Americans invented the idea of national parks. They sing of amber waves of grain and sublime purple mountain majesties. They’ve made the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone shrines of national identity and idealize nature in speeches, literature, painting, photography, and architecture.
And yet American lands today are torn by conflicts over science, religion, identity, and politics, with contradictory conceptions of nature at the heart of a broken national consensus.
To Native Americans, nature and culture are inseparable, and the identity and the history of a tribe is thoroughly interwoven with specific places, such as Rainbow Bridge or the San Francisco Peaks. In contrast, many White Americans embrace wilderness, defined as nature that is free of human presence, with no roads, telephone lines, or electricity. The wilderness is, to them, eternal and pre-human, an idea at odds with both Native Americans and the utilitarian concept of nature that is dominant in American society, one which treats nature as a stockpile of resources awaiting exploitation and development. In fact, there is a long American tradition that views transformations such as dams, roads, bridges, and urban growth as a harmonious completion of the original landscape. As if the river was always intended for irrigation and a mountain pass was patiently waiting for a railway line. Creationists, meanwhile, contend that the biblical flood described in the Book of Genesis carved American landscapes fewer than 10,000 years ago and that earth’s natural resources are still being created — a view completely at odds with the science of geology.
These conceptions of nature entail radically different understandings of history. Does nature represent eternity, ancestors, science, the present, the future, or a young earth? Is it to be revered, conserved, exploited, or sacrificed? A nation that identifies itself with nature begins to fall apart when it can no longer agree on what nature is.
Since World War II the relationships between these conceptions have shifted dramatically; unifying them has become even more difficult in recent decades. Today, many Americans worry about global warming, species extinction, and pollution. They question highway projects, new pipelines, strip mining, reliance on fossil fuels, and the location of waste disposal sites. At the same time, creationists have become more numerous, particularly in the Southwest. Their biblical sense of history explains the United States in terms of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism.