The idea of nature in America

Bibliographic Data

ID9684755
AuthorsLesley Marx (0000-0002-9657-293X, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, corresponding author), Leo Marx (0000-0001-5201-1658, Fellow of the American Academy since 1972, is Senior Lecturer and William R. Kenan Professor of American Cultural History Emeritus in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of “The Machine in the Garden” (1964), “The Pilot and the Passenger” (1988), and coeditor of “Does Technology Drive History?” (with Merritt Roe Smith, 1994))
Year2008
Volume137
Issue2
Pages8-21
Publication date2008-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDaedalus (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-5266 • E-ISSN: 1548-6192
PublisherMIT Press - Journals (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1162/daed.2008.137.2.8
OpenAlexW2133094124
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited1

Daedalus Spring 2008 The idea of nature is–or, rather, was– one of the fundamental American ideas. In its time it served–as the ideas of freedom, democracy, or progress did in theirs–to de1⁄2ne the meaning of America. For some three centuries, in fact, from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the closing of the Western frontier in 1890, the encounter of white settlers with what they perceived as wilderness –unaltered nature–was the de1⁄2ning American experience. By the end of that era, however, the wilderness had come to seem a thing of the past, and the land of farms and villages was rapidly becoming a land of factories and cities. By 1920, half the population lived in cities, and as the natural world became a less immediate presence, images of the pristine landscape–chief icon of American nature– lost their power to express the nation’s vision of itself. Then, in the 1970s, with the onset of the ecological ‘crisis,’ the refurbished, matter-of-fact word environment took over a large part of the niche in public discourse hitherto occupied by the word nature. Before the end of the century, the marked loss of status and currency suffered by the idea of nature had become a hot subject in academic and intellectual circles. Reputable scholars and journalists published essays and books about the ‘death’–or the ‘end’–of nature; the University of California recruited a dozen humanities professors to participate in a semester-long research seminar designed to “reinvent nature”;1 and the association of European specialists in American studies chose, as the aim of its turn-of-the-century conference, to reassess the changing role played by the idea of nature in America.2 Leo Marx

Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Political science · American Environmental and Regional History · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics

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