Abstract
The unfamiliar and the adventurous are firmly in control of an essay collection staking out fertile middle ground between American Studies and environmental history: no mention of John Muir or Henry David Thoreau, and buffalo only sneak in through a renowned taxidermy display at the Smithsonian. This volume brings to mind the freshness and quirkiness of Jenny Price’s Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (1999), which investigated things like the consumption of nature down at the shopping mall and the plastic flamingo lawn ornament. Innovativeness takes the form of a novel subject area or a new look at the familiar. Novelty includes putting sun tanning under the spotlight, in connection with notions of environmental determinism, racial degeneration and racial rejuvenation (Catherine Cocks’ ‘Children of Light’); youth as a natural resource (Susan Miller’s ‘The Gulick Family and the Nature of Adolescence’); and visual imagery’s use of children ‘as emotional emblems’ (p. 141) of a precarious future (Finis Dunaway’s ‘Dr. Spock Is Worried’).
In the reappraisal category are essays rooted in canonical places, whether ultra-hallowed or severely tainted: Annie Coleman’s Colorado River/Grand Canyon case study of ‘following a place where it goes, geographically, textually and historically’ (p. 192), which serves up a heady mix of water and words (‘River Rats in the Archive’), and Andrew Kirk’s ‘Prototyping Natures’, on declassified documentary photography and site workers’ atomic folk art of the Nevada Test Site. Other refreshing reassessments are an ebullient manifesto for bringing ‘nonhuman creatures’ (p. 22) into the history of slavery (Thomas Andrews’ ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’); how nation shaped nature rather than the conventional American narrative of nature moulding nation in an account of ‘environmental patriotism’ remaking the landscape at a Second World War internment camp for Japanese Americans (Connie Chiang’s ‘Winning the War at Manzanar’); and a revisiting of a classic American pursuit, camping, relocated from pioneering and recreational purposes on the overland trails and in national parks to Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, and richly re-contextualized within the political tradition of marching on Washington (co-editor Young’s ‘“Bring Tent”: The Occupy Movement and the Politics of Public Nature’). The frequent injection of the stellar cast of authors’ personal voices and experiences is a distinguishing feature and most welcome – epitomized by co-author Shaffer’s lovely essay on Digit and Dian, his ‘primate girl’ (pp. 14, 79) – and the intellectual fare largely digestible and jargon-free.
The truly introductory editors’ introduction – whose point of departure (perhaps obligatory, given its near-ubiquity in current discourse about the future of life on earth) is the Age of the Anthropocene – explains that their approach (and title) was inspired by Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009), the multifaceted verb ‘to render’ meaning ‘to represent, to perform, to surrender, to return or restore, to process or melt down, to cover, to translate into a computer image or Web page’ (p. 12). Twelve sparkling essays are distributed equally among four parts: ‘Animals’, ‘Bodies’, ‘Places’ and ‘Politics’. We can debate until the cows come home the distinction between ‘Animal’ and ‘Bodies’ (and whether an essay on pigs belongs among ‘Animals’ rather than in ‘Politics’). ‘Bodies’, for present purposes, is a property confined to human creatures, so taxidermy (John Herron’s ‘Stuffed’) resides in ‘Animals’. A case could also be made for relocating the site-specific Manzanar essay from ‘Politics’ to ‘Places’. But it all hangs together nicely and the editors are persuasive on why ostensibly unrelated topics such as sunbathing and a celebrity gorilla and his celebrity scientist belong in the same volume.
Individual authors occasionally nod to other contributors. But there could have been more nodding. Pigs, pork, ‘bacon mania’ and the growing invisibility of killing livestock, for instance, are addressed in Brett Mizelle’s ‘Unthinking Visibility’ (a story replicated across the industrialized world), but Andrews’ coverage extends to the power politics of meat supply and the slave’s desire for bacon, Kirk reflects on experimental deployment of pigs by atomic scientists and Chiang discusses the hog farm at Manzanar. And immediately after Coleman’s contribution, the Grand Canyon resurfaces in Frieda Knobloch’s challenging intellectual history of geologic time and the notion of decadence (‘Rocks of Ages’).
Strengthening bonds between American Studies (traditionally foregrounding, for the editors, culture and representations) and environmental history (conventionally prioritizing, in their view, nature and materiality) is this volume’s collective aim. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but because books I cut my scholarly teeth on – Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America (1964), Perry Miller’s Nature’s Nation and Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (both 1967) – were foundational texts in American Studies and environmental history alike – and studies such as Alfred Runte’s National Parks: The American Experience (1979), Price’s Flight Maps and William Cronon’s Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1995) continued to plant a foot in both camps – I had not realized that they had become so estranged in the USA. Concerning the alleged culture/nature split between the two fields, many environmental historians, I suspect, would argue that environmental history itself has become so enamoured of cultural constructions that it needs an ‘environmental turn’ too (while remaining culturally and sociologically sophisticated, of course).