Virtual America: Sleepwalking through Paradise (review)

Virtual America represents a new direction for John Opie, best known for his synthesis of environmental history, Nature's Nation, and for Ogallala, a study of the paradoxes of irrigation. A well-illustrated and succinct overview, the book's dust jacket has several stereographic landscapes, signaling immediately that Opie's "virtual America" was constructed not only in cyberspace but also during previous centuries. The book explores the layered relationships between the "first world" of nature, the "second world" of the built environment, the "third world" of virtuality, and the "last world" of those who achieve a sense of place. Opie is not hostile to cyberspace per se, though he does recognize the potential perils of total immersion in it, and does not glorify it as an "electronic frontier." Rather, he frames the use of cyberspace as part of a larger quest to imagine and define sacred spaces, relying on the theories of Y Fu Tuan and Mircea Eliade, and on cognitive mapping as explored by Oliver Sacks.

The opening chapter (1-38) on the "third world" of the Internet repositions the Transcendentalists as precursors. Thus, his "Thoreau intended to prepare Americans for personal connection with authentic wilderness. Instead, he trained us to enjoy the extravagance of cyberspace's Third Nature." (24) Yet, despite such linkages, the book's organization indicates a clear preference for direct rather than mediated encounters, and for the natural world rather than the built environment. The Internet cannot substitute for immersion in and personal observation of nature. The final and most interesting chapter (149-206) does not mention cyberspace, but is a fine essay on finding authenticity through intimate knowledge of the local. The central figures are Aldo Leopold and Annie Dillard, who exemplify Tuan's topofilia. The three chapters in between review the search for authenticity through tourism (39-82), world's fairs as utopian constructions (83-106), and "sleepwalking in America" (107-148) which reviews the culture of consumption and its relation to the ideology of manifest destiny. Each chapter is a useful overview that relies largely on secondary sources. The book as a whole is more suited to a reader new to these topics rather than to the specialist.

Opie scarcely cites the journal he once edited, Environmental History, nor does he mention such scholars as Hal Rothman and Martin Melosi, nor does he refer to Alan Trachtenberg or Miles Orvell in his discussions of photography. More crucially, Opie leaves out pastoralism and the American search for a middle landscape between the urban and the wild, perhaps because that tradition elides the division between first and second nature. Likewise, he mentions neither William Cronon or Richard White nor their questioning of "wilderness" as a category. In short, the concepts of first, second, third, and last nature must be more nuanced if they are to become the basis for research. However, this book can usefully guide students to think about how Americans have continually reconstructed their sense of place as they searched for an often problematic authenticity.