Fifteen Eighty Four

Why do people so often approach nature with the same kinds of rapt aesthetic and spiritual attention that they bring to works of art?  Why do they seek in nature both their most unique (or “true”) personal self and at the same time a defining source of collective identity, such as the spirit of a region or a nation?  Why does the environmental movement so often seek to preserve nature as a kind of cultural treasure for future appreciation, as in the National Park mode, rather than as an evolving network of relations in which humans also participate?  And why do large segments of the environmental movement remain so persistently socially elite and White? 

Landscapes of Genius and the Transatlantic Origins of Environmentalism addresses such questions by exploring how genius, nature, and authorship became closely associated over the course of the long nineteenth century.  The book focuses specifically on landscapes in Great Britain and the United States that became strongly associated with authors and their genius, such as William Wordsworth and the English Lake District, Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond, and John Muir and Yosemite.  These “landscapes of genius” defined nature as analogous to art and played an important role in the emergence of a new model of nineteenth-century high-cultural nationalism.  The book documents how the landscape of genius was translated from Great Britain to the United States, leading to the invention of the National Park and precipitating a transatlantic environmental movement in ways that continue to exert massive influence on environmental culture and politics today.

In my previous book, William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship (University of Virginia, 2012), I focused on the English Lake District and its association with Wordsworth.  In extending my scope beyond that specific author and landscape in my current book, four things became strongly apparent.  First, I realized how immensely important and influential the idea of genius became during the nineteenth century, implicating new ideas of nature in a wider social transformation.  Genius supported autonomous individualism—the genius of the individual author or reader—while at the same time connecting those individuals into the shared identity or genius of the nation.  Nationalist high cultures in fields such as literature, the visual arts, and music became defined as expressions of that genius in ways that enabled the emergence of a new nineteenth-century liberal democratic social order.  As genius became strongly associated also with specific natural landscapes and with nature in general, a modern environmental movement emerged to preserve such landscapes as shrines of national high culture, eventually producing the institution of the National Park.

Second, I realized just how deeply transatlantic this discourse of the landscape of genius was, in ways that have never been fully documented.  When Henry Thoreau remarked in Walden (1854) that “This is my lake country,” for instance, he invoked the already well-established history of Wordsworth’s English Lake District as a landscape of genius, which exerted a deeply pervasive influence on mid-nineteenth-century New England literary culture and on Thoreau’s decision to move to Walden Pond and how he related to nature there.  When John Muir emerged around the end of the nineteenth century as a leading proponent of the National Parks and political defender of Yosemite, as in the long political struggle from 1907-13 over San Francisco’s proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a reservoir and source of electric power, he drew strongly on this tradition of the landscape of genius, not only from Wordsworth and Thoreau but also from Robert Burns before them.  The political campaign to defend Hetch Hetchy closely paralleled earlier political campaigns to defend the English Lake District, including opposition to Manchester’s proposal to dam Thirlmere as a reservoir in the late 1870s, as both places were defined and defended as landscapes of genius.  Muir and Thoreau became inspirations in turn for Henry Salt and the British National Park movement, as the discourse of the landscape of genius flowed in new forms back across the Atlantic and around the world.

Looking towards Windermere from above Rydal Mount. c. 1865

Third, it became clear that the landscape of genius defined nature specifically in terms of gender, class, and race in ways that have fundamentally shaped the social profile and political agenda of the environmental movement.  Women, laboring-class, and BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] authors were also sometimes identified as geniuses and associated with specific landscapes and with nature.  While the genius of male, culturally elite, and White authors became identified with the nation and nature in general, however, the genius of these other authors was seen as representative only of their specific gender, class, and race, thus undermining their ability to represent either nature or the nation in such universal and transcendent terms.  Much of my current book contrasts the landscapes of genius that formed around Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Muir with the very different landscape associations that formed around these other authors: Frederick Douglass and his Cedar Hill estate in Anacostia, overlooking Washington, D.C., which Douglass originally promoted as a landscape of genius; Susan Fenimore Cooper’s association with the Cooperstown, New York landscape as popularized by her bestselling 1850 book, Rural Hours; and the British laboring-class poets Robert Burns, John Clare, and Ann Yearsley and their landscape associations.  This cultural history demonstrates how the landscape of genius could only fully form around White, male, culturally elite authors, thus defining nature and an early environmental movement in those socially exclusive terms.

Fourth and more broadly, in order to study the tightly intertwined history of authorial reception and landscapes, I found myself developing a new relational methodology that this book both models and theorizes.  This relational approach draws on Bruno Latour, as well as on other forms of actor-network, posthuman, and systems theory, in order to trace the various kinds of networks in which literary and other cultural texts participate over time and how those cultural systems intersect with and impact other kinds of systems: social, political, economic, material, and ecological.  My book in this sense engages a wide range of archival materials from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, including not only literary texts but also tourist guides, literary pilgrimage and travel narratives, magazine and newspaper articles, place-based literary criticism and biography, landscape images, maps, literary atlases and gazetteers, promotional and educational materials, political and legal discourse, organizational and institutional records, landscape management plans, souvenir memorabilia, and so on.  In tracing connections among these rich historical archives, the book explores the complex processes through which landscapes shaped texts and their reception and texts and their reception in turn shaped landscapes—including both the material and ecological properties of those landscapes and their wider social significance. 

The book’s coda engages the ongoing historical legacy of the landscape of genius by exploring how Thoreau and Walden have been invoked in response to climate change.  The coda uses extensive research into the psychology, sociology, and politics of climate change in order to explore what impacts those appeals are likely to have and what kinds of scholarly engagement with Thoreau might generate the most effective forms of climate change action.  In making this argument, the coda also theorizes a new relational methodology, in which scholars not only trace the systemic impacts of texts in the past but also anticipate and seek to shape the future systemic impacts of their own scholarship.  This relational method offers a powerful tool to explore connections between cultural texts and social, material, and ecological systems, while also enhancing the broader efficacy and impacts of humanistic scholarship.  It invigorates the humanities as a form of self-reflexive ethical agency in which scholars seek both to understand and reshape relations among various systems, discourses, and disciplines.

Overall, Landscapes of Genius and the Transatlantic Origins of Environmentalism offers a new transatlantic history of the origins of the environmental movement and modern environmental culture.  The book demonstrates how nature became so strongly associated with the fine arts, individualism, and national high culture and why environmentalism often remains defined in terms of White, male, elite middle-class culture.  A truly ecological society, I conclude, must disentangle nature from genius, cultural nationalism, and social privilege, thus moving beyond an environmentalism of genius.