Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform

By Finis Dunaway

Walden Pond. The Grand Canyon.Yosemite National Park. Throughout the twentieth century, photographers and filmmakers created unforgettable images of these and other American natural treasures. Many of these images, including the work of Ansel Adams, continue to occupy a prominent place in the American imagination. Making these representations, though, was more than a purely aesthetic project. In fact, portraying majestic scenes and threatened places galvanized concern for the environment and its protection. Natural Visions documents through images the history of environmental reform from the Progressive era to the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, showing the crucial role the camera played in the development of the conservation movement.

In Natural Visions, Finis Dunaway tells the story of how visual imagery—such as wilderness photographs, New Deal documentary films, and Sierra Club coffee-table books—shaped modern perceptions of the natural world. By examining the relationship between the camera and environmental politics through detailed studies of key artists and activists, Dunaway captures the emotional and spiritual meaning that became associated with the American landscape. Throughout the book, he reveals how photographers and filmmakers adapted longstanding traditions in American culture—the Puritan jeremiad, the romantic sublime, and the frontier myth—to literally picture nature as a place of grace for the individual and the nation.

Beautifully illustrated with photographs by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and a host of other artists, Natural Visions will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in American cultural history, the visual arts, and environmentalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226454245

Finis Dunaway

Finis Dunaway is professor of history at Trent University.

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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2005 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2005

Paperback edition 2008

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-17325-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-17326-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45424-5 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-17325-9 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-17326-7 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dunaway, Finis.

Natural visions : the power of images in American environmental reform / Finis Dunaway.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-17325-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Environmentalism—United States—Pictorial works. 2. Nature conservation—United States—Pictorial works. 3. Environmental protection in art. 4. Natural areas—United States—Pictorial works. 5. Nature photography—United States—20th century. 6. Wildlife photographers—United States. I. Title.

GE197.D86 2005

333.72’0973—dc22

2005008461

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

FINIS DUNAWAY

NATURAL VISIONS

The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

For Dana

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Part 1: Transcendental Vision

CHAPTER ONE. GLEASON’S TRANSPARENT EYEBALL

Part 2: The Nature of the New Deal

CHAPTER TWO. THE DECLINE TO DUST

CHAPTER THREE. THE RIVER OF TIME

CHAPTER FOUR. A FLICKER OF PERMANENCE

Part 3: Picturing the American Earth

CHAPTER FIVE. NATURE ON THE COFFEE TABLE

CHAPTER SIX. THOREAU WITH A CAMERA

CHAPTER SEVEN. AMERICAN ELEGY, AMERICAN RENEWAL

EPILOGUE. THE ECOLOGICAL SUBLIME

NOTES

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1. Herbert W. Gleason, H. W. Gleason at Thoreau’s cairn, Walden Pond

1.2. Herbert W. Gleason, fog from Nawshawtuct, Concord, Massachusetts

1.3. Herbert W. Gleason, Mazamas climbing snow slope, Mount Rainier

1.4. Herbert W. Gleason, large sequoia, Sequoia National Park

1.5. Herbert W. Gleason, rainbow, Bryce Canyon

2.1. Grant Wood, Fall Plowing

2.2. Panoramic view of grasslands, frame enlargement from The Plow That Broke the Plains

2.3. Alexandre Hogue, Erosion No. 2: Mother Earth Laid Bare

2.4. Settler, Plow at Your Peril, still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains

2.5. Dust and devastation, still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains

2.6. Dorothea Lange, photograph of poster outside Belasco Theater

2.7. Arthur Rothstein, The Plow That Broke the Plains: Look at It Now

2.8. Baby with plow, still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains

3.1. Panoramic view of river and forests, frame enlargement from The River

3.2. Tree stumps, still photograph from The River

3.3. Aerial view of flood, frame enlargement from The River

3.4. Panoramic view of soil erosion, still photograph from The River

3.5. Charles Child, illustration, Walt Whitman and the Mississippi River

3.6. Norris Dam, still photograph from The River

3.7. Planting trees, frame enlargement from The River

3.8. The River, poster

4.1. Insecure Tenure, illustration

4.2. Secure Tenure, illustration

4.3. Farm family in Pennsylvania, still photograph from The Land

4.4. Plantation home with eroded field, still photograph from The Land

4.5. Aerial view of the Arkansas River, frame enlargement from The Land

4.6. Aerial view of contour plowing, still photograph from The Land

4.7. Aerial view of soil conservation, still photograph from The Land

5.1. Joe Munroe, David Brower

5.2. Philip Hyde, Steamboat Rock

5.3. William Garnett, cleared landscape

5.4. William Garnett, slabs and foundations

5.5. William Garnett, rows of completed houses

5.6. William Garnett, aerial view of Los Angeles

5.7. Ferenc Berko, bathers on the Ganges

5.8. Ansel Adams, clearing winter storm, Yosemite Valley

6.1. Eliot Porter, barn swallow

7.1. Renny Russell, Pacific Coast near San Simeon

8.1. Charles Pratt, ferny glade in woods

8.2. Charles Pratt, woman and flowering tree

8.3. Charles Pratt, white feather on kelp

8.4. Charles Pratt, Ruppert Brewery

8.5. Charles Pratt, black cow

8.6. Terry Evans, ammunition storage bunkers and hay bales

Plates following

1. Eliot Porter, pool in brook

2. Eliot Porter, Hudson River

3. Eliot Porter, spruce trees in fog

4. Eliot Porter, maple leaves and pine needles

5. Eliot Porter, ovenbird

6. Eliot Porter, green reflections in stream

7. Eliot Porter, sunrise

8. Eliot Porter, Twilight Canyon

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

On any given day, writing a book can involve considerable pleasure and excitement, along with feelings of frustration and uncertainty. I want to thank everyone who supported me along the way and provided reassurance even when I gave them reason to doubt me. As every writer knows, it can be difficult explaining to friends and family why it takes so long to finish a project like this. So I want to begin by honoring the memory of my wife’s late grandfather, Max Feldman, who provided a response that any author would dream of hearing. After listening to me describe the long process of research, writing, and revision, Max replied, It’s good that it takes that long. It shows you care.

Lucky for me, I was not the only one who cared. At Rutgers University, where this book began as a dissertation, I found a wonderful group of friends and colleagues who responded to incipient ideas, suggested new directions and approaches, and inspired me by the examples of their own exciting scholarship. Although many people deserve to be mentioned, I want to thank in particular Matthew Guterl, Lucia McMahon, Peter Mickulas, Neil Brody Miller, Todd Uhlman, and Serena Zabin. Matthew Guterl deserves special thanks for reading every word of an early draft of this book, carefully scrutinizing the arguments and prose, and providing always helpful (not to mention almost instantaneous) feedback on each chapter.

I could not have asked for a better dissertation committee, composed of scholars who range widely in their approaches to studying the past. Miles Orvell, from the English and American studies departments at Temple University, was my outside reader, but you certainly would not know it from the enthusiasm, criticism, and good ideas he offered at every stage of the project. Matt Matsuda befriended me soon after I arrived at Rutgers and has consistently provided guidance on the methods of cultural history and the confusing world of academia. He knows that many of the ideas for this book were first hatched in his basement office many years ago. Susan Schrepfer helped introduce me to the exciting field of environmental history and has enlightened me on countless issues relating to the history and meanings of American conservation. James Goodman joined my committee at the perfect moment: just before I began writing. By encouraging me to tell stories, he influenced this book immeasurably. Jackson Lears, my advisor, expressed enthusiasm for this project when it was only a vague idea and continually encouraged me to embrace the interdisciplinary possibilities of the topic. Anyone familiar with his work will recognize his imprint on my thinking. I thank him not only for his careful readings of my prose but also for his friendship, sense of humor, and way of being in the world. He is a true role model.

Many other scholars offered advice and comments on portions of this work. At Rutgers, John Chambers, John Gillis, and Eviatar Zerubavel all offered constructive criticism on my early forays into New Deal film. John Rohrbach at the Amon Carter Museum carefully read the Sierra Club chapters and made many thoughtful suggestions. At Cornell, Michael Kammen read an early draft in its entirety and shared with me some of his breathtaking knowledge of American cultural history. I have never met John Meyer, a political theorist at Humboldt State University, but I want to thank him for his insightful criticism that improved the book enormously. Others who have helped me along the way include Marguerite Shaffer and Jeffrey Stine. Finally, I owe a hearty thanks to the Chapter House Beer and History Workshop in Ithaca, New York, whose members included Jeff Cowie, Joel Dinerstein, Caroline Merithew, Michael Smith, Michael Trotti, and Rob Vanderlan, for teaching me many lessons about historical scholarship, intellectual comradeship, and the venerable tradition of buying rounds.

This project was sustained by generous funding from several institutions. I wish to thank the Smithsonian Institution, the American Historical Association, the history department and the Graduate School at Rutgers University, and the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture for supporting my dissertation work. Since leaving graduate school, I benefited greatly from a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. I wish to thank many people there, including Tim Borstelmann, Maria Cristina Garcia, Michael Kammen, Mary Beth Norton, and Richard Polenberg for making me feel welcome. The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress provided a postdoctoral fellowship and a wonderful environment as I neared completion. Many thanks to Les Vogel and Prosser Gifford, among others, for creating a scholar’s paradise. An Ansel Adams Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography allowed me to spend two weeks in the collections of the best modern photography archive in the United States. Finally, a publication grant from the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists provided the funding for the book’s color insert.

Librarians and archivists at a number of institutions provided invaluable assistance as I tracked down sources for this project. I am grateful to Leslie Perrin Wilson at the Concord Free Public Library, John Rohrbach and the staff at the Amon Carter Museum, Amy Rule, Leslie Calmes, and other staff members at the Center for Creative Photography, Bernard Crystal at Columbia University’s Butler Library, the amazing staff at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as countless staff members at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, Cornell University, Harvard University, and Rutgers University.

I want to thank my new colleagues at Trent University, where I completed the book, for welcoming me to Canada, and inspiring me with their commitment to creative scholarship and innovative teaching. I particularly want to express my gratitude to the members of the history department, including the chair, Olga Andriewsky, for allowing me to defer my appointment so that I could accept a fellowship at the Library of Congress. I also wish to thank the Dean’s Office for the generous start-up package that helped cover the permission fees to reproduce many of the images in this book.

I feel incredibly fortunate that this manuscript found its way to Robert Devens and the University of Chicago Press. I know very little about the publishing business, but something tells me that there are few editors as talented, perceptive, and supportive as Robert. He has patiently guided me through the publishing process, offering countless suggestions along with intelligent judgment at critical moments. Elizabeth Branch Dyson fielded a barrage of questions about copyright matters and always offered friendly and expert advice. Maia Rigas made numerous suggestions that greatly improved the final draft. Paul Boyer and Gregg Mitman began as anonymous readers but, after providing me with some of the best feedback I have ever received, decided to reveal their identities. I am glad they did, so that I can have the opportunity to thank them both for careful readings and detailed comments that played a major role in the revision process.

I thank my parents, Donna and Mike Dunaway, for their support over many years and for their steadfast belief that I would indeed complete my career as a student. My wife’s family, especially her parents, Linda and Peter Capell, and grandparents, Ruth and Moses Capell and Yetta Feldman, have generously provided their kindness and support since I first met them. I also wish to thank cherished friends, especially Chris Baumann and Michele Collins, for enlivening my spirits time and again.

When I think of everything that Dana Capell has given to me, I am left wondering whether any of these pages could have been written without her. She offered unwavering support on days when I felt nothing but doubt about myself and despair about the project; she celebrated moments of excitement, always reminding me to recognize and appreciate even the smallest accomplishments. She read every draft, many of them more than once, and invariably offered comments that sharpened my prose. Through it all, she provided loving friendship and unyielding commitment. For these reasons and many more, I dedicate this book to her.

INTRODUCTION

When Americans want to understand their relationship to the natural world, they often turn to images. Consider a membership appeal made in the late 1990s by the Wilderness Society, one of the nation’s leading conservation groups. Mailed to individuals throughout the country, the appeal included several items: a letter detailing the commercial and political threats to the national forests; a petition directed to then-president Clinton, requesting that he take steps to counter the destruction and mismanagement of wild places; and—as an added enticement to new members—a FREE Gift Offer of Celebrating the American Earth, a portfolio of photographs by Ansel Adams. For many, the brochure explains, these photographs have answered more eloquently than any written statement the question, ‘Why wilderness?’ Celebrating the American Earth presents scenes of Yosemite and other national parks as part of the group’s campaign to protect the wilderness. By sending it to you, the brochure concludes, the Wilderness Society will fulfill Ansel Adams’ wish that through his photography all people might celebrate the American earth, and learn that preserving the land enriches the human spirit. Merging art with politics, fusing national identity with the human spirit, the Wilderness Society offered Ansel Adams’s photographs as a way to preserve the American landscape and save the American soul.¹

With this membership appeal, the Wilderness Society joined a long cultural tradition of linking visual images to environmental reform. Since its emergence at the turn of the twentieth century, the conservation movement has pushed for broad changes in American society. Through the creation of national parks and the founding of government agencies, the movement has been a voice for wild animals and natural scenery, for fragile ecosystems and finite resources of soil, water, and forests. Yet the history of environmental reform is more than the passage of a series of laws; it is also the story of images representing and defining the natural world, of the camera shaping politics and public attitudes. From magazines and documentary films to membership appeals and coffee table books, the conservation movement has relied on images more than any other American reform movement.

Natural Visions seeks to understand why the camera has played such a crucial role in American environmental politics and how it has shaped modern perceptions of the natural world. Beginning in 1900 and ending with the first celebration of Earth Day in 1970, I profile a group of artists and activists who used the camera in the service of politics hoping that images could galvanize concern for their reform efforts at the national level. I focus on photographs and films produced within a cluster of three periods of reform: the Progressive era, the New Deal era, and the 1960s. My protagonists include Herbert Gleason, a Congregationalist minister who became a landscape photographer, traveling lecturer, and national parks advocate during the early twentieth century. Moving to the 1930s, I write about Pare Lorentz and other New Deal artists who responded to the decade’s environmental crises by imagining nature casting judgment, taking its revenge upon a careless society. In the postwar period, I consider the careers of Sierra Club leaders and photographers—including David Brower, Ansel Adams, and Eliot Porter—who believed that coffee table books offered the most effective way to promote the cause of wilderness preservation. Taken together, the chapters that follow comprise a cultural history of environmental reform that explores the connections between aesthetics, politics, and religion across much of the twentieth century. Placing photographs and films at the intersection of individual experience and cultural context, this book shows how different reformers in different eras all shared a similar faith in the camera as a tool of conservation.

Before 1900, Americans had also looked to images to understand the meanings of their landscape. From Thomas Cole’s Hudson River school paintings to Albert Bierstadt’s monumental portrayals of the West, nineteenth-century artists celebrated the scenic wonders and spiritual possibilities of the American earth. Swirling in the romantic currents of the age, they tried to commune with nature by putting brush to canvas to present the landscape as resplendent with God’s glory. After the Civil War, photographers like William Henry Jackson extended this tradition. They promised to use the mechanical vision of the camera to document the land with topographical precision. In these ways, nineteenth-century visual culture provided Americans with the opportunity to glimpse the vast spaces of the West, to contemplate the significance of the frontier, and to ponder their relationship to the natural world.²

This study takes 1900 as its starting point because although twentieth-century artists borrowed earlier styles and conventions, they also used the camera to stake out new cultural terrain, to represent conservation sentiment through images. To be sure, landscape paintings and photographs had encouraged nineteenth-century policymakers to preserve Yellowstone National Park and other sites. Writers like George Perkins Marsh and Henry David Thoreau had published foundational works in environmental thought. At the local and state level, Americans had approved the first conservation measures and had started to recognize the problems of pollution in urban areas. Yet conservation did not coalesce into a national movement until the turn of the twentieth century. Following the U.S. Census Bureau’s announcement of a closed frontier in 1890, more Americans became worried about the loss of wilderness and the scarcity of resources. As Progressive reform gathered steam, the conservation movement became an important player in national politics, leading to the establishment of such agencies as the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service. Meanwhile, prominent environmental reformers—including John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt—began to applaud the representational power of the camera and recognize its potential as an instrument of persuasion. From the Progressive era through Earth Day, the camera would provide reformers with a way to link politics to visual culture, to turn environmental debates into questions of seeing.³

Natural Visions advances arguments and themes that develop as the chapters unfold. First, I ask why American environmental reformers have felt an enduring attraction to the camera. As they witnessed the alteration and loss of particular places, many artists and activists expressed ambivalence or even outright hostility toward technology, blaming it for the destruction of the American landscape. Yet they continued to rely on the camera—a technology of representation—to convey their ideas about the natural world. I argue that they viewed the camera as a machine with unique powers: a device that could capture reality and remember nature. With a sometimes naive belief in the camera’s mechanical, objective vision, they hoped that photographs and films could record the reality of nature and bring Americans closer to the nonhuman world. They also regarded the camera as a technology of memory, a machine that could preserve threatened landscapes on film. Worrying about the loss of nature, they tried to create visual monuments to vanishing places.⁴

More important, environmental reformers believed that the camera could help them bring aesthetics and emotions into politics. This theme echoes throughout the book, forming one of my major claims about the cultural implications of conservation. In these different eras of reform, artists and activists tried to challenge the utilitarian calculus of American politics by infusing public debate with beauty and passion. They turned to the camera out of faith that it could endow the landscape with sacred meaning and transcendent significance. While modern cultural critics fretted over the reproduction of reality, wondering if images estranged viewers from the physical world, environmental reformers expressed little anxiety over the status of nature in an age of mechanical reproduction. Their enthusiasm for the camera rested on the belief that it could elicit an emotional response in spectators, awakening them to the beauty of nature and arousing their concern for its protection.⁵

This book, then, presents the history of environmental reform as a history of the emotions. It also adds to the work of other scholars who have explored the religious roots of conservation. While others have considered the links between spirituality and environmentalism, Natural Visions places images and image makers at the center of the story, thus analyzing a group of people and type of sources often neglected by environmental historians. The protagonists of this study fused religious concepts with scientific knowledge to present conservation as a secular movement enlivened by sacred purpose. Through their embrace of the camera, they tried to unite the technological and the spiritual, to link religious feeling and human emotion to the machine.⁶

Natural Visions also considers the continuities and changes in environmental image making. While the subjects of this book are not usually considered in relation to one another, I have found that environmental artists employed similar strategies to mobilize public sentiment. Even as they celebrated the power of the camera, they did not assume that images could speak for themselves. Instead of displaying pictures in isolation, where they could evoke many possible meanings, artists and activists paired images with texts to lead viewers to particular interpretations. They formed stories about the human place in nature, narratives that reveal a striking continuity across the twentieth century. Casting their work in a religious framework of redemption, photographers and filmmakers urged Americans to express penitence for their sins, to change their ways, and to find salvation in nature. Throughout these different eras, they drew on deep wellsprings of American culture, including Puritan sermons and transcendentalist thought, to criticize modern society and convey their desire for cultural and political change.⁷

Environmental artists also relied on similar aesthetic modes—especially the sublime tradition—to represent the American landscape. Beginning with Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, theorists of the sublime have associated it with particular sites—such as powerful waterfalls or majestic mountains—that evoke awe and wonder in spectators. The sublime, according to these writers, provokes intense, religious emotion and allows people to feel the presence of the deity. Originating in Europe, the sublime aesthetic profoundly shaped American attitudes toward the natural world, as reflected in the writings of John Muir, the photographs of Ansel Adams, and the decision to set aside dramatic places—Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon—as national parks. In the United States, sublime landscapes have long been the most sacred landscapes.

Yet, as this book argues, the sublime needs to be understood in historical terms, as a dynamic and changing aesthetic that is adapted to suit the concerns of particular people at particular moments in time. By examining the political uses of the sublime, I have found that environmental reformers reworked this tradition in a variety of ways during the twentieth century. While the Progressive-era photographer Herbert Gleason adhered to the romantic sublime of monumental peaks and towering trees, New Deal filmmakers emphasized the sublimity of nature as a violent, destructive force. Finding a moral message in the ecological calamities of the thirties, they combined this catastrophic sublime with a celebration of New Deal technology, encouraging audiences to feel a sense of power in the presence of human engineering and machines. In the postwar period, Ansel Adams became legendary for his dramatic portrayal of Yosemite, yet other Sierra Club photographers—particularly Eliot Porter—departed from this style by trying to create a sense of surprise and wonder in response to more modest settings. By revising the sublime, Porter’s photography anticipated the new directions and concerns of contemporary environmentalism.

Many writers have argued that to feel intense emotion, to be astonished and overwhelmed, requires one to visit sites like the Grand Canyon or the Hoover Dam, to come in close contact with the thing itself. Yet Natural Visions suggests another way environmental reformers adapted the sublime. Investing great hopes in the camera, they believed that this machine could express their feelings to a mass audience. They encouraged spectators to feel awe-inspired not in the presence of actual landscapes but in response to visual images. Rather than witnessing the magnificence of Yosemite’s Half Dome in person, Ansel Adams’s photographs offered a facsimile of the real thing, reproducing on film the wondrous scenery. In twentieth-century America, environmental artists and their audiences found sublime experience—most easily and sometimes most powerfully—through the mediating lens of the camera.⁸

In my effort to understand the role of the camera in environmental reform, I found that my questions were best explored through a focus on key figures and their negotiations with the larger culture. As the historian David Brion Davis once noted, a biographical approach to the past can create a synthesis of culture and history by showing how cultural tensions and contradictions may be internalized, struggled with, and resolved within actual individuals.⁹ The chapters that follow place individual actors on a larger stage of cultural and political debate, identifying their personal fears and motivations, pondering their idiosyncratic interests, and relating their use of the camera to broader patterns of change. Through a narrative style, I have sought to capture how these different people came to see, understand, and represent nature in the ways that they did.¹⁰

The opening chapter—a prologue to the whole—focuses on the little-known career of Herbert Gleason, an ordained minister who found his true calling as a landscape photographer and environmental advocate. After leaving the ministry in 1899, Gleason developed a thriving career as a lecturer, traveling around the nation to deliver visual sermons about the American landscape. His photographs focused on two regions of the United States. In New England, he tried to retrace Thoreau’s journeys and to recast transcendentalism for the modern age. In the West, he celebrated the sublimity of mountains and canyons and promoted the concept of national parks. Active in the Sierra Club, the National Park Service, and other organizations, Gleason helped make the camera central to the cultural politics of environmental reform.

Parts 2 and 3—the core of the book—closely examine images sponsored by the federal government in the 1930s and by the Sierra Club in the 1960s. Part 2 considers a series of New Deal documentary films made in response to the ecological disasters of the decade. From the Great Plains to the Mississippi River, nature erupted in a fury of dust and deluge. The filmmakers Pare Lorentz and Robert Flaherty recreated the sublime power of the natural world, providing spectators with a vicarious experience of disaster. Lorentz and Flaherty portrayed the landscape as an interdependent community, a place of ecological harmony destroyed by human carelessness. Drawing on the Puritan legacy of the jeremiad sermon, they combined moving images with the voice of a narrator to condemn the nation’s abuse of its natural endowment. They converted the threatening power of nature into the technological power of the New Deal, presenting government efforts to control and manage the environment as a form of secular salvation.

Part 3 explores the curious phenomenon of the environmental coffee table book in postwar America. Led by David Brower, the Sierra Club published a series of large-format books featuring photographs by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and other artists. Produced in conjunction with the wilderness campaigns of the period, the books encouraged Americans to seek individual salvation through contact with nature. While New Deal filmmakers emphasized the links between soil and society, the Sierra Club celebrated a landscape devoid of people, a pure space apart from civilization. Photographers, writers, and Sierra Club leaders adapted the jeremiad sermon and the transcendentalist tradition to critique technological hubris and the destruction of wilderness. The books triggered debates over the meanings of conservation and offered different, sometimes contradictory ways of viewing the natural world. Following this section, the epilogue explores the emergence of a new form of the sublime through a look at two examples: the little-known collaboration between the writer Rachel Carson and the photographer Charles Pratt; and the widely circulated images associated with Earth Day 1970.

Today environmental images continue to abound in American culture and to frame perceptions of the natural world. As the Wilderness Society’s membership appeal and offer of an Ansel Adams portfolio suggest, many Americans still look at images for answers, at times in response to the question, why wilderness? but also in response to broader questions like, why nature? or even, what is nature? In forming answers to these questions, artists and their audiences have grappled with fundamental themes in American thought: with Puritan ideas of apocalypse and damnation, with romantic notions of the sublime, with concepts of abundance and scarcity on the frontier, with fantasies of the American earth as paradise. Such dreams and fears have often been expressed through images, in visions that imagine nature as a place of grace for the individual and the nation.

ABBREVIATIONS

PART 1

TRANSCENDENTAL VISION

1

Gleason’s Transparent Eyeball

While riding in a train through southern Utah in 1919, Herbert Gleason wrote a letter to his friend Stephen