Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (review)

In August 1963, Sierra Club board member August Frugé (the director of the University of California Press) noted with concern a shift in his organization's mission: from defender of wild places in the American West to publisher of lavish coffee-table books. Under the near-messianic drive of David Brower, the Sierra Club was spiraling into debt, building an empire out of the hefty bricks of coffee-table nature-photography books. A Sierra Club bankrupted by self-indulgence would be powerless to fight on other fronts.

Yet there was much to defend Brower's position: tactical, historical, and philosophical. Brower had envisioned a campaign that could reach an army of middle-class Americans generating a national hymn of protest. His synthesis of mass-market book publication, gorgeous photography, and spiritual messages was creating a generation of American wilderness-defenders. Without those books and the aesthetic they forged, the United States would today look very different indeed.

The development of a popular environmentalism in America through the rhetoric of photographic imagery is the subject of Finis Dunaway's admirable Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform. Dunaway proposes a "history of environmental reform as a history of the emotions" (p. xviii). It is his insight that teases forth the often-unrecognized strain of religiosity in the tradition of visual environmentalism. It is his careful work that connects such a strain to larger traditions of American religious thinking—most notably the messianic and destinarian on one side, the jeremiad on the other.

Dunaway begins in 1919 with Herbert Gleason, lapsed Protestant minister and tract author, photographer, lecturer, and successful champion of national parks and wilderness areas. In Gleason, Dunaway discovers the linkage between a fading Protestant evangelicalism and an increasingly vivid form of religiosity invigorating the developing tradition of wilderness photography and the wilderness-preservation movement more generally. In Gleason's working method, in his writing and thinking, in his photographs, in his behavior, and in the messages that resonated in his audience, Dunaway finds the disturbing complexities of the American environmental movement to be prefigured and set in motion.

Gleason's devotion to photography, precedent-setting though it was, contained enormous contradictions. "In Gleason's hands," Dunaway notes, "the camera heightened the spirituality of the natural world while also bringing it down to size, presenting it as both a source of salvation and an item for consumption" (p. 6). This will be a recurrent theme of the book and its subject; but Dunaway isn't satisfied with this still photograph of American attitudes toward landscape and the environment. He turns to the motion-picture documentaries of the 1930s, to Pare Lorenz and Robert Flaherty, in whom he discerns a more complex position toward the dominant forces in American environmental consciousness: the tradition of "pioneer" virtues; the myth of Manifest Destiny; the worship of "progress" as an inevitable upward course, the unthinking acceptance and exploitation of technology to tame, master, exploit, and then abandon an exhausted and denuded land by heading West. (It is a weakness of the book that Dunaway does not provide a nuanced panorama of what preceded and undergirded his twentieth-century subject.) As importantly, these 1930s documentary filmmakers celebrated and critiqued the vision of a new federalism that proposed to rein in individualistic profiteering and promote a "scientific management" model of land use and preservation. Yet, as Dunaway points out, the rhetorics of jeremiad and evangelical utopianism still dominated these films.

In the 1930s, dams were agents of reclamation and preservation; they were also marvelous visual foils for the photographic and the filmic celebration of New Deal land and resource management. But dams would soon be damned, just as New Deal benevolent paternalism would come to be—or be seen as—thoughtless hubris and wanton destructiveness. The return of nature to the private, the individualistic, the personal and transcendental in the Cold War years shifted the religious emphasis in the movement, reinvoking...