In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

introduction Why Whitman? I started college in 1970, the year we celebrated the first Earth Day, two years after Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act. In my junior year, 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed. One of the first big test cases was enacted not far from the University of Tennessee where I went to school.The law posed a problem for the plans of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to dam the Little Tennessee River at a place called Tellico. In fact, TVA had already done substantial work on the dam when the new law was invoked by wildlife biologists working with people we learned to call “environmentalists,” a word whose origin dates from my college years. The Oxford English Dictionary (1972 supplement) gives 1970 as the earliest instance of the term as used to mean “one who is concernedwiththepreservationof theenvironment(frompollution,etc.)” (Killingsworth and Palmer, Ecospeak 41). It may seem that environmentalists have been with us forever, but they were a relatively new breed, or were traveling under a new name, when they enlisted the help of a rare little fish called the snail darter, which demanded free-flowing water for spawning and whose presence at Tellico stymied the mighty TVA. At the time, I was an avid hiker and bird-watcher and an English major with a special interest in Romantic nature poetry. I had been brought up with a love for outdoor life and respect for wild things.But like many young people of the day, I began to feel a deeper identity with nature, a politically charged identity in the early 1970s. My peers and I felt threatened by the sameforcesthatendangeredthesnaildarter.Inourminds,theseforcescoalesced to form what we called“the system,”or“the machine,”as in“the war machine.”As the war in Vietnam lurched toward its chaotic conclusion in 1975, the attention of a mobilized activist youth turned to the war against nature,aswesawit,awarcarriedoutbyagentslikeTVA,thepesticideindustry , the oil giants, all part of a pervasive power born during the massive technological mobilization that never wound down after firing up for World War II. President Eisenhower had called it the “military-industrial complex,” a system that only grew stronger in our nation’s stand-off with the Communist powers in the cold war years. Q Like many causes during those formative years of environmentalism, the opposition to the Tellico Dam depended partly on scientific investigation and partly on a web of political identity reinforced by metaphors and myths. The famous nature writer Peter Matthiessen invoked the war metaphor when he traveled to east Tennessee in 1979 to write an article on Tellico for the New York Review of Books. He crafted a compelling image of the green and flowing nature of Appalachia cut and partitioned by TVA’s concrete and barbed wire,patrolled by armed guards whose presence made the old farms and forests seem like a war zone. Matthiessen spoke of the opposition to the project not only by environmentalists with their snail darter but also by a much older endangered species in the region, the Cherokee Indians.The proposed dam would flood a burial ground and the site of an ancient city that the Cherokees held sacred.In Matthiessen’s view, TVA was an irresistible power of government and industry victimizing a peaceful Native people who only wanted to maintain their traditions and honor their ancestors, as well as the tiny snail darter that needed the river to live and propagate its kind, a fetish in those days for the burgeoning movements of political ecology. The opposition to the Tellico Dam reenacted a grand myth of the conservation movement, stirring the century-old roots of environmentalism with the memory of early efforts to preserve nature in the face of industrial expansion and urban growth. At the center of the myth was the legendary John Muir, the father of conservation. Muir, who entered adulthood as a talented mechanic and inventor, devoted body and mind to the culture of the machine. But a factory accident blinded him temporarily and left him to reconsider his place in the world. When his sight returned, like Paul, he was transformed.Vowing to devote his life to studying not the creations of humankind but those of God, he left his home in the northern Midwest and tramped across the continent, settling finally in the Sierra Nevada, where he formed a bone-deep identification with the high mountains and the great Sequoia trees (trees named, incidentally, for the Cherokee chief...

Share