Thoreaus Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing

Ten Ways of Seeing Landscapes in Walden and Beyond

Ten Ways of Seeing Landscapes in Walden and Beyond j a m e s g . m c g r at h
The very first vote I cast after being elected to the Missoula City Council in 1995 was to spend $2 million to purchase 1,600 acres of hillside bordering the city to preserve it as open space. An open space bond had passed by a large margin, and the purchase had widespread support. A year later, however, when the city proposed closing access to the land during winter months in order to protect elk, we saw that support splinter . Wildlife advocates, including state and federal authorities, supported the closure. Recreation advocates, on the other hand, used to hiking, riding, and sledding on the hill, bristled at the irony of ‘‘closing’’ access to public ‘‘open’’ space. Clearly the broad support for acquiring the land came from groups of people who held substantially different values about why the city should own it. In 1976, D. W. Meinig wrote in his landmark essay, ‘‘The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene’’: ‘‘Even though we gather together and look in the same direction at the same instant we will not — we cannot — see the same landscape. We may certainly agree that we all see the same elements — houses, roads, trees, hills — in terms of such denotations as number, form, dimension, and color, but such facts take on meaning only through association; they must be fitted together according to some coherent body of ideas.’’1 He set forth ten different ways people see landscapes (acknowledging that there are more): landscape as Nature, Habitat, Artifact, System, Problem, Wealth, Ideology, History, Place, and Aesthetic. A cultural geographer, Meinig posits the ten ways of seeing as the various American cultural constructs people use to perceive (or even imagine) places. We can find these ways strongly present in our culture 149 and our nature writing. Obviously, nature writing and these cultural assumptions have a dynamic interaction, with important writers or perspectives having strong cultural influence on the one hand, and widely held cultural assumptions pervasively influencing writers on the other. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau makes use at various times of most of these cultural assumptions. It is well understood that he is a founder of American environmental writing, and therefore Thoreau develops most of the ways our culture approaches landscapes. In fact, in order to immerse himself thoroughly in his place, he sets out methodically to explore Walden Pond from as many ‘‘ways of seeing’’ as he can conceive. Thoreau’s multiple approaches are his deliberate strategy to be thorough . He writes in his Journal, ‘‘It is wise to write on many subjects to try many themes that so you may find the right & inspiring one. . . . There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth. . . . Probe the universe in a myriad points. Be avaricious of these impulses. You must try a thousand themes before you find the right one.’’2 These multiple viewpoints are, rather than another example of his self-contradictions, a technique for resolving them. Further, his environmental vision falls short of contemporary views to the degree that he cannot conceive of several ways of seeing that emerge after his time. The Ways in Walden One of the ways of seeing that Meinig articulates is landscape as place. This involves seeing that ‘‘every landscape is a locality, an individual piece in the infinitely varied mosaic of the earth. . . . Such a viewer attempts to penetrate common generalizations to appreciate the unique flavor of whatever he encounters’’ (53–54). Meinig uses the example of serious travel writers, who understand that ‘‘one may discover an implicit ideology that the individuality of places is a fundamental characteristic of subtle and immense importance to life on earth, that all human events take place, all problems are anchored in place, and ultimately can only be understood in such terms’’ (54). Fundamentally, the entire project of Walden is to present it as a place. Thoreau best zeros in on that in the final passage of ‘‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,’’ wherein he declares his intent to burrow into that one location with his mind to best come to know it: ‘‘here I will begin to mine.’’3 In his attempt to depict the place, Walden, and its meaning, Thoreau chooses to view it from as many ways of seeing as he can imagine — even 150 s o c i a l l y c...