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  • Mind over Matter: Social Justice, the Body, and Environmental History
  • Skylar Harris (bio)

In 1983 the New York artist Barbara Kruger released a photomontage showing the face of a female model, resting on a grassy background, with her eyes closed and covered by two leaves. Kruger completed the piece by adding the statement, “We won’t play nature to your culture.” In many ways, this image marked a turning point in America’s popular and intellectual response to the issue of the environment. Twenty-one years earlier, in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had launched a new era in the environmentalist movement, prompting many Americans to begin associating their own physical health with that of the environment. But whereas the publication of Silent Spring and the establishment of Earth Day in 1970 contributed to a far-reaching shift in the ways both scholars and laypersons thought about the practical implications of humanity’s physical engagement with nature, Kruger’s statement represented yet another approach to considering this relationship.

Rather than being born out of a concern for the physical effects of the interaction between humans and the environment, Kruger’s image emerged from a postmodern intellectual tradition [End Page 440] that sought to critically engage with the concept of cultural construction, as well as with contemporary feminist scholarship. With this image, Kruger critiqued prevailing cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity that associated women with nature and men with civilization. These dual identities, Kruger charged, served to culturally reinforce women’s exclusion from spheres of power and influence, and transformed them into passive objects, able to be viewed but unable to return the gaze.1

In addition to being notable landmarks in the history of the environment in America’s popular consciousness, Silent Spring, the first Earth Day, and Kruger’s untitled 1983 photograph also provide a noteworthy parallel to the evolution of the study of the environment’s impact on social equality, human health, and the body. The field has its roots in the study of the concrete, tangible effects of humanity’s interaction with the environment, but over time it has broadened to address a variety of abstract concepts. This includes not only the now-traditional cultural constructions of race, class, gender, but also the ontological reality of the concept of nature itself.2

One of environmental history’s first and most enduring contributions to the larger field of history is its ability to use the issue of the environment to investigate socioeconomic inequality and issues of social justice. This approach has become a popular subject for urban environmental historians, but its origins can be found in a less metropolitan context. Samuel Hays’s classic 1959 text, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement 1890–1920, made a seminal contribution to the field of environmental history. This work, which would come to shape not only environmental history but also the history of the Progressive Era, examined the ways in which reformers developed conservation policies for national parks and wilderness areas. In an effort to recreate an uncorrupted image of natural wilderness areas and enforce a conservation policy that emphasized efficiency and corporate progress over individual access and use, these reform-minded leaders ultimately privileged the land rights of large-scale land users and the middle class over more marginal populations.3

Following in Hays’s footsteps, Karl Jacoby’s Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation extends this approach through a series of case studies that examine the ways in which the conservation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries replaced local traditions of land use and management with formalized legal codes. While Hays’s national study focuses most heavily on the American West, Jacoby includes a detailed case study of the Adirondack State [End Page 441] Park in New York (which Hays’s study also includes, but does not as closely examine). Jacoby finds that, in the park’s creation in 1892, the goal of providing middle- and upper-class Americans with a retreat from the city in the form of natural recreation and wilderness conflicted directly with longstanding local land use policies. In order to...

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