THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9509290624
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM ROBOTHAM
LENGTH: Long : 127 lines
During the past three decades, Americans have embraced environmentalism in a big way, and that's generally regarded as good news by those of us who are concerned about the health of the planet.
But now that Congress is working to undo a variety of conservation and anti-pollution measures, it's time to face facts: For the most part, our sentiments about the environment reflect a superficial romanticism rather than a deep-rooted commitment to the natural world.
Some people may dispute this argument by pointing to everybody's favorite ``green'' initiative, recycling. But tossing cans in a special plastic bin instead of a trash can doesn't require much self-sacrifice. A far more telling trend is the phenomenal popularity of all-terrain utility vehicles like the Ford Explorer. Ironically, these sleek machines reflect our hunger for wilderness adventure - and we buy them thinking that they'll somehow help us get back to nature. What we seem to have missed is that they use more fossil fuel than Cadillacs.
Our love of national parks, where attendance last year topped 270 million, is another example of how our interest in nature doesn't reflect a deep ecological awareness. In our zeal to commune with the trees, rivers and mountains we are inadvertently taking an alarming toll on these preserves.
There is no single reason for the contradictions in our behavior. One possible explanation may be widespread scientific illiteracy. Without a working knowledge of the natural world, it is difficult to appreciate fully the ways in which our own behavior affects the environment.
But scientific education by itself cannot solve the problem. And even if it could, we are not likely to achieve scientific literacy on a broad scale any time in the near future.
In the meantime, what we can do is rethink the ways in which art and popular culture shape our attitudes toward nature. As Harvard Professor Lawrence Buell writes in his new book, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Harvard University Press), ``How we image a thing, true or false, affects our conduct toward it.''
Our perceptions of nature tend to be simplistic because they are shaped as much by Hollywood and Madison Avenue as they are by firsthand experience. The ideas expressed in the movie ``Pocahontas'' exemplify our sentimentalism. One of the most important characters in the movie is a tree. Indeed, it is from this talking tree named Grandmother Willow - as well as from the ``voices of the mountains'' and other forces in nature - that Pocahontas receives her wisdom.
Children's stories have taken this anthropomorphic approach to nature for generations, of course. And perhaps it is a bit overreaching to ascribe much significance to a cartoon. But the movie, which appeals to adults as well as children, reinforces a highly romanticized view of nature in a variety of ways. Particularly noteworthy are the unrealistically dramatic landscapes surrounding Jamestown.
On a more subtle level, cultural images aimed directly at adults - from Marlboro ads to films like ``A River Runs Through It'' - do the same thing. Even the nature shows on public television are problematic, because they excite in us expectations about nature that the real thing cannot satisfy.
The American tendency to romanticize nature is not a recent phenomenon. As the historian Roderick Nash pointed out three decades ago, the wilderness has long held a special place in the hearts of Americans because it shaped our culture in two ways: It contained the raw materials needed to build a civilization from scratch, and it provided us with a metaphor that gave the civilization meaning. America was a ``virgin land'' and thus, potentially at least, another Eden - a place where mankind could start anew.
For the most part, of course, the new Eden idea simply spurred destruction of the wilderness. After all, the Bible itself teaches us to conquer nature. But even America's foremost champion of agrarian culture, who called for transformation of the land, saw beauty and meaning in the wilds. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote that viewing the Natural Bridge brought on a feeling of ``indescribable rapture.''
Half a century later, the landscape painters of the so-called Hudson River School were beginning to express such rapture on canvas. That movement reached its height in the mid-19th century with the massive paintings of Albert Bierstadt. Like other artists and writers before him, Bierstadt was in a hurry to document the beauty of the American West before the wilderness disappeared. What is interesting today, however, is that he didn't simply record what he saw. He overdramatized the mountains in much the same way that Disney artists have, and in the process he helped shape the public's notions about the natural environment.
One way to begin developing a more sophisticated conception of nature, Buell suggests, is by returning to the writings of Henry David Thoreau. In The Environmental Imagination, Buell explores the entire scope of American nature writing, from colonial times to the present. But as he points out, no writer ``comes closer than Thoreau to standing for nature in both the scholarly and popular mind.''
To a large extent, of course, Thoreau's popularity is a reflection of our romanticism - and when read casually, his writings seem to verify our simplistic notions. But when we study Thoreau more deeply, we begin to realize that his most memorable quotations - lines like ``In wildness is the preservation of the world'' - give us a limited understanding of his ideas.
Throughout Walden and other works, Thoreau continually shifts perspectives - not because he is indecisive in an immature way but because he has a keen sense of the irony and complexity of life. As soon as we think we have him pegged as the consummate romantic, swooning at the sounds of birds and rustling leaves, we come across passages like the one in The Maine Woods in which he characterizes the summit of Mount Katahdin as ``a place for heathenism and superstitious rites - to be inhabited by men nearer the kin of rocks and wild animals than we.''
The passage goes on to reveal Thoreau's deep ambivalence about the raw wilderness that surrounds him. Elsewhere, he says he ``loves the wild not less than the good,'' but he makes it clear that he was no primitivist, no simple-minded worshiper of the ``noble savage.'' Indeed, contrary to popular belief, he did not entirely reject the concept of civilization.
``I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there,'' Thoreau wrote near the end of Walden. ``Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.''
To this day, many of us fantasize about following Thoreau's path, figuratively, if not literally. Indeed, such daydreams have given rise to a new trend: the eco-adventure.
But if Thoreau teaches us anything, it is that we must cultivate a sustained and heightened awareness of nature, not simply a leisure-time appreciation of it. Moreover, he urges us not to follow him, but to develop a relationship with the natural environment that is based on our own experiences and imaginative powers.
When we achieve self-reliance in our thinking - and begin to re-examine the superficial representations of nature that circulate throughout our culture - we will give new meaning to the environmental movement. MEMO: Tom Robotham is a historian and writer who lives in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY
KEYWORDS: ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION BOOKS by CNB