INTRODUCTION

Reproducing nature: the technology of national parks

What do we think of when we think of America’s national parks? For most of us, national parks are natural parks – evoking images of large tracts of unspoiled wilderness, majestic mountains, spectacular waterfalls, or undisturbed forests. If asked, many of us would acknowledge and embrace the management goal adopted in 1963 by the National Park Service: that “the biotic associations within each park be maintained, or where necessary recreated, as nearly as possible in the condition that prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man.”¹ In other words, the origins of America’s national parks are usually thought to consist in the desire to withdraw or preserve particularly spectacular natural areas from the threat of social, political, and economic development, at least partly for the purpose of reminding Americans what their country was like when their European predecessors first took possession of it. Indeed it is something of a historical truism that the construction of American national identity has always been inseparable from nature. Unlike European nations, whose identity derived from a common language, ethnic or racial heritage, religion, or cultural history, the identity of the United States of America as “nature’s nation” has been grounded in large part in the land itself.² Because of this centrality of nature to American self-identity, questions of environmentalism in America have invariably taken on ideological and national significance. In America, the preservation of natural spaces has involved not only the creation of an alternative to the nation’s cultural space but also the creation of America itself.

   In claiming that nature, wilderness, or the national parks themselves are culturally constructed, I am echoing what in the past decade has become a common refrain among ecocritics and environmental historians.³ At the 1995 biennial meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in Las Vegas, for example, Susan Flader began her response to a session entitled “Nature Objectified/Nature Commodified: The Defense of Scenery” by noting the general agreement among environmental historians that nature is a cultural construction. Despite what nineteenth- and twentieth-century preservationist ideology might maintain, Flader averred, the preservation of natural scenery works to further, not to oppose, the values of the dominant culture. Speaking in the same conference’s two-part headliner session, “Reinventing Nature,” William Cronon made a similar point, arguing that the concept of wilderness does not escape the categories of culture – that there is “nothing natural about the concept of wilderness.”⁴ Contending that wilderness reproduces the cultural values its advocates seek to escape, Flader and Cronon are hardly alone in their indictment of “romantic nature as an instrument of imperial conquest.” As Lawrence Buell has noted, citing (among other examples) “The West as America,” the 1991 exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, it is now almost taken for granted that the “nineteenth-century American romantic representation of the West was built on an ideology of conquest.”⁵ For each of these three scholars, as for any number of others, the ideology of nature or wilderness preservation has been demystified, has been revealed to harbor within it the very will to power it would set out to escape.

   Countering a less critical body of primarily historical scholarship that often took at face value the claims of early preservationists (that nature offered an escape from the ideologies of progress and development that fueled American expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), recent work in environmental studies has set the stage for a revaluation of the cultural meanings of the origins of environmentalism in America. Motivated largely by the widespread acceptance of arguments for the social or cultural construction of knowledge, environmental historians have begun to rewrite the story of American environmentalism. No longer a triumphant narrative of the acceptance of concepts like the rights of nature or the intrinsic value of wilderness, the history of environmentalism increasingly tells the story of a deployment of the ideology of nature’s intrinsic value to further the social, cultural, or political interests of a dominant race, class, gender, or institutional formation. Compelling as this revisionist narrative is, however, it runs the risk of stripping nature of any particularity or specificity whatsoever – of transforming nature so completely into culture that the preservation of nature as a national park, for example, becomes indistinguishable from its transformation into a ranch or a mine or a private resort.

   In defending the particularity of different constructions of nature, my work diverges from this narrative. In so doing, I do not propose that we undo the hard-earned insights of the cultural construction of knowledge, but that we undertake the more difficult task of pursuing these insights more seriously.⁶ Granted that nature is inseparable from culture, we need to ask how national parks differ from (and intersect with) other culturally constructed entities. Further, we need to ask both how the cultural construction of nature varies historically and how it remains constant through time and across different geographical locations. In other words we need to pursue locally the more global insights of the cultural construction of nature – perhaps in something like an ecological criticism, which understands that the cultural construction of nature circulates within what could be called a discursive ecosystem. The task of such a criticism would be to trace the connections and interrelations both within the discursive practices of environmentalism and among the scientific, technological, and cultural networks through which environmentalism emerges. For it is only through such connections and interrelations that the particularity of nature can be defined.⁷

   In attempting to exemplify such a critical practice, I set out from the premise that the origins of America’s national parks can be fruitfully understood not as straightforward instances of the preservation of nature but rather as complex cultural representations or productions. I challenge the notion that “nature” is a self-identical quality, and that the creation of national parks involves establishing a boundary and declaring that inside that boundary is “nature,” while outside of that boundary is something else, say, “culture” or some other non-natural quality or essence. To establish a national park is not to put an institutional fence around nature as you would put a fence around a herd of cattle. Rather, to establish a national park is to construct a complex technology, an “organic machine” that operates according to and within a discursive formation, a set or network of discursive practices.⁸ Saying this is not to deny the matter-of-fact sense in which establishing a national park involves preserving an area of land as “natural” as opposed to (for example) converting it into a farm, a ranch, a mine, a housing development, a shopping mall, or an amusement park. Nor is it to deny the differences between what goes on inside the boundaries of a park and what goes on outside. But these differences are not intrinsic ones, differences in the essence or “nature” or quality of the land on one side as opposed to the other; rather these differences are the product of a complex assemblage of heterogeneous technologies and social practices, the aim of which is the production or reproduction of a culturally and discursively defined and formed object called “nature.” To map out the way in which national parks emerge in the last third of the nineteenth century requires the description of the relations among these parks and the various discursive formations which enable their emergence at a particular historical moment and in a particular cultural formation. It is, in other words, to insist upon the fact that the preservation of nature entailed in establishing the national parks should be seen as the preservation of culture as well – more specifically of the network of scientific, technological, aesthetic, social, economic, and other practices that makes up what we call “culture” at any particular historical moment. For in thinking of the cultural origins of our national parks, I would agree with Bruno Latour that people do not typically think of themselves as actually living in a “culture” until their customary practices are challenged.⁹ The origins of the national parks can be understood as instances of a challenge that not only allow us to define America’s culture at a particular historical moment, but also reveal or make visible aspects of that culture which might otherwise go unnoticed.

   One aspect of nineteenth-century American culture that the national parks makes visible is how nature is persistently identified with landscape. Whereas the turn to landscape painting in early-nineteenth-century France, for example, has traditionally been explained as a move away from the more elevated subjects of historical painting, in antebellum America the representation of landscape by New York School painters was understood as itself a form of historical painting in which the landscape was imbued with culturally rich iconographic and symbolic meaning (see Figure 1). Contending in an “Essay on American Scenery” (1835) that “the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness,” Thomas Cole exalts American scenery over European, precisely “because in civilized Europe the primitive features of scenery have long since been destroyed or modified.”¹⁰ Similarly in “Letters on Landscape Painting” (1855), Asher Durand urges American painters to paint American landscapes, arguing that the persistence of many “forms of nature yet spared from the pollutions of civilization,” combined with the “principle of self-government,” should furnish the conditions for the American landscape painter “boldly [to] originate a high and independent style, based on his native resources.”¹¹ For both Cole and Durand, although America’s untouched wilderness offers the opportunity for a distinctly American landscape painting, the westward “progress” of civilization across the continent suggests that this opportunity will not last forever.

   Angela Miller has mapped out the relations among landscape painting, progress, and ideas of nationalism as they evolved in mid-nineteenth-century America, arguing that such painting, particularly in New York and New England, took as its foremost cultural task the representation of the natural landscape’s role in constructing American national identity. Cole’s critique of American expansion, she argues, his refusal “to accept this emergent definition of ‘nature’s nation’ as an empire,” manifests itself in paintings that persistently work through questions of national identity, by persistently dramatizing the conflict between nature and culture in such a way as to emphasize the destructive agency of America’s social, cultural, and technological institutions.¹² Largely in response to the political conflicts of the Mexican–American and Civil Wars, Frederic Church takes a different stance towards the destructiveness of America’s westward expansion. In his monumental landscapes of Central and South America, for example, nature is depicted as the conceptual and pictorial ground for an allegory of national identity in which human and social agency is erased: “In place of Cole’s engagement of the spectator as an actor implicated in the transfomations of nature is a nature that has erased culture’s wounds.”¹³ Where Church’s paintings often represented nature as doing away with the evidence of cultural agency (see Figure 2), Durand’s most programmatic works “projected a pious belief in wilderness as the basis of national culture,” in which “wilderness served as the blank slate ready to receive culture’s imprint.”¹⁴ In Progress, or The Advance of Civilization (1853) (see Figure 3) Durand offers a paradigmatic visual portrayal of the mid-century relation between technology, nature, and American democratic progress, in which “a sense of place gives way almost entirely to an ideal vision of nationhood as it was to be realized in time and space. Here democratic social energies would harness technology to transform wilderness into a productive middle ground where nature and culture were ideally balanced.”¹⁵ By 1875, Miller concludes, the shared concern with national landscape, developed (albeit to different ends) in painters like Cole, Church, and Durand, had given way to the vicissitudes of an emerging consumer culture: “While it had one last and glorious gasp following the Civil War in the work of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, the national landscape eventually collapsed as an anachronism in an age when communal associations were increasingly marketed through new media and choreographed by new urban experiences. In such spaces as the department store, replete with exotica and historical fantasies, American identity was being redefined around private acts of acquisition and possession.”¹⁶

   Although landscape painting’s role in defining national identity may have diminished in the late nineteenth century, the same is not necessarily true of the natural landscape itself. The creation of national parks in the last third of the nineteenth century, I would argue, entails the reproduction of an American national landscape in light of the redefinition of American national identity that accompanied the rise of consumer culture. Indeed the act of setting aside parks from private acquisition and development

1 Thomas Cole, Course of Empire: Destruction

2 Frederic Church, Cotopaxi

3 Asher Durand, Progress, or The Advance of Civilization, 1853

needs itself to be understood as part of the growth of media, urbanism, and spectacle that marked consumer culture. Although more visibly manifest in urban, industrial centers of the East, consumer culture participated in the postbellum transformation of the United States “from a society of ‘island communities’ to a modern, urban-industrial nation-state” that included the trans-Mississippi West.¹⁷ This transformation laid the foundation for the establishment of “western tourism” as a “a truly national tourism,” in which the national parks played a significant role in helping to define American national identity.¹⁸ But it was not only as a tourist destination and national symbol that the West was brought together with the East after the Civil War; technology-intensive industries like mining and the railroads “made the West an integral element of the industrializing Atlantic economy.”¹⁹ Against earlier accounts of Western exceptionalism, the best of the new Western history has portrayed the region as integral to the growth of Eastern, urban America as the hub of a major industrialized nation.²⁰

By all accounts the West loomed large in the post-Civil War industrial program: as an investment arena for surplus capital, as a source of raw materials, and as a vast vacant lot to enter and occupy . . . The history of the post-Civil War West – and of the nation at large – is the story of dynamic, reciprocal, and interconnected phenomena. That is especially true of the establishment and evolution of modern capitalism and of the integration of the trans-Mississippi West into national- and international-exchange relationships. To attempt to describe change in the West as an isolated, internally homogenous process falsifies the material world; it ignores important and integral relationships involving the modern capitalist world system.²¹

Insofar as the West as a region participates in “the central technological, economic, and cultural changes that helped to initiate and define this transformation,” the origins of the national parks must be understood in the context of “the construction of a national transportation network, the emergence of a national market, and the development of a national print media” which mark post-Civil War America.²²

   To make sense of the way in which national parks participate in the production of American national identity after the Civil War, I argue that nature is not only culturally constructed, but technologically constructed – that national parks function (in the broadest sense) as technologies for the reproduction of nature. Consequently I take up the origins of the three “major” national parks – Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon – as sites whose particularity and specificity emerge from an affiliation of diverse technological practices and cultural beliefs that each of the book’s three chapters traces out. These chapters are not in any strict sense essays in the history of ideas of conservation, preservation, environmentalism, or biocentrism; the history of landscape art, aesthetics, or representation; or the history of the social, technological, economic, or political development of the American West. Rather they are essays in what I have elsewhere called cultural historicism, a way of thinking about cultural history that could claim to be discursively ecocritical.²³ These essays proceed from the assumption that the national parks need to be understood not simply by explaining how they are socially or culturally constructed, but also by looking at how certain fundamental cultural logics or metaphors (like natural agency or fidelity to nature) are worked out through the parks at the same historical moment in different discursive practices. In taking up certain American origin myths as played out across heterogeneous discourses and technologies of representation and reproduction, I hope to illuminate the way in which American cultural origins are simultaneously constructed and destabilized through the act of reproducing nature.

   In traditional accounts of the post-Civil War appropriation of undeveloped Western lands by the industrialized East, nature is characteristically defined in opposition to technology in two general senses. On the one hand, nature is understood as the raw material with which or on which technology works, and which is threatened by the industrial development of America as the nation moves westward across the continent (for example, Alan Trachtenberg’s idea of the incorporation of America).²⁴ On the other, nature is often conceived as, or in conjunction with, something like spirit, which provides a refuge or alternative space from which to mount a critique of technology, progress, or industrial capitalism (compare, say, the traditional account of Thoreau or John Muir in American environmental history, or of romanticism generally in the history of Western culture). Given these general assumptions about nature and technology, the creation of national parks in nineteenth-century America has traditionally been seen as the creation of places that are natural as opposed to technological, that are reserved, preserved, or set aside as sanctuaries within which technology (or culture, or capital) is not supposed to hold sway.

   Taking issue with this account of the origins of national parks, I argue that national parks are themselves hybrid technologies for the reproduction of nature. In the last third of the nineteenth century, insofar as nature or wilderness (defined either as raw material or as sanctuary) is understood as being transformed into cultural landscape by industrialization and incorporation, or as being threatened by the westward movement of the American nation, national parks need to be understood as technologies for the reproduction of that very nature which is being threatened and destroyed. In characterizing our national parks in this manner, I mean in the first instance that the parks are created by and employ a variety of technologies. That is, I mean to acknowledge the common-sense way in which it takes technologies to create and maintain the parks (particularly technologies of mapping and surveying, of road and trail construction, of communication, of lodging, of commerce, of land and resource management). But I mean more crucially that the parks themselves function as technologies of representation not unlike painting, photography, cartography, or landscape architecture. Constructed of and by a number of different technologies, national parks also operate in alliance with nature as complex and heterogeneous technological apparatuses. Neither gardens in the machine nor machines in the garden, national parks are machines that are made up of gardens, or gardens that function as machines. Like both gardens and machines, national parks are not self-replicating, but need tending and maintenance: trails erode or are blocked by fallen debris; roads require improvement or repair; exotic flora and fauna need to be eradicated or controlled. I am not of course suggesting that the national parks are the only such technologies in nineteenth-century America. Not only are landscape photography, painting, or illustration, for example, technologies for the visual reproduction of nature (often reproducing many of the same geographical areas or natural features that are preserved as parks), but urban parks and rural cemeteries, gardens and farms, hunting reserves and national forests are also technologies that reproduce nature according to the cultural formations and discursive practices of the time.

   Granted then that national parks are in some senses like these other cultural formations, why should we think of them as technologies of representation, instead of simply as institutions or discursive formations or cultural constructions? By thinking of the parks as technologies of representation, I would argue, we are reminded that, like all technologies, they participate in a complex, heterogeneous network of social practices, a network that is made up of human, social, and natural actors and attributes. In other words, thinking about national parks as technologies reminds us that, contrary to the way in which they have been romanticized in the varied discourses of environmental studies, national parks do not emerge in isolation from society, culture, and industry, but are part of the network of institutional structures, of discursive and material practices that make up American culture. Furthermore, in characterizing the parks as technologies, I mean to emphasize what Richard White characterizes as the labor (human, natural, cultural, and technological) involved in their reproduction of nature, the sense in which national parks are inseparable from the industrial production of material artifacts or commodities.²⁵ Indeed in the years following the Civil War, the American West became increasingly embedded not only in the networks of manufacturing, transportation, and media extending from the urban centers back East, but also in the extension of capital both from major Eastern cities and from European, particularly British, sources: “Because of a profitability crisis in Europe by the 1870s where investments in traditional industrializing sectors such as railroads were no longer returning acceptable profit margins, American financial ventures proved especially attractive.”²⁶ It is not accidental, I would argue, that national parks emerge precisely at the moment when the extension of the railroad, as well as the expansion of capital-, labor-, and technology-intensive industries like mining, make the Western landscape more accessible to and exploitable by Eastern, and increasingly European, capital. Because national parks are both natural and American, they appear both necessary and desirable at precisely the moment that nature’s appropriation by American capital is being threatened by European investment.