SENTIMENTAL NATURE
In 1979, a young historian working on the origins of the national parks produced an astonishing thesis: that the world’s first huge, scenic parks, all of them born in America, were the result of a national insecurity complex. Alfred Runte, in National Parks: The American Experience, made the claim that Americans endorsed the idea of setting aside massive acreages of gorgeous, unclaimed federal land as an act of “scenic monumentalism.” The United States, still a young nation in 1872 when Congress sanctified Yellowstone, remained a country of uncultured upstarts and rubes – at least in the European mind. We had no great art museums, or arresting public sculpture gardens, or important libraries filled with literary masterpieces, or ornate cathedrals towering over ancient cities made of stone, but we did have monumental scenery, much of it out in the Far West. Yellowstone itself was a mindbending landscape – geyser basins and steaming fumaroles and travertine terraces covering thousands of acres, and a wild river plunging though a canyon made of roche jaune. . . . There was nothing like it in staid old western Europe. Americans perhaps had no grand cultural traditions of art, music, or literature, but God did we have scenery! Places that exhibited the jaw-dropping splendor of nature’s sculpted landscapes became beacons of patriotic pride. Within fifty years following the designation of Yellowstone, the U.S. boasted a staggering array of national parks and monuments – mountain, desert, stratovolcano, caldera plateau – established amid the stunning landscapes of the West.
At the time I read Runte’s thesis, I was struck by the analogies he drew between scenic landscapes and works of art. It occurred to me then, and occurs to me even more profoundly now, atop a lifetime of reading, that the analogy is sound – that the appreciation of landscape in the manner affirmed by national park designations really is a kind of spectatorship. You don’t participate in a painting, except in a manner of speaking; likewise, you don’t participate in a “preserved” landscape. You look at them – both painting and parkscape – from the spectator’s distance. You stand, as they say, at some remove.
That sense was richly confirmed when the first director of the National Park Service, the industrialist Stephen Mather, launched an aggressive and hugely successful campaign to build automotive highways through the parks. The vast majority of the millions who today enter places like Yellowstone, Great Smoky, or Glacier do so in their automobiles, and never leave the indoors safety and comfort of their cars. The segmented landscapes of the park stream past the windows as if the viewers were strolling down an aisle in the Louvre. Runte helped me realize that the encounter with an outdoors viewshed regarded as a kind of artwork did much to speed us along the path of our attempted divorce from the natural world. Historically, it was one important step – and a very recent one – in the long western saga of sentimentalizing nature.
Amitav Ghosh’s superb climate change book The Great Derangement (U. Of Chicago Press, 2016) carried me a layer deeper into the same realization. Ghosh makes it clear that the Western embrace of “pretty” nature is a fantasy of the privileged, and would never have been shared by the Ancients, who had a rather more rugged time with the rigors of survival on this selfsame earth. No denizen of the Mediterranean, for example, would have placed his home on the seashore merely to enjoy the view. He would have possessed too much respect for the fickle and horrifying main. The sea was not something to be placidly admired as if it were a painting framed by a picture window, but something mostly to be feared. The enjoyment of a thing so wild set at a distance assumed to be safe was one big piece of our embourgeoisment of the natural world: “nature” fully pacified, and safe to be admired from afar, something to be enjoyed only for the aesthetic pleasure it imparts.
The process of sentimentalizing our universal Mother Nature has continued to the present. Amid our hyper-industrialized urban lives, all-things-outdoors are enjoying a moment of perhaps unprecedented popularity. Nature is only ever supposed to soothe us, uplift us, contribute to our sense of well-being, and if we exhibit an opposite reaction to it – say fear or anxiety – we apparently need to be concerned for our mental stability. I recently ran across an article posted on healthline.com which spoke to the matter of “curing one’s fears of nature.” The experts at healthline.com aver that the fear of nature in any form is a sign of deteriorated mental health. They can put you in touch with professionals who promise, for example, to cure you of your thalassophobia, a forbidding Greek-rooted pathology which means fear of the sea. Healthline.com says that thalassophobia is “a specific phobia that can negatively affect your quality of life.” They are eager to assist: “If you need help overcoming your fear of the sea, a mental health professional can come to your aid. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a treatment option for thalassophobia along with exposure therapy.”
I happen to have a mild form of thalassophobia, and I have a different take. I believe that people who do not fear the sea are mentally ill, and perhaps depraved. I believe the same of people who think nothing of air travel: they literally do not think about the practice of hurtling six miles above the earth at 600 miles an hour. I, on the other hand, in the seat of a commercial jet, believe with all my heart that the only thing holding this 200-ton wingèd metal tube in the air is my sphincter.
Nature is not a landscape painting in the guise of a national park. Nature is no more benevolent than a rattlesnake, no more peaceful than the thermonuclear fusion raging in the sun. Nature is a five-mile-deep abyss in the sea; terminal velocity in gravity’s unerring grip; a dense pine forest which contains grizzly bears looking for blood and flesh. Mother Nature is the bitch who can kill you in a heartbeat and pick her teeth with your shin bones. There is nothing sentimental about it.