Beyond Iconic and Ironic In U.S. Environmental History

Thirteen authors in two new monographs and an essay collection grapple with the “nature-culture paradox,” the entanglement of two slippery categories that many Americans have long constructed as separate (Shaffer and Young, p. 1). The scholars here reject the project of locating a pure nature within human history, but all investigate the ways in which Americans over time deployed nature in opposition to culture with problematic and fascinating results in places from Rocky Mountain National Park to rural Georgia, and in the representational realms of politics, science, culture, and society.

Over a forty-year ongoing debate, U.S. scholars of the environment have staked out a range of methodological and intellectual positions along a spectrum, from a full materialism on one end to a full cultural idealism on the other. On the natural/material end, scholars foreground a nonhuman nature that provides a stable template from which human meddlers may draw ethical norms regarding their actions within their physical environments. At the far cultural end, humans construct all knowledge and understanding of the physical world, and thus “nature” itself; they have no knowledge of the nonhuman world outside cultural mediation and cannot locate an unmediated nature as either historical agent or as a source of unconstructed norms (Shaffer and Young, p. 8). Full agreement is unlikely. In 2004, Richard White dismissed concerns amongst the materialists that a second generation, fully engaged in the “cultural turn,” might lose focus on a “material ‘nature’” in their embrace of “discourse, narrative, and hybridity.”¹ Paul S. Sutter himself, in a 2013 state-of-the-field essay, shared concerns that this hybrid nature/culture might be too easy an out, producing intellectually agile but muddled stories unable to meaningfully help anyone—let alone historians—“chart paths of action” in an imperiled present and future.²

All of the authors under review here (including Sutter) directly engage these debates, but also consciously move beyond them—not through further theoretical wrangling, but by using careful research, creative analysis, and clear language to tell good stories that suggest new methods and questions. In their detailed histories of Coyote Valley in Rocky Mountain National Park and Providence Canyon State Park in Stewart County, Georgia, Andrews and Sutter occupy the more material end of the scale than Shaffer, Young, et al. in Rendering Nature. Their deep archival work and mastery of scientific understanding reveal the specificity, contingency, and historical importance of particular soils, plants, animals, and human communities in these particular places and times; in these histories, the matter itself mattered. Elk, willow, beaver, soil, and rain all carried physical properties observed, understood, and narrated by humans. Yet they remained both nonhuman and absolutely central to events. Even with focused attention to the soil and plants underfoot as real entities beyond human construction, however, Andrews and Sutter argue against a normative, separate, balanced, or self-regulating nature as an autonomous agent and a source of moral guidance for human actions. Sutter asserts that, given the history unearthed (literally) at Providence Canyon, humans cannot look to nature for a moral order or draw any single moral truth about Southern agrarian and social practices as good or evil. “We ought to move beyond the moral authority of a nature before history,” he concludes (Sutter, p. 191). Andrews concurs, revealing the inherent trickiness of finding the moral of the story within complex ecological systems. The story he and others assumed about Coyote Valley—that climate change will destroy the subalpine forest—may not, Andrews asserts, end up being the central narrative of this deep micro-environmental history...