trumps the ecological sublime - at least, the "bigger" ecological sublime, of Adams' Yosemite and the like.

Dunaway is a professor of history at Trent University in Ontario. I know he has an article in the recent American Quarterly about use of imagery in seventies environmentalism.

Engines of Change

Engine and boiler from John Stevens' Little Juliana steamboat, 1804. Hindle and Lubar use steamboatery as an example of how inventions were often co-developed by several different independent people, who then competed to claim credit.

Title: Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790-1860 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986)

Authors: Brooke Hindle and Steven Lubar. Hindle, who died in 2001, was apparently a guiding light of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), and an early adopter of the method of studying science, technology, and material culture in historical context. His first books included The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America (1956) and David Rittenhouse (1964), but apparently his most famous book is Emulation and Invention (1981), which was particularly focused on describing early American inventions in verbal terms for a verbally-oriented audience (that would be us, historians). Hindle worked at NYU and the Smithsonian, which published this exhibit companion volume. Lubar, Hindle's co-author, is a professor at Brown in the Department of American Civilization, with interests in material culture, museums, public culture, and the history of technology. Some other interesting books he's written or edited: History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. with W. David Kingery (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). Here's his blog about museums.

The painting "Men of Progress," 1863, by Christian Schussele, depicted famous inventors, with Samuel Morse at the center and Benjamin Franklin looking on benevolently from above.

My Review: Hindle and Lubar describe the history of early American invention as being powered by three factors: an abundance of natural resources (wood, iron); an abundance of labor (including slaves); and a cultural climate which favored invention. The "special American conditions," in this story, meant that fewer people rejected or protested against technological advancement, because more people were flexible non-specialists who participated in many different types of production; also, people could see how technology would widen economic gaps, because of the example provided by the European Industrial Revolution, and were able to adjust their speed of technological development to ameliorate its social effects.

Chapters include interesting ones on machine shops, communitarian experiments (the Shakers, New Harmony), and the rise of railroading. There are many good pictures, as you might expect from a book which came from a museum exhibit.

I found the book to be overly invested in a story of American exceptionalism that celebrated the inventiveness of classes of men such as machinists and inventors, without examining the later results of this technological development or questioning the rightness of all of this invention—there's a definite feeling of positivist progressivism about the narrative.

Reviews of Others: In the Journal of American History, John Staudenmeier lauded the exhibit and the book for having respect for technological achievements of the past, rather than making fun of bygoners' missteps (is that really so endemic an attitude?) But he says that extending the exhibit's scope beyond the 1860s would bring some of the more negative consequences of technological development to light, a move which he says the exhibit attempts to make, but is often thwarted by the sheer impressiveness (or "sensuality") of the machinery. In the Winterthur Portfolio, John Skemer wrote that the book avoided the "one-man, one-invention" schema of history, but criticized it for portraying the America of this time period as focused exclusively on technological advancement, citing works which have found that there were other, more flexible, cottage-type modes of production co-existing with this Whiggish drive for industrial advancement.

The Hall rifle, invented by John Hall, was the first American rifle with fully interchangeable parts. The government ordered 1,000 of them in 1819 and it took Hall four years to complete the order. Things got a lot better in the mass-produced gun business later on. Hindle and Lubar hold that the invention of fully interchangeable parts was one of the most significant American contributions to the world economy in the nineteenth century.

American Slavery, American Freedom

Title: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975)

Author: Edmund S. Morgan, professor emeritus of the Yale history department. Studied under Perry Miller at Harvard. Teacher of John Demos. Winner of many awards for his books on colonial and early Republican history, and for his life work in general, including the National Humanities Medal in 2000 and a Pulitzer "special citation" in 2006 (is that like an Oscar lifetime achievement award? I think so). Other notable books (he wrote a bunch) are The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1955); The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (1956); and Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988), which won the Bancroft Prize. Morgan has also written biographies of Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams, and Benjamin Franklin.

My Review: This book attempts to answer the paradox embodied in its title: how could a society founded on the ideals of human freedom accept the blatant violation of that ideals in its very midst? (Morgan sees this as the fundamental paradox of America as a whole.) In order to answer the question, Morgan looks at the hundred years during which Virginia existed previous to the beginning of wholesale African slavery, describing the social and labor conditions of the colony.

The Jamestown colony, he writes, was founded with a great need for labor - indeed, those who became rich at the outset were those who could manage to marshal the greatest number of servants, not those who had the most land or the most capital. The upper classes of Britain looked at Virginia as perfect place to offload the lazy, unproductive classes of people who were unemployed in the home country. These people would accept contracts to come to Virginia as servants and serve a certain term to pay for their passage. Once in the colony, excuses would be made to extend their term, and once they were set free, there was very little hope for the American Dream - land was difficult to work if you were doing it on a small scale; land was only available on the dangerous, Indian-proximate frontier; and women were scarce, meaning family life for these "small" ex-servants was nonexistent. More than anything, though, these servants usually just died so early in life (as did most people in Virginia) that they didn't have a chance to ask for their rightful place in Virginia's economic order.

For Morgan, this short life expectancy is one of the major reasons why Virginia's planters saw it as economically more advantageous to import English servants, rather than African slaves - why pay the higher price for a slave when s/he was likely to die soon, leaving a planter without having exploited the full "term" of their labor (that is, their lifetime)? There were some Africans in the colony before the end of the seventeenth century, but Morgan says that they were unaccompanied by the later racism they experienced. They worked alongside white servants, and intermarried with whites.

When life expectancy began to go up, and events such as Bacon's Rebellion convinced the upper classes that the lower classes were indeed dangerous, slavery began to look like a better option. With a plantation of African slaves, control would be easier and economic advantage easier to extract. In a story familiar from such books as Roediger's Wages of Whiteness, the white lower classes were pacified with minor economic advances, begrudging cession of political rights, and the knowledge that they, at least, were "better" than the Indians and black people living alongside them in the South. Meanwhile, the upper classes could (mostly) rest safe in their beds, knowing that the poor people who supported their wealth were enslaved and controllable. (The "mostly" refers to the fear a lot of them retained of slave rebellions, which were actually rare.) Voila - slavery and freedom, side by side.

Souvenir from the 1907 Jamestown Exposition ("Meet Me On The War Path"!)

Reviews: The book won the Francis Parkman Prize, as well as others. In the Journal of American History, Russell Menard wrote that the book was "graceful, learned and witty" (it is that) and loves it, mostly, except when he worries that by attributing all of English racism to economic need, Morgan gives short shrift to any possible other explanation - it's almost mechanical, an account which Menard compares unfavorably to Winthrop Jordan's more subtle work (presumably White over Black [1968] though Menard doesn't specify). Menard also wants more evidence about the decline in mortality, a point at which I found myself confused as well, and wants more drawn-out analyses of the difference in prices between slaves and servants. In the Journal of Social History, Lois Green Carr said that she liked the book, too, but thought that actually servants had more opportunity when "graduated" from service than Morgan had it, and that those who joined Bacon's Rebellion were not actually reacting from stringent conditions for freedmen at the time - that things were status quo for them, until about the 1680s.

Words: "feeoffee" ("a person invested with a fief")

Poster for Terence Malick's 2005 film "The New World," with Colin Farrell as John Smith - a film I have to admit I found myself embarrassingly swept away by, with a good representation of the dirtiness and desperation of the Jamestown settlement, and a really romantic one of the nobility of the Indian.

1491

Machu Picchu. The Inka, for Mann, are a paradigmatic example of the role of disease and political fragmentation in the conquest of American civilization by the Europeans.

Title: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage, 2005).

Author: Charles C. Mann, journalist, who writes (mostly) science coverage for the Atlantic Monthly, Nat'l Geo, Vanity Fair, etc. His other books include @ Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (1998, with David Freedman); Noah's Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (1996, with Mark Plummer); The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition (1991, with Mark Plummer); and The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics (1986, with Robert Crease).

My review: Mann's book is an overview of debates in archaeology, anthrophology, ethnobotany, paleontology, paleography, paleobotany, ancient history, and any number of other specialized fields, all of whom are trying to determine what the "New World" looked like before Europeans got here. The overall impact is a shift from a view of a sparsely populated, wild place filled with primitives who lived by the grace of the land, to a conception of continents covered with people who maintained the landscape for their particular needs, sometimes living in balance with the ecology and sometimes failing to do so.

Mann echoes Shephard Krech and William Cronon's lines of argument, discussing some of the same examples as Krech (including the controversy over the Pleistocene extinctions) and citing both authors. He also owes a major debt to Alfred Crosby, previously of UT American Studies, and geographer Jared Diamond.

The book covers a very wide range of subjects, and does a very adroit job of using early chapters to set up a trio of final chapters that bring together his conclusions into a neat bundle. For example, Mann discusses the debates over demography, which run like so: Some posit, based on the difference between early travelers' accounts and later observations, that so many Indians were killed off by early epidemics transmitted by arrivistes such as De Soto that by the time more Europeans came to survey and colonize, there weren't nearly as many Indians as there were a short time before. Thus, when we estimate how many Indians used to inhabit the continent, we should assume many more than we previously thought.

Moreover, those Indians that were left were in a state of political turmoil. Mann illustrates this theory using the story of Squanto, reconstructing it in such a way that Squanto's friendliness toward the Europeans can be explained by the deaths of most of his tribesmen, leaving him vulnerable; and that the willingness of Massasoit of the Wampanoag to cooperate with the Plymouth colony could be due to the same thing (since most of M's tribesmen had died, he was left with little choice but to ally with the English against the Narragansett).

Having set this up, in later chapters Mann describes the new understandings we have of the way in which Amazonian Indians may have managed the growth of fruit trees and sowed charcoal into the soil in order to create a more human-friendly environment. He concludes that, in fact, the entire "untouched" Amazon may be a human artifact. He then adds this to the knowledge we have of the way that Indians on the East Coast burned their forests for ease of access and management of food species (see Krech, Cronon again).

Combining the knowledge we have of these systems of ecological management, with the ideas coming to the fore about the way that populations were affected by early epidemics, Mann posits that the "wild" forests that the Pilgrims saw thronging the coastline, the throngs of passenger pigeons, many of the signifiers of "abundant America", may all have been due to the recent disappearance of the groups of managing Indians who had previously kept these ecosystems at equilibrium. Wow! Now, that's what I call a revelation.

I admire the way that Mann handles the issue of the impact of these debates over the past on the current political situation. Although I was wary of the fact that the New York Sun endorsed the book, and was occasionally annoyed when Mann came down heavily on the wise-use side of environmental ethics, he definitely recognizes that the information in the book could prove useful to conservatives wanting to expiate ancestors from charges of genocide and environmental misuse (like so: "well, if the Indians were all killed by germs, and they were ecological abusers anyway, then what's the big deal?") To this end, Mann distinguishes carefully between the conventional idea of Indians at the mercy of their environment and the importance of a new understanding of Indians as creative maintainers of the landscape.

Artist's rendering of what the city around Cahokia, in modern-day Missouri, may have looked like around AD 1000-ish. This was a real revelation to me, though others may have heard of it - the mounds in that area reveal evidence of a city of 120 acres, holding between 10,000 and 20,000 people.

Reception: All of the popular press reviews of this book were totally in love with it, so there's that.

I love reading the paperback copies of these kinds of books, because the afterwords often tell you exactly what specific criticism the authors received after the publication of the hardback. Mann stepped into many already raging controversies, and he acknowledges that he was bound to make some people mad and get some arguments wrong. (The great thing about this kind of intelligent-layman book is that he has an automatic out whenever questioned on technical matters - well, at least, I think so.) The most pressing criticism is that a lot of these "revelations" are actually over fifty years old - but, as Mann says, if the general public/those in public schools aren't taught about them, they lose their importance. Hence, the book.

Yanomami family, by Victor Englebert (photographing for an advocacy group). Mann points out that by the time the Yanomami were encountered in the seventeenth century, they may already have moved from an agricultural lifestyle to a hunter-gatherer one because of the upheaval caused by disease communicated by other groups which had made contact with Europeans. Thus, the conventional image of their lives is one that fails to acknowledge the full history of the tribe before contact and assumes that they have always been so.

Vocab words: "ramose" ("branching"); "theogony" (theology which studies the origins of gods); "coruscate" ("to give forth intermittent or vibratory flashes of light"); "fissiparous" ("producing new individuals by fission").

Leads: This book has an extensive bibliography. Secondary: Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1980); C. Ponting, Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (1991); Stephen Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (1982); R. Temple, The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention (1998).

The Sexual Politics of Meat

I'm pretty sure this book did not mention the 1972 movie "Prime Cut", in which Lee Marvin finds Sissy Spacek naked, in a pen full of hay, in a barn, about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But it sure should have.

Title: The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990)

Author: Carol J. Adams, who has a masters in divinity and an extensive career as an activist outside of her academic writings. She's not affiliated with an academic institution, so far as I can see, but guest-lectures at many, and seems to travel extensively, giving a slide show based on this book. Other books she's written include Help! My Child Stopped Eating Meat (2004); The Pornography of Meat (2004); and Living Among Meat Eaters (2003). Adams lives in Dallas, which is brave on many levels, considering her political commitments.

My review: Adams hopes to make the point that the act of eating meat has been persistently gendered male, and that the inherent assumptions of meat-eating are similiar to the assumptions of woman-oppressing. What are these assumptions? Adams argues that the "sexual politics of meat" include "the idea[s] that the end justifies the means...the objectification of other beings is a natural part of life...and that violence can and should be masked" (24). Adams uses the concept of the "absent referent" to anchor the various implications of these assumptions or ideas. For her, the act of eating meat obscures the life of the actual animal, just as the acts of objectification or violence or misogyny obscure the life of the actual female. Both the woman and the animal are unimportant in the greater system of meaning constructed by the patriarchy. (For this reason, Adams advocates inserting a "[sic]" after any sentence in which an animal is called "it", just as we would after a sentence in which "he" is used as a universal pronoun.) (See chapter "The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women", p 50.)

Adams wants to restore what she sees as a lost history of associations between feminism and vegetarianism, arguing that first-wave feminist activists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century recognized the connections between their own struggles for political recognition and the choice to be vegetarian. She also uses a wide array of literary sources, including utopic novels such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915; see Bryson entry); Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906); and children's lit such as Charlotte's Web (1952). She recounts anecdotes from her experience as a domestic violence counselor. She also uses images collected from advertisements and (very interestingly) from publications internal to the meat industry.

"Truck Accident" (2004), by artist Sue Coe, whose Dead Meat is a book of paintings and writings about slaughterhouses.

This book can be difficult for one who lies on the other side of the divide between meat-chewing and meat-eschewing. To her credit, Adams seems to know that the conversion to her "side" can be one that is so absolute as to be almost mystical. But there are moments in this book that feel disingenous, as when she cites a description of a snuff film but neglects to write that the film in question was not actually a snuff film at all (see Snopes.com's debunking of the matter - thanks to Nick for telling me that this was an urban legend and rescuing me from many nightmares); or when she suggests that the school shooters of the 1990s may have shot kids because they were hunters so they were "used to it". Not only that, but the book, I think, assumes too much when it comes to correlation vs. causation. Just because, historically, men have been given more meat to eat even when women require the protein for breast-feeding, does that mean that meat is inherently patriarchal? Did English laborers of the nineteenth century really participate in patriarchy by giving the male members of the family more meat to eat? Should they have tried to find a nice mix of quinoa and kale to serve up instead? Is my skepticism or pickiness about this book derived from some deep guilt about or ambivalence about my meat-eating, which will some day be unearthed in a flood of veganism? Only time will tell.

Reviews of others: In Environmental Ethics, Deborah Slicer wrote that the book should have been written in clearer, easier-to-follow language (it didn't seem too bad to me!) and that Adams' analyses of race and class issues were unnecessarily truncated. (This is true - there was an interesting bit on Western imposition of meat diets on colonized cultures, but it was brief and undeveloped. There's plenty of room for further investigation in this area - and of the questions of diet imposition in general. The Inuit, for example, eat plenty of meat, but American and English explorers still found their diet disgusting.)

Apparently, in a later book Adams addresses the abhorrent PETA ad phenomenon.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Henry Salt, ed., Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers (1914); the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.

Secondary: Linda Birke, Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (1994); Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (1985); Mary Douglas, "Deciphering a Meal", in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975); Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (1985); Carolyn Steedman, "Landscape for a Good Woman", in Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (1985).

Additionally, the book's bibliography is helpfully separated into subject areas, including "Vegetarian Writings", "Animal Concerns and Animal Defense", "Feminist Writings", "Sexual and Domestic Violence", "Literary Criticism", "History, Autobiography, Biography", "Fiction, Poetry, Drama", "Medical and Nutritional Writings", and "Other".

The Unsettling of America

Title: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977)

Author: Wendell Berry, author of many books: novels, poetry, and essays. Also a longtime resident of northwestern Kentucky, farmer of 125 acres, former teacher of college creative writing, former Stegner Fellow.

My review:

This is a still from the recent documentary King Corn, which was co-made by/costars an alum from my high school, Ian Cheney. In this film, two city-raised kids who have old family roots in agricultural America try to return to Iowa, buy an acre of corn, and live the agdream. Of course, they end up on a tour through all of the technological boondoggles of contemporary monoculture. My favorite moment is when Ian tries to make high fructose corn syrup on his stove, and the process is so complicated that he almost can't do it. The number of friends I have who care a lot about farming (yet, interestingly, don't have farms themselves) is quite large (see, for example, Elanor Starmer's blog), and I am so implicated in this system of thought that reading a book like Unsettling almost felt like overkill. Plus, my conception of Berry's writing came completely from a couple of poems of his I had read and loved in high school, and which were kind of smushy in a latter-day Unitarian earth-love sort of way. (Here's one, "The Peace of Wild Things".)

Unsettling was much more of a jeremiad than I had ever expected, and addressed much deeper issues of National Character (or, more specifically, Modern Character) than I had thought. Berry's thought on technology (broadly defined) and its place in human endeavor goes beyond Luddism or antimodernism (although you could certainly slot him in there - he also really loves the Amish). For Berry, who employs what I would call a heavily Marxist mode of analysis, our "attitude toward work" has caused us to create a Frankensteinian system of technology and impersonal management methods, all designed to distance ourself from our own physical bodies.

As for the structure of the book, which Berry specifically cast as a response to what he saw as "modern or orthodox agriculture" (and remember, this was the 1970s, post-Earl Butz and Green Revolution...), Berry seems to get off with a bang, or three chapters which use the word "crisis" twice in their titles. Then there are more extended meditations on aspects of the crisis, including a chapter, "The Body and the Earth", which seeks to re-place the body in the ecological system and which follows a Carolyn Merchant-esque path in describing the tragic consequences of the divorce of body and soul.

Passages such as this startling one make his point, namely that technology is another method of alienation, leading to increasing enslavement of people and energy. Question: I see his point, but I find it objectionable to compare slavery and, say, modern irrigation systems. Is this direct equivalence, in itself, dehumanizing? Viz: "We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from...Out of this contempt for work arose the idea of a n****r: at first some person, and later some thing, to be used to relieve us of the burden of work. If we began by making n****rs of people, we have ended by making a n****r of the world. We have taken the irreplaceable energies and materials of the world and turned them into jimcrack 'labor-saving devices'. We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds n****rs to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves. And in doing this to the world that is our common heritage and bond, we have returned to making n****rs of people: we have become each other's n****rs" (12).

Some other potentially objectionable facets of this argument - beyond the comparison between slaves and tractors - include Berry's lament on the divorce of sexuality from childbearing marriages, which he says has destroyed the fabric of community and devalued the sacred act of sex. Pretty heteronormative, and also fairly biologically determinist, which is interesting, because his call for technological limitation is kind of anti-evolutionary. If you think that humans should be fulfilling the family structures their biology "demands" of them, then you also have to accept the human drive for technological improvement and reduction of work. A family structure that reaches beyond the boundaries of the "traditional" procreative one is a creative reimagining of biology, just like Berry's ideal farming structure would be.

All of Berry's critiques stem from the concept of human limitation, which he argues is necessary for our own health, bodily and spiritually speaking. Human limitation, which might involve limiting technology used (a la the Amish) or production itself (a la all previous versions of agriculture before the Green Revolution) is, of course, not a particularly popular concept, with the dominant visions of technocratic elites focused on the "way forward". Because of this, Berry visualizes himself on the "margins" of contemporary agriculture, and maybe also contemporary society, but says that the "margins" are a totally necessary and fruitful contributor to societal planning. (Once again, I wonder why he can't, then, get with the idea of marginal families or family units.)

Reception: I believe my colleague Lisa Powell will be sending me her paper on the reception of this book, so that I can put more in this section. From what I remember of her work, it seemed that Unsettling was the catalyst of a new small-farming movement, and that many new organic/small/local farmers could trace their "awakening" to this book (or, at least, that was her thesis - but then the paper explored the difficulty of pinpointing the origins of a movement or following the influence of a text through said movement - see, for example, Abbey's Monkeywrench Gang and ELF...) More to come on that.


I found this picture of Wendell Berry attached to a fascinating document: a 1976 debate published on NASA's website, in which Berry responded to a contest held for students to plan space settlement colonies. There's a long debate between him and one of the responsible adults. Sample of Berry: "I think you have wandered into a trap - one that is crowded with so many glamorous captives that you think it is some kind of escape. The trap is that a technological 'solution' on the scale of this one is bound to create a whole set of new problems, ramifying ahead of foresight." (See also Markley's Dying Planet on the anti-environmentalism of space colonization.)

Things to follow up on: The 1914 Smith-Lever act created the cooperative extension service. Was there a childhood education component at that point?

Shifting Gears

Charles Sheeler, "Ford Plant, River Rouge, Criss-Crossed Conveyors", 1927

Title: Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: the UNC Press, 1987)

Author: Cecelia Tichi, of the English department at Vanderbilt. Her other books are numerous and have a broad range of subject matter: Exposes and Excess: Muckraking in America, 1900/2000 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Spaces (Harvard UP, 2001); Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Konky-Tonk Bars (Duke University Press, 1998) (did she mean "honky-tonk bars"? I bet so); High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (Oxford University Press, 1991); and New World: New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (Yale UP, 1979). Apparently she's also written three novels! Cool.

Stuart Davis, Percolator, 1927

My review: Tichi writes that although some writers, artists, and poets took an antimodern stance regarding the technological advances of the 1880-1930 period (there's gotta be a better name for that fifty years!), others of their contemporaries embraced not only the subject matter of the machine age, but also its methods of composition, adopting what Tichi calls a "gear and girder" approach to art-making.

On the ground, this engineering-style approach reflected itself in more pared-down prose (Hemingway, who cited his apprenticeship with a newspaper, during which he had to telegraph stories to his editor, as a motivator for his simple sentence construction); a materialist approach to poetry (William Carlos Williams - glad to see you again!); and a heightened sense of the motion and physicality of the "real world", taken from Taylorization's attention to detail (John Dos Passos).

Tichi's approach is at its most effective when she goes into deep textual analysis, but when she situates these writers in their cultural milieu, things feel more scattershot. The images chosen to illustrate this book exemplify the problems with this approach - many of them are postcards of major engineering projects, or advertisements mentioning "efficiency", "waste", or other Taylorizing keywords in a commercial context. But often the images are not analyzed in depth or situated within a larger analysis, serving mostly as window dressing for her larger points.

By far the most useful chapter for my purposes is the one on the "cult of the engineer" in American culture (p 97). Here, Tichi describes how the engineer became a heroic figure in children's lit, movies, advertisements, and fiction, taking the place of the cowboy in stories of Western settlement and becoming an aspirational figure. Tichi writes of his appeal: "He signified stability in a changing world...he was technology's human face, providing reassurance that the world of gears and girders combined rationality with humanity" (99). Here she cites Henry Adams, Rex Beach, and Herbert Hoover, among others.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater, 1935

Reviews of others: Howard Segal wrote in the Journal of American History that the book was dispassionate and smart and steered clear of either hostility or worshipfulness, which were dangerous tendencies of other books about technology (this did come out in 1987, which was early in the "social-construction" game, I guess). He wished the book could have been more international. In American Literature, Christopher Nelson wrote that Tichi's method of analysis sometimes had trouble with matters of emphasis: why foreground one "cultural tendency" and background another as "latent"? This overstatement, Nelson wrote, led to occasional oversimplification, as when Tichi hit multiple times upon the "analogy of literary economy and engineering values". Nelson also wished that Tichi had included more material on the social realities of technology and its power relationships, such as the implications for labor or the structure of the working class.

Rube Goldberg device for cleaning shop windows; date of drawing unidentified on Rube Goldberg site. Goldberg's machines were parodies of labor-saving methods, exemplifying, like Chaplin's "Modern Times", the comic side of these obsessions with efficiency.

Books to follow up on: Primary: the Erector set for kids (1910s); The Book of Wonders (1916 kids' text); St. Nicholas magazine; journal: School and Society; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888); William Book, The Intelligence of High School Seniors (1922); John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925); Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901); John H Randall, Our Changing Civilization: How Science and the Machine are Reconstructing Modern Life (1931); Civilization in the United States (anthology of intellectual thought in early 1920s); childrens' lit about engineering listed on page 100.

Secondary: Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1979).

Changes in the Land

Pictures of my own altered (altared?) New England landscape, Gilmanton, New Hampshire, summers of 2005 and 2006.

Title: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

Author: William Cronon, of the history department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Author of Nature's Metropolis (1991) and editor of Uncommon Ground (1996). Cronon penned the paradigm-shifting essay "The Trouble With Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature", which was included in Uncommon Ground, and which I will write more about when I get to that book. Also author of the awesomest-ever essay on abandoned towns in the West: "Kennecott Journey, or, The Paths out of Town" (in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking the Nation's Western Past [1992], which he co-edited with Jay Gitlin and George Miles). "KJ" is available in PDF form on Cronon's site.


Argument: The ecological transformation of the New England countryside after the arrival of European settlers was intimately tied up with the worldviews, expectations, and social structures of the two major human groups inhabiting the area: the settlers and the Indians. Cronon asks how this transformation, which was so great that "the Indians' earlier way of interacting with their environment became impossible", came about. In the process, he describes the processes used by the Indians and the settlers to shape the landscape to their needs, and examines the ecological effects of these processes (which included agriculture, burning of forests, use of water, and the husbandry of livestock).


Chapter-by-chapter:

Part 1: Looking Backward
1. The View from Walden: Using Thoreau to exemplify a later European romantic misunderstanding of the nature of the land before European settlement, Cronon seeks to establish the terms of his examination, which will emphasize the point that the Native Americans, too, had evolved a set of practices of living-on-the-land: "The choice is not between two landscapes, one with and one without a human influence; it is between two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem" (12).

Part 2: The Ecological Transformation of Colonial New England
2. Landscape and Patchwork: What did settlers find when they arrived in New England? Cronon here focuses on both attitudes of settlers and on the actuality of the landscape (as opposed to Kolodny, who sticks closer to attitudes). The land was not "untouched", but rather was a "patchwork", he argues, due to Indian use of agriculture and of burning to create more favorable forest configurations.

3. Seasons of Want and Plenty: This chapter contains information about agricultural practices on both sides of the settler-Indian equation. Englishmen expected to be able to live in America much the same way that they lived in England, which led to what you could call "misunderstandings" between them, the Indians, and the land itself. Instead of following seasonal abundancies of natural resources, as the Indians did, settlers expected to be able to control rhythms of agricultural production and to be able to keep livestock year-round. This was a moral issue for them: they didn't see why Indians went hungry in winter, if they could over-produce in summer and save for the lean times of February. (Settlers also thought Indians were barbarous for giving their women complete control of the fieldwork.) Meanwhile, the kind of monoculture that the settlers practiced would eventually prove destructive to the soil. Here is more on the Indian patterns of burning, and on settler perceptions of the same (they didn't see it as directed, but rather characterized it as out-of-control or wild).

4. Bounding the Land: Settlers pointed to Indian habits of moving villages depending on times of year or fertility of land when citing the principle of "vacuum domicilium" in order to take Indian land. This idea held that the Indians did not actually improve upon the land, but merely hunted it, and thus did not deserve to keep it (in this case, "hunting" was given negative connotations of unplanned leisure or sport, rather than being seen as an essential survival activity, which it was). Here, Cronon discusses conflicting ideas of property on the two sides: Indians would often sell or give what they assumed were usufruct rights, while Englishmen took the sale to mean that they now had control over entire pieces of tribal land.

5. Commodities of the Hunt: Cronon enters the realm of debates over the involvement of Indians in the fur trade. For his part, he argues that epidemics had destabilized the Indian social order to the point where some Indians saw the prestige goods offered to those who would hunt beaver as an opportunity to establish themselves as powerful in a new, post-sickness order. "Animals...had fallen victim especially to the new Indian dependence on a market in prestige goods...the Indians, not realizing the full ramifications of what that market meant, and finally having little choice but to participate in it, fell victims too: to disease, demographic collapse, economic dependency, and the loss of a world of ecological relationships they could never find again" (107).

6. Taking the Forest: Here, Cronon describes the marketing of the New England forest, for fuel, buildings, or for exporting as the masts of ships. The deforestation of the landscape caused runoff, no longer controlled by the roots of trees; the reduction of edge-dwelling animal species; changed the species composition of forests; and, writes Cronon, "where forests were destroyed, the landscape became hotter in summer and colder in winter" (126).

7. A World of Fields and Fences: A further description of settlers' agricultural practices, including particularly their use of livestock, which caused conflicts between settlers and Indians over ranging (see Coleman; Lepore; also Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire) and continued the process of soil erosion.

Part 3: Harvests of Change
8. That Wilderness Should Turn a Mart: Cronon asks WHY these major changes of species composition, extirpation, deforestation, soil erosion had to take place, and answers that "capitalism and environmental degradation went hand in hand" (161) - but notes that this analysis "makes that change seem too sudden and unicausal", when, in fact, the diseases brought by Europeans had a major effect on social composition in the new world, and pastoralism had predated capitalism in the Old World by thousands of years. However, he sums up, none of these factors would have come into play if the Europeans had never taken it upon themselves to move onto their "new" continent: "Economic and ecological imperialisms reinforced each other" (162).

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Karen Kupperman liked the way Cronon synthesized diverse sources and focused them "through the lens of ecological concerns", but faulted him for being too credulous while interacting with his colonial sources, and for failing to incorporate any information about larger-scale climate change during the time period, which might also have caused ecological shifts. Meanwhile, in the Western Historical Quarterly, Bernard Sheehan called this new ecological focus on mostly-old material a "revelation" for most historians, but called Cronon out for what I noticed, too: that although he's careful not to call the Indians "more ecological", he still betrays a certain preference for their way of living on the land. (Hard not to do, considering the evidence.)


Vocab words: "coppice" ("a small wood or thicket consisting of underwood and small trees grown for the purpose of periodical cutting"); "usufruct" ("the right of temporary possession, use, or enjoyment of the advantages of property belonging to another, so far as may be had without causing damage or prejudice to this"); "severality" ("individual or particular points, matters, or objects").

Books to follow up on: Secondary: David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies (1970); Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (1978); Ronald Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plan Ecology, 1895-1955 (1981).

Sand County Almanac

Title: A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949)

Author: Aldo Leopold, 1887-1948, who formed an important part of the early conservation movement. A transitional figure, Leopold first worked in the US Forest Service during a time when activities such as killing wolves on sight were accepted and encouraged - a much more drastic, human-oriented management style.

"I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not the creel, but my memory. Like the whitethroats, I had forgotten it would ever again be aught but morning on the Fork." (40)

By the end of his life, Leopold had come around to a more biocentric environmental ethic, as showcased in this book. He was involved in the founding of the Wilderness Society in 1935. Leopold taught at University of Wisconsin, Madison as a professor of game management from 1933 through the time of his death. He lived in Madison during the week and on the farm described in the book on the weekends. He died while fighting a brush fire on a neighbor's farm. Two of his sons, Luna Leopold and A. Starker Leopold, were also scientists notable for their conservation efforts.

Basic characterization: The book consists of a series of essays concerning biotic life on the Wisconsin farm owned by AL's family. They manifest a deep love of these "wild things", and question the "progress" which strips them from the land - not only on the basis of their inherent right to live, but also on the basis of the right of what he sees as the biophilic minority of humanity ("for us...the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech" [vii]). The essays manifest a strong critique of the ways of modern society, which Leopold likens to "a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy" (ix).

Leopold at work.

Things that surprised me, or that I liked, or would follow up on:

Leopold's emphasis on the transnational nature of biotic life ("the international commerce of geese") (23).

The characterization of the prairie settler as another kind of "animal" - Coleman makes the same move in his description of the conflicts between wolf and man (29).

AL's constant emphasis on the insufficience of biological /historical/botanical education, when it comes to creating an ecologically aware and ethical citizenry (46, 207). Meanwhile, ETHICS is his main bag: he believes that the "extension of ethics" to the land is "an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity" (203, also 214).

What makes a conservationist, he writes, "is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop" (68) - all about stewardship and domain.

His own sort of conflicted, maybe-elitist relationship with his desire to see nature: "All conservation of wildness is self defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish" (101).

His idea that subversion of evolutionary rules is what renders us human/better (spoken on the topic of his sadness about the passing of the passenger pigeon): "For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auk thought of nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn our loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather than in Mr. DuPont's nylons or Mr. Vannevar Bush's bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts" (110). My question: can you feel yourself to be superior, and still subvert your needs to those of the "beasts"? If you set yourself up over them, do you risk not caring? (See Matthew Scully, Dominion.)

Telling the story of a lightning storm that almost got him while he was in New Mexico in his youth, Leopold ends with: "It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear" (126). A direct hit at FDR?

He writes much on the incapicity of "recreational areas" to develop habits of perception - yet he advocated their creation (esp. p 174-5). Solution: he wants us to experience wild life unmitigated by "machinery" - processed only by "modern mentality" (187). Snowmobiles in Y'stone, take that.

On the gap between concepts of scientific power and actual ability of scientists to "manage" the environment: "The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not. He knows that the biotic mechanism is so complex that its workings may never be fully understood" (205).

Vocab words: "pasque" ("a spring-flowering herbaceous plant, Pulsatilla vulgaris [family Ranunculaceae], with finely divided leaves and purple bell-shaped flowers clothed externally with silky hairs, found locally on calcareous grassland in Europe. Also: any of various similar Eurasian and North American plants of the genus Pulsatilla [formerly, and sometimes still, included in Anemone]; esp. P. patens var. multifida of North America (also called prairie crocus, prairie smoke"); "precocial" ("of an animal, esp a bird: able to move about and feed independently soon after hatching or birth; having young which are able to do this"); "anserine" ("of, pertaining to, or of the nature of a goose"); "tyro" ("a beginner or learner in anything; one who is learning or who has mastered the rudiments only of any branch of knowledge; a novice").

The pasque flower.

Books I've read that mention it: Coleman, Vicious (use of the "Thinking Like a Mountain" wolf anecdote).

Acts of God

New Orleans, 2005

Title: Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Author: Ted Steinberg, professor of history at Case Western Reserve, whose interests lie in "19th and 20th-century US environmental, legal, and social history". Some of his other books seem as though they should also be on my lists: American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (2006); Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (2002); Slide Mountain: Or, the Folly of Owning Nature (1995). Steinberg also seems to have an active career writing and commenting in the popular press (as his subject matter would seem to call for).

Argument: Arguing from a political-economy standpoint, Steinberg writes that the way disasters caused by hurricane, flooding, tornado, earthquake, and heat waves have been naturalized in the past century has obscured the fact that much of the human damage done is exacerbated by decisions made by government and corporate interests. This argument is much the same as the one made by EJ activist Robert Bullard in the speech I saw him give at the ASLE meeting about H. Katrina: namely, that the way we talk about the complex of damage associated with Katrina has taken blame off of FEMA and state, local, and federal government, and instead put it on God/nature, meaning that few or no changes in infrastructure are likely to be made. Of course, there is a strong class element to this argument: Steinberg and Bullard both say that because those likely to be lastingly affected by disasters tend to be poor, and sometimes black or Native American or Latino, this rhetoric has meant that natural disasters just intensify immiseration in these communities - an intensification which is seen as "nobody's fault".

Chapter-by-chapter:

Return of the Suppressed
One: Last Call for Judgment Day: The Charleston earthquake of 1886 serves as an example of a transition event between an earlier way of imagining natural disasters - as punishments from God - and a more neutralized "nature did it" stance. Steinberg says interesting things about how the intense reaction of the black community in Charleston was pathologized as superstitious and primitive, especially by a business class which was eager to dismiss the catastrophe and move on with commerce.

Charleston, 1886

Two: Disaster as Archetype: This chapter covers the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the effects of which were, Steinberg says, covered up by a business community interested in maintaining the viability of SF as a city (they blamed the fire for the damage, not an earthquake, since the latter would be harder to explain away as a one-time event).

Three: Do-it-Yourself Deathscape: Just as wealthy San Franciscans attempted to keep their city from being classified as an "earthquake zone", developers in Florida in the early twentieth century defied all evidence that the state was in a hurricane epicenter, a pattern which has continued throughout the state's history. Here, Steinberg calls out such invested actors as the Miami Herald for keeping the community in a state of denial about the true impact of the disasaters that have befallen it, greatly affecting its poorest members.

Interlude: Body Counting: Reasons why the natural disasters which occurred in the fifty years between 1880 and 1930 were so deadly; and forecasts about the deadliness of future events.

San Francisco, 1906

Federalizing Risk
Four: Building for Apocalypse: Back to Florida, and an examination of new federal insurance programs which amortized expense of rebuilding after hurricanes onto federal taxpayers, easing the way for developers to build in riskier and riskier locations. Steinberg writes: "As risk and space diverged it became harder to locate blame when calamity did strike and more difficult to discern that the federalization of risk did not benefit everyone equally" (81). Among the people who definitely don't benefit: those living in mobile homes. Steinberg includes quotes from "manufactured housing" industry spokespeople, who excuse their shoddy buildings by arguing that poor people LIKE the "value" of these houses (and, implicitly, don't mind living in conditions that rich people would reject as unsafe).

Five: Uncle Sam - Floodplan Recidivist: A local story about St. Charles, Missouri, where mobile homes situated on floodplains were especially hard hit in the 1993 flooding. Steinberg uses the tale to explore the ways in which the poor end up living in more dangerous locales, and the way they are then undercompensated or even blamed for damage from "natural" disaster.

Interlude: The Perils of Private Property: Examination of upward trends in insurance claims from weather events, and the idea that although these trends are undeniable, and unassociated with natural activity, official rhetoric still holds that increased activity - and not unwise building policy - is to blame for the problem.

Missouri, 1993

Containing Calamity
Six: The Neurotic Life of Weather Control: The story of those who would hope to change the course of hurricanes and other storms by "seeding" clouds (this was also mentioned in Ross, Strange Weather), thereby manifesting complete control over weather. The chapter also includes the voices of those who oppose this kind of activity on the grounds of religion or ecological feeling.

Seven: Forecasting at the Fair Weather Service: Another social cause of damage from natural disaster: the unequal funding of weather forecasting and warning systems, and technocratic trust placed in technological fixes at the expense of proper funding and staffing.

Eight: Who Pays?: The answer: Poor people. This chapter talks about why this is the case, pointing to underfunding (see chapter seven), and the idea that "relief officials have tended to embrace a wrong-headed set of assumptions of about the poor" (174) which holds that they will only squander or misuse any funds disbursed to them to rebuild after disasters.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, J. Brooks Flippen found little to critique, writing that Steinberg's book features an interesting combination of social, cultural, and political history, even if his argument becomes a bit "polemical".

Vocab words: "nosology" ("a list or catalogue of known diseases"); "caissons" ("a large water-tight case or chest used in laying foundations of bridges, etc., in deep water"); "groins" (in the context of a building element: "a deep trench, or excavation"); "pluvial" ("of or relating to rain; characterized by much rain, rainy").

Louisiana, 2005

Books to follow up on: Primary: Weatherwise magazine.

Secondary: Charles Bates and John Fuller, America's Weather Warriors, 1814-1985 (1986); Steven Biel, Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (1996); Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (1982); Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1965); Mark Monmonier, Cartographies of Danger: Mapping Hazards in America (1997); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979).