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BOOKFORUM, SUMMER 2018
Unsettled Territory
REBECCA LEBER
This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent
BY DAEGAN MILLER
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
$30.00 List Price
In nineteenth-century America, the word progress signaled limitless
expansion and domination: Manifest Destiny was in full force and
Americans rushed to exploit the country’s seemingly endless natural
resources. In This Radical Land, landscape historian Daegan Miller
returns to the era when this idea of progress first took shape. He gives
us intriguing counterexamples, writing a history of forgotten
communities that advanced a radical vision of what humans’ relationship
to the land could be: One defined not by exploitation but by
sustainability and interdependence. Surprisingly, it’s a definition that
is seemingly in opposition to today’s environmental movement, which
largely holds that nature should remain unblemished. Miller’s study is
not just a historical counternarrative, then: It’s also a way of
thinking about the contradictions of modern environmentalism, of asking
whom the movement serves, what ideas are allowed, and who is marginalized.
Miller begins with an unexpected example, detailing Henry David
Thoreau’s lesser-known work as a land surveyor. The Walden author spent
his days marking the trees along the Concord River in Massachusetts.
Thoreau had been hired to settle a land dispute, but he delivered a
seven-foot countermodern map that pictured the factory—dotted Concord
“teeming with life and human usage.” Miller explains that “what
separated Thoreau from many of his politically radical peers was his
insight that free trade and slavery, the mill and the factory,
territorial expansion and offensive war and demoralized rivers, all were
rooted in a peculiar kind of landscape.” Miller then turns to the work
of photographer A. J. Russell, who was hired by Union Pacific to
document the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Like Thoreau,
Russell fulfilled the needs of his employer while also capturing,
according to Miller, “a raw current of resistance” in his photos. He
composed these images so that the railroad line was contrasted with “a
landscape that swallowed up its inhabitants in infinite space and
drowned them in deep time.” Manifest Destiny presupposed an unruly
landscape needing to be tamed and replaced with bustling commerce. The
“jarring and strange” photographs instead prized “stasis over motion,
stillness over noise . . . isolation over society,” and revealed deeper
truths about progress.
Miller’s most compelling examples are histories of collective
communities. In the Adirondacks, black pioneers settled 120,000 acres of
abolitionist Gerrit Smith’s land, which came to be known as “Timbuctoo.”
The plan—created by Smith and endorsed by Frederick Douglass and John
Brown, who settled nearby—was to create an alternative to the racism,
poverty, and violence that defined black life in the north. While the
1840s antislavery settlers did echo the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny,
there was an important twist: Though they cleared the woods and worked
the land, “their vision of a proper human role in nature was
fundamentally different from what the promoters of Manifest Destiny
meant when they fantasized of forests falling to amber waves of grain.”
Instead, the settlers created a sustainable, equitable community, where,
Miller writes, “everything and everyone lived on a level wide open to
the sun, awash in an evergreen breeze.”
A similarly idealistic community, the Kaweah Colony, consisted of a few
dozen radicals who lived among the Sequoias in California and took
inspiration (and their name) from the Native Americans expelled from the
region by white settlers. “The idea was to create a space completely
different from the capitalistic, competitive arena of the gladiatorial
free market,” Miller explains, “one that integrated work, leisure, and
living, and which allowed for the fullest development of each individual
even as it fulfilled the social needs of security, health, and
industry.” These devotees of Karl Marx pursued a vision in which wealth
came from living inter-dependently with nature. To conservationists of
the time, who preferred to view the land as something to be “saved,”
this was a novel and disturbing idea. The colony was displaced when
Congress created Sequoia National Park. Although the ostensible goal was
to conserve the land, Miller sees a more nefarious aim. “The motive
behind the enlarged Sequoia National Park was not preservation at all—or
rather, it was,” he writes. “Preservation of the Southern Pacific’s
wealth; preservation of capitalism.”
The legacies of both Timbuctoo and Kaweah are almost entirely forgotten
today. Miller blames this historical erasure on the revisionism of early
white environmentalists, who collapsed “all notions of wilderness into
one single idea articulated by a single, homogeneous group of
Americans.” This way of looking at the natural world has long distanced
the white, upper-middle-class environmental movement from marginalized
communities—a problem that persists today. Though the histories in This
Radical Land took place long ago, the era’s conflicted ideas about
preservation, sustainability, and progress still confuse the debate over
just what our relationship to nature should be. Under the Trump
administration, offshore drilling has been heavily deregulated and the
boundaries of national monuments have been redrawn with little regard
for either ecosystems or people. But while the environmentalist movement
is quick to protest offshore drilling, it often struggles to respond to
labor and social-justice issues. Native Americans have been especially
vulnerable to the administration’s changes, with the Interior Department
passing policies that could contaminate their water and give them less
control over their territory. But their desire to responsibly use the
land, rather than admire it from afar, seemingly leaves them at odds
with some preservationists working against the Trump administration.
Miller and his essay subjects remind us that we might do better to focus
on the human side of these disastrous policies rather than to frame the
natural world as a pristine and untouchable place.
Rebecca Leber is a journalist based in Washington, DC. She is a reporter
for Mother Jones, and has written about environmental issues for the New
Republic, Grist, and other publications.
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