243
| “Don’t show the sky . . .”: Eliot Porter, quoted by David Brower in a letter reminiscing about Porter, to curator John Rohrbach of the Amon Carter Museum, September 1999.
|
245
| “the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery . . .”: Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” in
American Art, 1700–1960
, ed. John McCoubrey, Sources and Documents in the History of Art series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 92.
|
245
| much has been written to revise this idea: My own 1994 book
Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West
documents
the cost of imagining Yosemite Valley as virgin wilderness—the cost to the Euro-American imagination, Native American rights, and the place’s ecology. Ethnobotanists such as Kat Anderson and books ranging from William Cronon’s
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
to Jonathan S. Adams and Thomas O. McShane’s
The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion
to Alston Chase’s
Playing God in Yellowstone
have done more to complicate our understanding of the ecosystems we sometimes call wilderness and of the human presence in them. Recently, the Native American writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn published
Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice
.
|
246
| “The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions . . .”: William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), p. 80.
|
248
| “What has troubled me . . .”: George Marshall, letter to Eliot Porter, May 11, 1965, Eliot Porter file, carton 11, David Brower Papers, Sierra Club Archives.
|
248
| “Most of the photographs . . .”: George Marshall, letter to David Brower, May 6, 1965, Eliot Porter file, carton 11, David Brower Papers, Sierra Club Archives.
|
250
| “was supposed to influence people for conservation . . .”: Eliot Porter, letter to Marcie and Stephen Porter, December 17, 1977, Stephen Porter file, Eliot Porter Archives.
|
250
| “almost always unintentionally softens . . .”: Eliot Porter, address to Los Alamos Honor Students, p. 4, Eliot Porter Archives. Other color photogra-phers—notably Richard Misrach and John Pfahl—have explored the moral quandary implicit in the way that a color photograph likely to attract attention is likely to endow its subject with beauties of color or composition; these two artists have intentionally deployed this flaw to test ethics against aesthetics (a subject I have addressed at length in
Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach
).
|
251
| “More people currently know the appearance of Yosemite Valley . . .”: Robert Adams, “C. A. Hickman,” in
Beauty in Photography: Essays in
Defense of Traditional Values
(New York: Aperture, 1981), p. 103. As Michael Cohen has pointed out, Adams’s assertion that there are “few converts . . . to be won to the general idea of wilderness preservation” is open to ambiguity now, with the spread of corporate-financed anti-environmentalist groups (such as the Wise Use Movement and People for the West) contributing to widespread suspicion and hostility toward environmentalists among rural, conservative, and working-class people.
|
253
| “In the 1970s came, ironically, a more and more dazzling presentation of those creatures . . .”: Barry Lopez, “Learning to See,” in
About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory
(New York: Random House, 1998), p. 233.
|
254
| “I came to love my rows, my beans . . .”: Henry David Thoreau, from the “Bean Field” chapter of
Walden
, in
Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau
(New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 140.
|
256
| “two Squares, each having four Quarters . . .”: A. J. Dezallier D’Argenville, “Theory and Practice of Gardening” (1712), trans. John James, in
The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620–1820
, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), p. 125.
|
256
| “There is certainly something in the amiable Simplicity . . .”: Alexander Pope, 1713 essay from
The Guardian
, in Hunt and Willis,
The Genius of the Place
, p. 205.
|
256
| “Adam and Eve in Yew . . .”: ibid., p. 208.
|
257
| “the object of art may be to seek the elimination of the necessity of it . . .”: Robert Irwin in conversation with Ed Wortz and James Turrell in Lawrence Weschler,
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 128. Irwin designed the very peculiar garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, a garden that is a sort of sunken basin in whose center is an inaccessible hedge maze surrounded by water. The plantings are abundant, and the decision to eliminate the commanding view of the site with a descent into the wildly varied floral plantings could be construed
as a pointed rejection of the monumentally ambitious architecture and looming location on a high hill.
|
257
| “For several decades the nineteenth century had no distinctive garden style . . .”: Christopher Thacker,
The History of Gardens
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 239.
|
258
| “It was as though the creation was a jig-saw puzzle . . .”: John Prest,
The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 39.
|
259
| “The Wardian case is, with the ha-ha . . .”: Thacker,
History of Gardens
, p. 236. A ha-ha is a sunken boundary or fence, which visually eliminates the boundary though in fact it remains.
|
259
| “biocolonialism”: See, for example, Tamar Kahn in the
Johannesburg Business Day
, March 22, 2002: “For thousands of years the San have used the Hoodia cactus as an appetite suppressant and thirst quencher. It helped them endure long hunts, and resist the temptation to eat their kill before they returned to their camps. The cactus is potentially worth a fortune, because it could very well be the first plant to give rise to a commercially viable appetite suppressant drug. In the US alone, with an estimated 35-million to 65-million clinically obese people, the market for such a product is huge and growing all the time. The central issue in the tale of the cactus, the San, and the international drug companies, is what benefits will the San derive from all of this? That question made international headlines last year, when a British journalist revealed that the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) had patented Hoodia’s appetite-suppressing ingredient, dubbed P57, and granted the development rights to Phytopharm, a small pharmaceutical firm in the UK.”
|
259
| “The few plants are strangers . . .”: John Wesley Powell,
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons
(New York: Dover Books, 1961), p. 22. On the other hand, consider historian Patricia Nelson Limerick on her first trip out of the arid West in which she was born: “As I drove across Oklahoma, crossing what I later learned was the ninety-eighth meridian, discovery joined up with its usual partner, disorientation. The air became humid, clammy, and unpleasant, and the landscape turned distressingly green. The
Eastern United States, I learned with every mile, was badly infested by plants. Even where they had been driven back, the bushes, shrubs, and trees gave every sign of anticipating a reconquest. But the even more remarkable fact was this: millions of people lived in this muggy, congested world . . . and considered it normal” (“Disorientation and Reorientation,”
Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West
[New York: W. W. Norton, 2000], p. 196).
|
261
| Laura Ingalls Wilder tells a tale: Wilder’s
Farmer Boy
(1933; New York: HarperCollins, 2004) is a digressive portion of her many-volume fictionalized memoirs of growing up on the American frontier. This book deals with her husband’s childhood on a big farm in New York State, during which he raises a prize pumpkin and worries about having cheated by growing it milk-fed (and the book, as I recall thirty years later, gives details of how he fed this early Miracle-Gro formula to the vine). It must be said, however, that at the Findhorn spiritual community in Scotland in the 1970s, overgrown vegetables became an even more explicit sign of the approval of the gods than did all those county fair pumpkins and postcards of freight cars bearing a single peach of America the Promised Land.
|
263
| class war of the roses: “The war of the roses is at bottom a class war. The tracts of old-rosarians bristle with the fine distinctions, winks, and code words by which aristocrats have always recognized one another” (Michael Pollan,
Second Nature: A Plant’s Eye View of the World
[New York: Random House, 2001], p. 84).
|
263
| “Looking at my dahlias one summer day . . .”: Eleanor Perényi,
Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden
(New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 46–47.
|
351
| “Decay can be halted . . .”: in J. B. Jackson, “Looking at New Mexico,” in
Landscape in Sight: Looking at America
, ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 62.
|
353
| Victor Hugo poem quoted: Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 95.
|
360
| “This was the first of the great fires which devastated San Francisco . . .”: Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet,
The Annals of San Francisco
(New York: D. Appleton, 1855), p. 241.
|
360
| “But in proportion to the unusual depression . . .”: ibid., pp. 277–278.
|
361
| “Elsewhere such a fire might well be called a great one . . .”: ibid., p. 299.
|
361
| “Sour, pseudo-religious folk on the shores of the Atlantic . . .”: ibid., p. 333.
|
361
| “successively destroyed nearly all the old buildings and land-marks of Yerba Buena . . .”: ibid., p. 345.
|
362
| “The lives lost yesterday are not chargeable to the earthquake . . .”:
San Francisco Morning Call
, October 22, 1868.
|
362
| “The aim of Operation Gomorrah, as it was called . . .”: W. G. Sebald,
On the Natural History of Destruction
, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 26.
|
363
| “San Francisco is now developing programs . . .”: Leonard S. Mosias for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, “Residential Rehabilitation Survey Western Addition Area 2,” July 1962, unpaginated.
|
365
| Between 1960 and 1974, the number of fires tripled: Jill Jonnes,
We’re Still Here: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the South Bronx
(Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), p. 261.
|
365
| an average of 33 fires a night in the first half of the 1970s: Brian Wallis, ed.,
If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism—A Project by Martha Rosler
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), p. 288.
|
365
| “in the first year without payoffs . . .”: Marshall Berman, “New York (New York City),” in
These United States
, ed. John Leonard (New York: Nation Books, 2003), p. 299.
|
365
| “People don’t want housing in the South Bronx . . .”: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan quoted in Jonnes,
We’re Still Here
, p. 92.
|
366
| “For years, midnight fires ate up not only buildings . . .”: Berman, “New York (New York City),” p. 288.
|
366
| “In the 1970s and 1980s, New York’s greatest spectacles . . .”: ibid., p. 294.
|
366
| “whole areas look like the burnt-out ruins of war . . .”: Cardinal Terence Cooke quoted in Jonnes,
We’re Still Here
, p. 264.
|
366
| “Already in the mid-1970s . . .”: Luc Sante, “My Lost City,”
New York Review of Books
, November 6, 2003, p. 34.
|
370
| “From the outset . . .”: Sebald,
Natural History of Destruction
, p. 7.
|
Most of the essays in this book have appeared in print in earlier versions, though often in overseas or local publications, lush books few seem to have found, and other obscure places. They have been edited for this volume; some have been shortened, while in others text that had been cut from the earlier version was restored. Some essays have been retitled or have had their original titles restored.
