MAVE Dissertation,
Lancaster University 2001

The Role of Culture in the Perception
of Nature in the United States

Martin J. LeBlanc

Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank everyone at the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at Lancaster University for their support and encouragement during my wonderful year of study. Bronislaw Szerszynski, John Foster, Marjeta Cevc and Phil Macnaghten provided valuable insight and constructive criticisms throughout the year that have helped my ideas evolve. I would especially like to thank my dissertation advisor Mark Toogood for always challenging me to improve and opening my eyes to an entirely new world.

This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of Mandy Wright who constantly provides me with inspiration.

I would like to express my deepest thanks to both of my parents for their love and support. This work is dedicated to my Father Ronald LeBlanc for his patience and unyielding tough love no matter what the circumstances. I would not be at this point without you. Thanks.

Cover Art: Thomas Cole The Voyage of Life: Youth 1839

Introduction……………………………………………………………………… 5
Ideas of Nature……………………………………………………………………..7
	Nature/Culture Paradox……………………………………………………...8
The Ways Humanity Perceives Nature…………………………………………..10
	Sight and Cultural Identity…………………………………………………11
	The Use of Language in the Perception of Nature…………………………14
Idea of Wilderness………………………………………………………………...16
	Definitions………………………………………………………………….16
	Modern Perceptions of Wilderness………………………………………... 17
	Historical Transformation in the Conception of Wilderness………………. 18
Nature and the Cultural Landscape………………………………………………20
	Modernity……………………………………………………………………21
	Romanticism…………………………………………………………………21
	The Sublime and the Picturesque…………………………………………….23
The Social Construction of Nature in America……………………………………25
	The American Conservation Tradition………………………………………..23
	The Rise of Idealised Nature through Cultural Modes………………………..29
	James Feminore Cooper……………………………………………………….30
	Hudson River Painters…………………………………………………………31
	Romantics and Transcendentalists……………………………………………..33
	Urban America…………………………………………………………………36
	The Symbolism of the Natural…………………………………………………38
The Modern American Cultural Landscape………………………………………41
	Environmental Perception and Cognition…………………………………….41
	American Pop Culture and the Symbolism of Nature………………………...42
	Changing Landscape of the Suburb…………………………………………...43
	The Cinematic Portrayal of Nature……………………………………………44
A Case Study in the Changing Cultural Perception of Nature in America………46
	Falling Down…………………………………………………………………..50
	The Artificial American Landscape……………………………………………53
A Model for the American Cultural Landscape…………………………………….55
Conclusion: The Role of Mediated Forms in the Perception of Nature…………...59
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...63

	 

Introduction
In this dissertation I show the direct influence culture has had on American perceptions of nature from settlement to the present. This influence has become stronger in the post-industrial era as most American interpret nature through artificially created, mediated forms such as television or from inside an automobile. This, in turn, has created a modern American culture that for the most part embraces the idea of nature without truly experiencing it firsthand or understanding its importance to the very survival of humanity as we know it. In order to reestablish a connection between humans and nature, I advocate experiencing nature through direct contact and with the least number of mediated forms possible. This process has the potential to create an understanding within each of us of the integral connection between humanity and nature.

As we shall see, American perceptions of nature do not fit one single definition and culture has been the central factor in shaping American awareness of their natural environment. I will begin by examining the varying concepts around the word “nature” and its duality with culture. I then proceed to a discussion of the different ways in which humanity perceives nature, focusing primarily on visual and linguistic forms. Next I look at the idea of wilderness, exploring and its various definitions and perceptions in American life. This brings me to an analysis of nature and the cultural landscape as well as their impact on society. I look at how man and nature have interacted throughout history by an examining different ideas and movements, from the biblical era through Modernity, Romanticism, the Sublime and the Picturesque. I look through a historical lens at the American understanding of and identity with nature through cultural modes. My examination outlines the role played by literature (James Feminore Cooper), painting (Hudson River Painters) and philosophical movements (Transcendentalists) in the change in perception of nature in America from a negative model to a positive one. I show the American transformation from a rural nation to an industrialized, urban one and its part in the growth of the cult of nature. I then use specific examples from pop culture and their role in separating the everyday American from nature by the use of mediated forms that blur the line between the artificial and the natural. These examples include: 
•	a look at the changing landscape of America
•	the impact pop culture has on American environmental perceptions
•	cinema and different cultural modes of nature
•	a case study on the movie Falling Down (1992), which highlights the ‘urban’ wilderness theory
•	a survey on environmental perception in two disparate American groups (sawmill workers and EARTHFIRST! Members)

I conclude my dissertation by calling for Americans to seek out experiences with nature that are not directed and influenced through mediated forms. I maintain that culture plays a powerful role in how Americans perceive their natural environment; that perception, in turn, creates their value system towards it. 

Ideas of Nature
The sense of the natural has always correlated with our understanding of human culture and history. People have interpreted nature in countless different ways since the beginning of time. Nature, many theorists maintain  cannot be constructed as one singular nature, but must be interpreted as a diversity of contested natures (Macnaghten/Urry,1:1998). Philosopher Raymond Williams observes that the term ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex and difficult word in the English language; that the idea of nature contains within itself an enormous amount of human history; and that our current understandings of nature derive from an immensely complicated array of ideas linked to many of the key concepts of Western thought, such as God, Idealism, Democracy, Modernity, Society, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and so on (Macnaghten/Urry,8:1998). These assertations may be true, but have we put too much emphasis on the different interpretations of nature and failed to explore if there is one definition of nature that is above any cultural constructions. Ulrich Beck has declared that “nature itself is not nature: it is a concept, a norm, a recollection, a utopia, an alternative plan (Beck, 21:1992). Bill McKibben, in his widely read book The End of Nature, outlined with numerous examples that we are living in an artificially created nature that is controlled by us. While both of these interpretations have validity, why does nature, artificial or not, still play a major role in the consciousness of the modern day American citizen?

In looking at the idea of nature we must take into account all of the different meanings that have been placed on it throughout time. In modern usage, landscape and scenery can be used almost interchangeably with nature. But this confluence is achieved at a price for by sharing company with scenery and landscape, nature is ceding most of its semantic domain (Tuan,132:971).  In the United States, the word “wilderness” is used presently to describe ‘pristine’ nature, but many contest this supports the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the natural. It is interesting to note that the idea of wilderness being pristine nature has come to be the very antithesis of its meaning during the formative years of American society where it was seen as evil and was pushed out to the margins of society. This illustrates the dichotomy of the “word” nature and our many perceptions of it.

Nature/Culture Paradox
The sovereign theory of nature in our time has been one of process, struggle, unending variation  (Eagleton, 94:1999). Just as our perceptions inform us that there is more to the world than our perceptions, an attentive reading of culture suggests that there is more to the world than culture.” Karl Marx argued that a “will to power was prior to culture” and what gives birth to it is not meaning but need. Does this argument work in defining nature? Has nature been created by humans because of our need for aesthetic pleasure and a subculture that is outside the everyday perceived cultural norms which are rigidly structured and controlled by us? Nature is just not the other of culture. It has a weight within it. 
Nature and society throughout most of time have been looked at as rivals. Modernity involved the belief that human progress should be measured and evaluated in terms of the domination of nature by society, rather than through any attempt to transform the relationship between the two. This theory created a culture that believed humans are fundamentally different from and superior to all other animal species; that societies can determine their own destinies; that a singular nature is vast and presents unlimited opportunities for exploitation by human societies; and that the history of each society is one of unending progress through overcoming the resistances of the natural world (Glacken:1967). The present day perception of nature is dominated by capitalist technocentrism and the authority of countries intent upon establishing themselves in a world dominated by the free market and the notion of globalisation. The antithesis of this technocratic outlook towards nature would be the Marxist political economy interpretation of nature, which views labour as the centre of society-nature relations: it is labour that allows both the use and exploitation of nature, it is labour that produces environmental transformations, and it is labour that creates human consciousness (Phillips,236:2000) 

But this theory has been disputed by many, including Habermas, who argues for a reconstruction of Marxist theory away from an exclusive emphasis on labour towards a recognition of the communicative aspects of social life (Habermas,1979).. Here lies the key in the cultural/natural divide. Social institutions and social interaction have helped us frame the way we look at nature in a certain context. To quantify the worldview on nature into capitalistic or socialist theory is to miss the point that forms of our created cultures may help us ignore the true power that nature holds over us. We live in a world that gives us enough artificial pleasure to last a lifetime and help create a divide between humanity and nature. But this construct obstructs a simple truth: if the degradation of the earth’s resources does not stop, we will follow the path of many other species and find ourselves extinct.

The Ways Humanity Perceives Nature
Nature is filmed, pictured and talked about everywhere. From whale murals that dot cities throughout North America to popular television shows like the Crocodile Hunter that take us to natural wonders around the world.  Alexander Wilson writes that in “the broadest sense of the term, landscape is a way of seeing the world and imagining our relationship to nature. It is something we think, do and make as a social collective” (Wilson,14:1992). But how do humans come to know what any such nature is like? Ulrich Beck argues that in many ways in modern society we are unable to use our sensory powers to grasp the effect of the natural on us. The illustration of such natural risks can be seen in the form of nuclear radiation which is an artificial creation made by us in just the last seventy-five years. It is a risk that cannot be directly touched, tasted, heard, smelled or especially seen. As Beck argues about Chernobyl:

We look, we listen further, but the normality of our sensual perception deceives. In the sense of this danger, our senses fail us. All of us…were blinded even when we saw. We experienced a world, unchanged for our senses fail us. All of us…were blinded even when we saw. We experienced a world, unchanged for our senses, behind which a hidden contamination and danger occurred which was hidden from our view(cited from (Macnaghten/Urry, 106:1998).
 
This natural risk, while not realistic to us by our sensory capabilities, has been played out in the heavily watched television movie The Day After (1984), which told the story of a nuclear war and its effects on people and the natural world in gruesome detail. This provides the perfect example of how in a modern society ripe with artificial pleasure, we can create a visual simulation of a natural risk that cannot be directly sensed by us. 

We sense nature not just by our sight, but also by touch, smell, hearing and even taste. Macnaghten and Urry argue that “different ways of sensing are organized around the modalities of space and time, which form, mediate and refract the senses” (Macnaughten/ Urry,106:1998). They highlight the importance of human senses and their role in the perception and interpretation of different natures.  A human being perceives the world through all of his/her senses simultaneously. The information about the world potentially available to humans is immense.

Sight and Cultural Identity
 In modern society man has come to depend more on sight than in the past (Tuan,11:1970). Sight has long been regarded as the noblest of the senses, as can be seen by observing the colorful outfits of royalty throughout the Middle Ages. American wilderness in the eighteenth  and nineteenth centuries was observed through a visual lens, that put God at the center looking down at the natural world he created. There have been intensely complex interconnections between a visual discourse and the understanding of nature as something that is separate from human civilization. Philosopher Michel Foucault claims that “man is an invention of recent date and that man is one who sees, observes and classifies as the notion of resemblance gives way to that of representation of what Augustine terms the ‘lust of the eyes’ (Macnagten /Urry,112:1998).  

The idea that humanity lusts through its eyes can be seen in the commercialisation of nature in the modern era. While humanity continues to drive more and consume more, people also have nature scenes as computer screensavers and demand to visually observe the sublime. A good example of this can be seen in the state of Texas, which ranks 49th out of the 50 states in environmental spending on preservation of land, but spends the most money of any state in the United States on a highway cleanup campaign so people who are driving and polluting the air can have a beautiful landscape to observe. This paradox shows the true power that the visual plays in shaping our understanding of the natural. Lake poet John Ruskin claimed that the ‘the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something’ (Lang,153:1999) But this power of the visual overwhelms in many cases the true ecological damage that is taking place that cannot be observed through a simple glance. 

The way that many of us observe nature in the modern era is through a strong visual stimulus. Standard environmental images now shown on television include oil slicked birds, traffic congestion and smokestacks. The world is fast becoming consumed and used up by our appetite for visual images (Sontag:1978). Andrew Ross has established the connection between the environmental movement and the use of scenes of degraded nature to mobilise sympathy, support and action for their causes. These images may be the most successful way of rousing and generating a public outcry. The word “Exxon Valdez” in the late 1980’s  became synonymous with environmental degradation when that ship ran aground at Prince William Sound in Alaska. The outpouring of public outrage was stirred up by graphic images of oil-slicked birds and beautiful purple sunsets scarred by dirty tar coming in wave after wave. The environmental movement welcomed the media in to examine for themselves the disaster by meeting them with packets outlining the tragedy and showing images of the first dead birds and seals. This caused the media to focus right away on the emotional appeal of nature being disturbed. As Susan Sontag points out, “images are more real than anyone could have supposed (Sontag:1978)”. 

Our cultural identity in turn, has so influenced our perception that a person may be able to see things that are non-existent. A native of Prince William Sound may not have seen the Valdez incident through such an emotional lens but rather an ecological one. This lens may have been formulated from a native’s complex attitude towards images that derives from their total immersion in their local environment (Ross,1994:175). A visitor, in this case the media and their viewers or readers, used just their eyes to compose pictures. These pictures provided the lens through which the Middle American (and, for that matter, all viewers) perceived the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The influence of sight plays a major role in our society and has been a basis for epistemology and Western scientific thought. Sight is what has led us to have an aesthetic appreciation of nature. Vision has had an enormous influence in the disembodying of people’s relationship with nature (Macnaghten/Urry,132:1998)

The Use of Language in the Perception of Nature
Language also plays an important role in shaping how humanity reflects upon and observes nature.  It is both the reflector and shaper of social (and possibly natural), reality. Historian Richard White has argued that the use of scientific language in describing nature has led humanity to suffer from a “failure to recognize the role of value judgments and beliefs; according to White, we are in danger of turning “culture into superstructure in the old vulgar Marxist sense” (White:299).   While scientific writing in most cases does not allow the reader to render value judgments on the natural, the opposite can be said about modern nature writing. Aldo Leopold, the forester turned philosopher, who has become in some circles a prophet for the modern environmental movement, expressed the natural in a poetic prose which can be considered as the antithesis of scientific writing. A good example of this can be seen in one of his most famous passages:

When our rifles were empty the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes-something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then and full of trigger-itch. I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean a hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the fierce green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain would agree with such a view (Leopld,130:1949).

Leopold uses the device of personification here to render a biota, itself represented by the mountain, to be more sympathetic to the reader than it otherwise would be. The passage turns on the creation of an individual “old wolf” with whom the narrator bonds and whose death affects him and us because she has become a subject (Shumway,262:2000). 

This use of descriptive language in describing nature follows the tradition of the Romantics and Transcendentalists who first introduced Americans to graphic descriptions of nature’s sublime beauty. This was a significant development in the United States since their artistic use of language in describing nature entailed a deployment of an image repertoire (American Adam) that could interconnect an exceptional national subject with a representative national scene (Virgin Land) and an exemplary national motive (errand into the wilderness). The composite result of the interaction of these images was the creation of a mythological entity-Nature’s Nation-whose citizens believed, by way of a supreme fiction called natural law, that the ruling assumptions of their national compact (Liberty, Equality, Social Justice) could be understood as indistinguishable from the sovereign creative power of nature (Mazel,xvi:2000). From the beginning of the formation of the United States, culture has played a major role in establishing nature’s identity in the minds of its citizens. The lenses may vary but the surface of the landscape is not passive, it is given a constitutive role as the stage set for the human drama itself. (Cosgrove:1990).

The Idea of Wilderness
Definitions
The word “wilderness” has been used throughout time to explain natural phenomena. Its meaning has at times been as complex as the word “nature”. But in the modern day its definition can be ascertained from the US Wilderness Act of 1964. Rarely will one find a political and even further legislative definition that adequately describes modern humanity’s definition of a word, but in this case it works: 

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain (Callicott,123:1998).

The origin of the word wilderness is very likely wil(d)deorness, which means the place of the wild deer in the Old English version of the word. In this word and in its Germanic predecessors, such as Wildern, the meaning approximates our current definitions of wilderness as a savage and uninhibited place left to nature (Simmons,160:1993). While these are the  working political and linguistic definitions of wilderness, it is harder to describe individual perceptions of wilderness. Roderick Nash explains the term wilderness as “designating a quality that produces a certain mood or feeling in a given individual and as a consequence may be assigned by that person to a specific place. Because of this subjectivity a universally acceptable definition of wilderness is elusive” (Nash,1:1973). This outlines the paradox of the word wilderness: it can be designated or perceived differently by anyone but maintains its status as ‘ideal’ or ‘pristine’ nature in the modern era. In the wilderness, the non-human world is undefiled and even paramount. This can lead to another polarity, that of human attitudes towards an unaltered state of nature (Simmons,162:1993).

Even in the modern political definition of wilderness there has been a change in what can be seen as '‘wilderness’. When the Wilderness Act was written into law in 1964 there was no debate about whether the Bureau of Management land should be designated as wilderness. BLM land was made up mostly of arid dry Western lands that lacked the majestic landscapes of mountains and rambling rivers that fit perceptions of wilderness at the time. By the time the next major bill discussing wilderness appeared, the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, desert lands were vehemently argued by many as ideal wilderness areas. What this stark contrast makes clear is that the meaning of wilderness is not a fixed one, but a changing one, evolving as values within Western society change (Hays,44:1998). 

Modern Perceptions of Wilderness
Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the word wilderness can be associated with several different meanings, but the majority of them, derive it as a source of pleasure. Pristine and solitude are just two words that are used to describe the modern day perception of wilderness. “Pristine” suggests that wilderness is seen as nature in its true form, free from humanization. Solitude and wilderness have come together more in the modern era as many now search for the peace and tranquility an untouched wilderness can offer. Eco-tourism is a booming industry today as humans look to isolate themselves from each other by finding their ‘true’ self in pristine nature (wilderness). This conception of wilderness lies in stark contrast to how it was perceived by humans in the eras before the modern one. It is described in the Bible, for instance, with a sharp negative bent. On the one hand, it is a place of desolation, the unsowed land frequented by demons: it is condemned by God. Christ was tempted by the devil in the wilderness (Tuan,110:1973). On the other hand, (and interestingly in line with the modern era perception of wilderness) it could be used as a “place of refuge and contemplation.” But, in general, wilderness has been seen until the modern era as separate from man, a roadblock to his attainment of success. If paradise was humankind’s greatest good, wilderness was its greatest evil (Nash,1968:9). 

Historical Transformation of the Wilderness
This ideology that shaped early Christian thought and led to the taming of the European wilderness was critical in shaping the minds of the first settlers of America. For the first hundred years of the American nation, wilderness was still seen as a barrier to the development of the state. This attitude has changed during the twentieth century as pop culture has embraced the ‘cult’ of wilderness. Why do humans and specifically modern middle class Americans, identify with wilderness and demand that it be protected? It is an interesting paradox that we identify wilderness as ideal nature while urban areas, once embraced as the epitome of a successful civilization, are now identified by many as ‘scary’ and ‘unforgiving’ places where one should not attempt to be. It seems that we have now classified our once proud urban areas as modern wilderness wastelands. But what this paradox shows is that wilderness cannot be defined objectively: it is as much a state of mind as a description of nature. As a state of mind, does true wilderness exist only in the sprawling cities? In order to understand this transformation in human perception we must look back at how humans have interpreted nature and interacted with it throughout history.

Nature and the Cultural Landscape
Humans live in two different worlds: (1) an ecological world in which we have basic metabolic requirements analogous to any other forms of life; and (2) a psychological world in which our cognitive faculties have enabled us to construct complex cultures (Simmons,48:1993). From the beginning humans have influenced the natural environment which surrounds us and, conversely, vice versa we have had our culture influenced by the natural environment. But a constant thread that has run through history is the human fascination with the natural. As stated earlier, the Bible put forth an ethic of using the land for human needs. As John Passmore outlines, “by the time the Genesis stories were composed –in Mesopotamia-man had already embarked on the task of transforming nature. In the Genesis stories man justifies his actions. He did not set about mastering the world-any more than he set about multiplying-because Genesis told him to. Rather, Genesis salved his confidence” (Passmore:1974). Passmore is correct in his analysis of Genesis. It outlined a clear picture of how humans should interact and perceive nature. It allowed humanity to separate itself from the natural and look a it as a resource to be exploited in the name of advancing civilization. This attitude ran from the Paleolithic to Neolithic culture and beyond. But humans were still not automatically inclined to produce a devastating effect upon the natural world. Many of the stereotypes formed in history continued on through the birth of modernity, when humans sped up the process of subduing nature for short-term economic benefits.

Modernity can be understood as a historical movement that begins with the Renaissance and extends to the present in the form Post-Modernism. Modernism has been the ideological cutting edge that, reinforcing the Judeo-Christian perspective on nature and time, led to the wholesale conversion of first the European and then the American wilderness into civilization (Oeschalger,68:1991). Modernity led to an ideological conversion of the natural into material culture. Unlike in former eras in human history, modern human beings think of themselves as existing without natural limits. We have created the limits now set upon humans as a system of laws and shared social norms that the majority follows. Modernity has not included nature as a shared entity with humanity; instead it has separated us more than ever from nature by creating a world full of artificial pleasures and economic pluralism which demands that nature be looked at as a resource for our consumption. But no matter what sense of order modernity has tried to impress upon humanity, the channels through which societies receive their messages about the environment are becoming ever more important. Through them humanity can see nature in a different mediated form than in purely economic terms. 

Romanticism
The view of nature as sublime can be traced to the Romantic idea of nature. This view developed in urban areas where artists and intellectuals enhanced the idea of wild nature. Tales of the New World now being told by Europeans, accentuated the desire for the wild, the primitive (Oeschalager,110:1991).  Roderick Nash offers a useful summary of the Romantic idea of wilderness, arguing that “in regard to nature Romantics preferred the wild. Rejecting the meticulously ordered gardens at Versailles, so attractive to the Enlightenment mind, they turned to the unkempt forest” (Nash,53:1973). The solitude and freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation. The Romantic wilderness was also much more than this as it has tremendous social implications as well. The philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau’s concept of the natural man held that humanity was born free yet everywhere they are in chains. Rousseau believed that the state, science and other elements of culture, including property and law, had corrupted the human estate; the true path to happiness and well-being lay in finding the way back to a natural existence (Des Jardins:1997). Romanticism led many in the upper reaches of society to visualise wild nature as an oasis, free of the ills of civilisation. Romanticism did not see the human animal as evil but rather civlilisation was a distorting element that turned humans against each other.

While Romanticism played an important role in transforming many elite perceptions of nature (from an evil entity that should be conquered to one the held sublime beauty), it was not as successful at changing the working class perception of nature. By the time Romanticism had arrived, many of the peasantry in western Europe found themselves progressively liberated from the burdens of serfdom, acquiring personal freedom, the commutation of work service and, in many areas, release from the feudal extractions that could so burden their capital resources (Dodgson:1987). The opening of the market to this new class fueled a rush on capitalising on existing natural resources. The working class did not have the time to bemoan the state of society and wish for a return to the natural; instead they saw nature as an obstacle between them and survival in an increasingly competitive capitalist market. I have outlined the Romantic tradition towards nature because it was so critical in shaping modern perceptions of nature. It was the first sign of the deep divide which still pervades modern interpretations of nature: the divide between urban elite class and the rural working class. As Simon Schama has expressed it “born from the oxymoron of agreeable horror, Romanticism was nursed on calamity (Schama, 450:1996).

 The Sublime and the Picturesque
Two theories arose out of Romaticism, the sublime and the picturesque, which still play a practical role in shaping the modern perception of nature. Edmund Burke in 1757 adumbrated a theory of the sublime and beautiful, the sublime inspiring a fear which fills the mind with great ideas and stirs the soul (such as a storm), the beautiful resting primarily on love and its associated emotions, refreshing the spirit in a different way (). The sublime involved an intense emotional reaction to landscape, to the dizzying claustrophobic fear induced by height, the rapid movement of water and especially overhanging rocks and crags that were seen as immensely threatening to visitors (MacNaughten/ Urry,114:1998). The sublime brought into focus viewing nature as a spectacle. Nature came to be seen during this time period as scenery, views and perceptual sensation. 
The other theory that grew out of this period was that of the picturesque. It is difficult to define the picturesque but it can be seen as the antithesis of Burke’s sublime for it rejects a self-conscious design and system and recommends instead irregularity, variation, decay and wildness in ‘natural’ appearance as sources of aesthetic pleasure (Copely/Garside:1994). William Gilpin, an English clergyman and the first proponent of the picturesque, was the butt of romantic disgust for trying to contain nature in a picture frame. But looking at it from a modern perspective only Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime evoked an immediate response from their own generation and continues to this day to shape modern interpretations of nature. The thrust of Gilpin’s argument is to claim the best of nature is above improvement. Both of these theories played a critical role in shaping the view of nature in Europe and especially England in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It was a trickle down effect as the working class was the last to embrace the sublime and picturesque, but both theories went a long way in establishing ideas on human perceptions of nature.

The Social Construction of Nature in America
While Europeans were laying the groundwork for theories that would eventually arrive on the shores of North America, the New World was busy growing and developing at a rate yet unseen by humanity. American settlers from Jamestown to the Pilgrims found the New World to be harsh and full of savages. William Bradford a Pilgrim, recorded his dismay at finding Cape Code wild and desolate. He lamented the Pilgrims’ inability to find a vantage point “to view from this wilderness a more godly country to feed their hopes” (Nash,1968:27). This tradition was in line with the European tradition of seeing nature as morally impure. American settlers also faced a daunting landscape that had not undergone thousands of years of humanisation to make it hospitable. Instead they saw a land blessed with an abundance of natural resources but also possessing an intimidating persona as an entity where nothing is “inhabited except but hellish fiends, and brutish men, that devils worshiped. American colonists sensed that they battled wild country not only for personal survival but also in the name of nation, race and God” (Nash,1968:24). 

This bias that early Americans held against the wild was helped by cultural constructions that framed nature as a resource that should be used but not protected. Singh observes that humanity can exist in a variety of ecosystems and is able to adapt itself to varying external conditions. This theory has been labeled ‘bio-cultural’ and fits in well with how early American settlers adapted to the natural environment: “The adaptation to the environment takes different forms and involves different environmental conditions. Culture has made man’s mechanisms for adaptation even more specialized than his physiological tours” (Singh:1980)These mechanisms that European culture had presented the settlers helped them shape the new environment they were now part of.  

The American Conservation Tradition
Two main traditions of thought on conservation of nature followed the new settlers from Europe. The first tradition prevalent in Western thinking and action was stewardship, an idea that was grounded in the teachings of the Bible. It was the antithesis of many of the ideas laid out by the Book of Genesis for it stated that God was creating animals to be companions of man and instructing him to manage and protect the Garden of Eden and all of the animals in it. Stewardship clearly flies in the face of the limitless exploitation that was clearly taking place in early colonial America. But what stewardship did is guide many early American conservationists such as John Muir and George Perkins Marsh.  The third conservation notion that had a place in early American interpretations of nature and continues on to this day is human cooperation with nature. This tradition certainly evolved out of the stewardship tradition, but its title is as ambiguous as one would assume. This tradition is still dominant in America today because it can be framed in so many ways. Some of its notions would fit modern-day deep ecologists, while it can also be framed to be used as promotion for advocates of the wise-use movement. The basic notion is this premise is that people want their surroundings to be of maximum effort (Redman,22:1999). To some this might involve agrarian transformations, to others it might involve designation of a sacred grove, while yet to others it may mean reforestation. This tradition has been at the forefront of the American interpretation of the natural and has helped create the paradox of the American attitude towards nature.

Through its early settlement and spanning the creation of the United States of America 
Utilitarianism was the dominant tradition of American interaction with nature.
The United States was trying to introduce itself on the world stage by corralling
the numerous natural resources that it possessed. The general attitude of Americans at 
this time is put forth in the letters of St John de Crevecoeur:  “We now hold an immense 
country filled with houses, good roads, orchards and meadows, and bridges when a 
hundred years ago all there was here was wild, woody, uncultivated”(Merchant138:1993)  
 There was a distinct pride Americans shared from their conquering 
of the natural to create a society based upon a free market of goods. With the 
establishment of the United States, many citizens began a westward expansion that would 
span until the end of the century. It appears the universal disposition of Americans to
 migrate to the western wilderness was to enlarge their dominion over nature 
(Turner,1920:7). This idea was following the tradition of agricultural and industrial 
expansion that had marked the growth of the United States. Pioneer diaries and 
reminiscences rang with the theme that what was “unbroken and trackless wilderness” 
had been “reclaimed,” which, of course, was “always for the better” (Nash,1968:40). 
Terms like wilderness and forests conjured up negative ideas for most early Americans. 
Accompanying adjectives such as “desolate”, “barren”, “monotonous” and gloomy and 
stimulated a desire to subdue them, populate them and cover them with cornfields, 
villages and towns (Matthews,107:1993). Alexis De Toqueville concluded in Democracy 
	America that “in Europe people talk about the wilds of America, but the themselves never think about them, They are insensible to the wonders of inanimate and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them until they fall beneath the hatchet. Their eyes are fixed upon another sight the march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitutes and subduing nature”(Toqueville,137:200). This exploitive attitude dominated early America as it grew, unlike any other country in the history of modern civilisation. 

While the working class was progressing rapidly throughout the great 
landscape of the United States, the upper class and the intellectuals began to speak of the 
new modern European interpretations of nature such as the sublime and picturesque. As 
the United States cemented its dominance as a strong independent nation, many 
began to see nature as much more than the resource some claimed it only to be.
The shift in the American perception of nature is an ever-evolving process that evokes all
of the stereotypes developed about American people in general. Perceptions of nature in America have been as eclectic as the people who have come to make them. But as the United States raced towards domination of the entire North American landscape in the mid nineteenth century the populace began to question the rate and the reason for the plunder of the natural resources which graced the continent. Those who questioned the general belief of “all development equals good development” were ostracized and labeled as radicals by mainstream society at the time. But they established an idea that nature could be an antidote to the stress of the free market industrial world America was fast becoming. This idea continues today as Americans look to nature as a relief from the everyday world of commerce, traffic and bills. But the tradition of questioning society’s idea of nature must be understood in order to realize the effect it still has today at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 

The Rise of Idealised Nature through Cultural Modes
Values and myths affect the individual behavior of the people who believe in them. These cultural constructions play into one’s identity with the natural. The second half of the eighteenth century brought about a philosophical and artistic shift in values, which instead of seeing humans as social beings gathering inspiration from the divinity of nature, sought to find human identity and consciousness within nature (Bunce,26:1994). This shift which formed in Europe through the Romantic writings of Lord Byron and William Wordsworth, had a major impact on many American artists and intellectuals at the time. Lord Byron in 1816 articulated a message on nature that would be read by many as a manifesto for his generation: “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods/There is a rapture on the lonely shore/There is a society where none intrudes…I love man not the less but nature more” (Des Jardins,1997:334). The tradition of nature as the antithesis of civilization would be expressed to Americans not through newspapers or their church or the government but rather through the lens of artists, writers and poets. It’s interesting to note that in the modern era most of the messages promoting a positive perception of nature continue to come from a cultural lens.

James Feminore Cooper 
Looking at the first Americans to influence a change in our perception of nature one must start with the landscape artists and Romantic writers. Literature and the arts would both become critical  in changing American perceptions of nature. As Leo Marx has pointed out, “if there is a single native institution which has consistently criticized American life from a vantage like that of ecology, it is the institution of letters” (Marx,151:1988). One of the first Americans to put value in nature was James Fenimore Cooper, author of the famous Leather-Stocking series published between 1823 and 1840. The Pioneers, the first in the series, took considerable pains to show that nature had value as a moral influence, a source of beauty and a place of exciting adventure. The main character, Natty Bumppo, was the first popular American literary figure to become a mouthpiece in conversations about the holiness and solitude that nature provided (Matthews,1991:124).  Cooper was active not only in describing the American landscape but also in documenting-and protesting against-the misuse and destruction of the immense but not immeasurable natural resources (Valtilai,9:1998). Cooper was influenced by deist ideas of the eighteenth century-presenting nature with all of its sublimity and beauty, as the manifestation of God’s perfection-as well as by the Romantic conceptions of the untouched wilderness as the ideal milieu for the spiritual development of the free individual. (Peck:1987). Cooper used these influences to help mold his own identity with the landscape. While not rejecting the pastoral ideal, the vision of man-improved nature, as tragically inferior to a life lived entirely on nature’s terms, as many Romantics and Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Cooper let his characters come to many of the same conclusions the Romantics would.

In the Pioneers, Natty Bumppo’s aim is to escape to the vast lands of the American West where he could find true solitude. When Natty Bumppo does leave the city for the forest, he reports that “ no city dweller can know how often the hand of God is seen in the wilderness” (Cooper,1823:126). This comment dovetails nicely with Thoreau’s philosophy on his own life, “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life”(Thoreau,74:1965) More vigorous than its European counterpart, the pastoral and primitivist mood in American literature was started by the writings James Fenimore Cooper. His writings, wildly popular then and to some degree still today, set in motion a legacy of writers, from Ernest Hemingway to John Steinbeck, who put wild nature as the background for the life in which the so typically American escapist yearning the individual freedom can be pursued with some sort of success (Valtiala,31:1998). While this legacy may be his greatest attribute, Cooper was the first major American writer to have nature serve as the great model to man. When required by the narrative, nature also willingly reflects the moods, moral qualities of its characters. Cooper helped influence American culture into seeing that the primary role played by humans is to reflect and praise nature and its ability to soothe the soul of humanity. 

Hudson River Painters
Writing and painting are two different artistic genres, each with its own set of rules. Writers are often said to “paint with words”; correspondingly, artists can be labeled as literary and verbal. The Hudson River painters, starting out from “Cooperland”, made their appearance in the 1820s, at about the time of Cooper’s debut. The famous group of landscape artists of a distinctly national design gave an original and versatile pictorial support to some of the central ideas concerning the American environment and lifestyle articulated by Cooper and other writers. The term “Hudson River School,” originally pejoratively intended, was, however, not used until the 1870s . The philosophy pervading the movement has been traced to John Ruskin and his precept of “truth to nature”. The painting showed exaggerated landscapes with people not the focus of the canvas but rather a background to the splendor of nature. The credo of the first generation of Hudson River Painters has been committed to paper by the most famous and closely aligned with James Fenimore Cooper, Thomas Cole in a letter to Rober Gilmor of Baltimore:
I believe with you that it is off the greatest importance for a painter always to have his mind upon Nature as the star by which he is to steer to excellence in his art (Cooper:1823).
Of all of the Hudson River Painters, Thomas Cole mirrored Cooper in a call for Americans to perceive nature as a moral influence on American Society. What unites Cole and Cooper is the fact they are moralists to the highest degree. In a lecture given at the New York Lyceum in 1835, Thomas Cole lists the magnificent properties in America that make this continent of special value as a basis of nourishment for the pictorial descriptions of his day. Cole outlines the importance nature plays in America. First of all, Cole sees that America has the wilderness, ‘still a fitting place to speak of God.’ Secondly, there are spots in America where the combination of the sublime, the magnificent and the picturesque have no parallel in other parts of the world. Thirdly, America possesses associations more with the future than with past; in a new Eden the need to wallow in nostalgia is negligible. Cole ended his speech by characterizing the American wilderness with the glowing epithet “quintessentially sublime” (Vatallia,40:1998). This important speech was one of the first times in America an accepted and widely popular artist (or cultural figure for that matter) made a case for the value of nature. It started a pattern that continues to this day of people understanding and relating to nature through a lens shaped by cultural icons. We can appreciate the modern day interpretations of nature and its perception by looking at how movies and other forms of pop culture help shape American environmental values. Cole and Cooper were the first of many artists to contribute to the tradition of influencing American perceptions of nature through their work. What Thomas Cole did with brush and canvas, in order to celebrate the American landscape, James Fenimore Cooper did with a pen and paper.

Romantics and Transcendentalists
Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson followed the Hudson River painters and James Fenimore Cooper in exposing Americans to a different outlook towards nature. Their contribution has been immense through their influence intellectually and culturally on American attitudes towards nature. What is so impressive about both Emerson and Thoreau is how they continue to influence modern-day American perceptions of nature over a hundred and fifty years after their deaths. Lumping Emerson and Thoreau together has become commonplace; even though they were close friends and shared much of the same ideology there were noticeable differences. Emerson can be closely connected with the Romantic movement in Europe. His famous essay Nature, which appeared in 1836, was not a philosophical inquiry but rather a literary exercise designed to rest a pre-established belief in God on rational rather then scriptural footing. The conceptual focal point of the essay is the human soul and God, not nature or the wilderness (Oeschalager,134:1991). This can be best seen from the final passage in the conclusion of the essay Nature:
The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation,- a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God,-he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to the perfect sight (Emerson, Nature).
This reveals Emerson’s orientation and perception of the natural world. The position is conventionally anthropocentric and androcentric, framed by a Baconian-Cartesian perspective: nature is mere putty in human hands, bestowed by God upon his most favored creation, man (Oeschalager,135:1991). 

It is fashionable to lump Thoreau and Emerson together as the transcendentalist movement. Their philosophy may have been parallel on many of the social issues of the day, but Thoreau and Emerson had completely different perceptions of nature. As I have noted above, Emerson held an anthropocentric view towards nature, while Thoreau was not satisfied in just announcing his passion for nature; he also wanted to understand its value. The one constant about Thoreau and Emerson was that their writing was only superficially about the natural world. Nature and especially the wilderness symbolised the unexplored qualities and untapped capacities of every individual. Their writings helped Americans look at themselves in comparison to the processes of nature. They helped usher in an era of environmental awareness based upon the individual.

While Emerson was better known during his lifetime, Thoreau is the patron saint of American environmental writing. He remained obscure during his life and he had to struggle to arrive at the deep understanding of nature for which he is now remembered. Thoreau spent his entire career laboriously trying to sort out the competing claims of nature and culture. His most widely read book, Walden (1852), embeds much of the history of his thinking about the natural environment. Thoreau saw the landscape as nature. He approached landscape as nature, preferring untrammeled, isolated, and wild landscapes. Often this view is enmeshed in a version of romanticism, which sees landscapes as both religious or mythological and aesthetic. This is exemplified in Walden where Thoreau questioned humanity’s role in the degradation of and constant need to control nature. One of his most famous quotes from Walden laid out his views and exhorted his reader to “be the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher altitudes”. Thoreau put nature and especially wilderness to convey his message to his readers: “wildness….in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor in us” (Nash,89:1973). Thoreau in his writings used the landscape to outline his own personal philosophy towards nature and to convince the reader that his view was just and well-reasoned by using scientific language along with his beautiful descriptive prose. But at the crux of Thoreau’s contribution was the way his writing exemplified the shift in scientific emphasis from taxonomy toward ecology. 

Aldo Leopold best articulates the ecological approach to nature in the mid twentieth century by describing it in terms of the “A-B cleavage” whereby people in group A see the land as soil, and its function as commodity production” while people in Group B see “the land as a biota, and its function as something broader” (Buell,4:1995). While Thoreau did not have the scientific background that Leopold had, he was one of the first successful writers in America to articulate a message which could reach the general public from different points of view: scientific, philosophical and historical. This message is what helped  Thoreau ultimately become so successful in helping shape and change perceptions of nature in America in the mid-twentieth century and continuing today. Thoreau’s popularity after his death is a perfect example of the impact one can have in changing cultural perceptions of nature. His books are now required reading in almost any environmental literature class; his former home, Walden Pond, has become a celebrated national treasure; and his most famous quote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” has been used in television ads, on t-shirts and in many other commercial forms. Thoreau’s single vision, enlarged through pop culture, has had a significant impact on America’s perceptions of nature. It helped shape American minds by combining  Now that we have examined some of the philosophical, artistic and literary developments that helped shape America’s perception of the environment, let us jump ahead to look at what forces shaped American perceptions towards nature in the twenty-first century. Before we do this, however, it might be useful to outline the change of the United States from a rural agrarian society trying to conquer nature, into that of an industrialised urban society trying to protect it.

Urban America
The United States underwent a significant change during the Nineteenth century as it became an industrialized power and also had an influx of millions of new immigrants from around the globe. This influx provided a new dimension to American perceptions of the natural environment. Many people have labeled the American embrace of the industrial revolution “ecoethnographic romanticism” (Crumley:1994). The term is used to point that the Industrial Revolution was the original environmental sin that has put humanity in a situation where it is critical to our very survival  to conserve and protect the natural environment. The interesting paradox is that while America embraced the industrial revolution and many of the material comforts that it brought, (automobiles, for example), America in the early twentieth century began to see the natural environment not as a hindrance to the making of civilization, but rather, as a critical element in maintaining a national identity. President Teddy Roosevelt commented in 1897 that “nature holds a peculiar but important position in American life and if we continue to expand without factoring our effect on nature it will come back to haunt us” (Callicott,65:1998). America had moved away from the garden society it had been in the early eighteenth century to a machine society by the time Roosevelt was elected President.  This change is evident when contrasting Roosevelt’s statement made in the midst of the machine/garden shift to one made by President Thomas Jefferson in 1804 as he discounted technological and intellectual know-how under the guise that it cheapened American character: “state a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better then the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules”(Marx,130:1964). The pastoral element in this famous anti-technological and intellectual homily is apparent. 

The nineteenth century was critical in establishing an American ethic towards the land and it produced this ethic because America no longer prided itself on its ability to harness nature, but instead began to embrace an intellectual vision that nature was crucial in shaping values. The shift that took place also came about because people no longer looked out on to rolling green fields and crystal clear streams. For the first time more Americans lived in cities than rural areas. Being away from the natural led Americans to perceive it as a cleansing force. The rural landscape and especially wilderness are the farthest removed from the city and civil life. It lies at both the beginning and the end of the cycle of nature. Denis Cosgrove has commented that “if the city is gendered male and the middle landscape female, then wilderness is neuter because it is pre-social” (Bender,297:1993). The move to the cities had blurred American’s relationship to the natural and they yearned to reconnect with it. The rise of modern cities has been the central fact in American history in the last century. More than anything else, cities transformed the simple, agrarian national community of Thomas Jefferson’s time to the complex modern society of our own day (Schmitt,vii:1969). 

The Symbolism of the Natural
Wild nature seemed increasingly remote to many city dwellers at the turn of the century, but they could surround themselves with its symbols. For those who could afford them, there were the lilypads and morning glories of Tiffany art glass and the nature themes woven in oriental carpets. For the less fortunate, the twining vines of Art Nouveau graced lampshades and picture frames, paper weights and candle sticks (Schmitt,16:1969). While Americans were wrapping themselves in symbols of the natural, they were also busy exploring it. There was a rapid rise in outdoors clubs who offered the chance to ‘go back to nature’. As automobile production boomed in the early twentieth century, commuters willing to drive themselves could choose their landscapes by aesthetics instead of time- tables. A process had been created to put Americans in the natural through artificial means. As the intimate tie between land and its users was severed with the development of capitalism, the idea of landscape arose (Bourassa:1991). In other words, it became possible for Americans to distance themselves from the land so that it could be viewed as landscape. As Paul Shepard (1967) put it: ‘Man withdrew from the picture and turned to look at it.’ 

The concept and embrace of the natural landscape in America in the early twentieth century has ideological connections with capitalist attitudes towards land. Land under the capitalist system had come to be viewed as just another factor in production, a form of capital, which has no special significance for or ties to its owners. The boom in interest towards nature and getting ‘back to it’ correlated in a way with the capitalist mode of land tenure by implying a degree of control or power on the part of persons who have no specific connections to a place. While the symbols of nature were beginning to be embraced by Americans at this time, they were romantic notions that bordered on fantasy and did not lead to a change in habits towards the conservation of nature. Americans looked at nature as a place to get away from the ‘real’ world of work and responsibility, but not as a living entity which affected our livelihood. The Preservation movement which developed out of this embrace of nature was clearly focused on the benefits we could derive from the natural, not on how we should leave nature alone for its own sake. John Muir, the leading environmentalist of the day and the head of the Preservation movement, rejoiced in 1901 that “thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people found that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity” (Muir:1901). While there is no doubt that the majority of American people for the first time saw nature as a cleansing entity and a critical part of our national character, in many ways they had created a false perception based on short-lived experiences. Wild nature was becoming a retreat but not a place of deep reflection or a tool in changing a competitive capitalist economic system that quantified nature into pure economic terms. Even Muir himself was worried about how Americans were traveling to natural areas: “nothing can be done well at the speed of 40 miles a day…..the multitude of mixed, novel impressions rapidly piled on one another make only a dreamy, bewildering, swirling blur, most of which is unmemorable” (Muir,59:1901). While the move to the cities was effective in creating a cult of the wild and getting more Americans out into nature, it was not as successful at changing a system that put nature into an ordered capitalist system where it was labeled a  pure economic resource. It became fashionable to embrace nature and its ‘purifying’ qualities but it continued a tradition of the elites having the opportunity to get back to nature while the lower class continued to subdue nature for the benefit of the economic system under which the United States was created. This disparity was never more apparent than during this period in American history. As Peter Schmitt points out, “well to do Americans of the early 20th century made the cabin in the woods a new symbol of weekend freedom, building their rustic retreats on mountainsides, in isolated corners on suburban estates and even in den rooms behind the facades of wealth”(Schmitt,168:1969). It was a facade because the environment was still being exploited at a rapid clip and there was a divide between economic and social classes regarding who was getting the opportunity to experience nature. By the mid twentieth century, nature had finally derived a positive connotation to the majority of Americans, but its perception was based on many outside factors and rather than direct experiences.
The Modern American Cultural Landscape
Environmental Perception and Cognition
Americans understand their environments through environmental perception and cognition (cognitive mapping). This latter term is defined as “a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which individual acquires, codes, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in his/her everyday environments” (Downs:1973). The first stage of coping with the environment is to obtain information about it. This happens through the various sensory modalities-vision, hearing, smell, touch, taste that were discussed earlier in this paper. The main modality is the visual mode as Americans identify their environment by looking around at the paths, landmarks, boundaries, and other features of the environment. But in this same vein all of our senses receive first-hand information about various properties of our environment. These sensory inputs do not enter our heads and “go out the other side” so to speak. Rather they become part of our environment and they are experiences that we call on to remember again and again (Altman,46:1984).Many times environmental cognition involves stereotyping different environments. As Irwin Altman explains, “thus Rome is the Vatican; Greece is the Acropolis; the western United States are the Rocky Mountains.” Simplifications, labels and schematics are typical features of environmental cognitions. In our environmental cognitions we infer the existence of things to round out our beliefs and perceptions and to make them consistent. Environmental cognitions are truly “psychological” in that we interpret the environment and we are selective and incomplete in our portrayal of it. Some factors in the Americans cognition of the environment have been post-World War II landscape design and Nature movies and television. 

American Pop Culture and the Symbolism of Nature
Pop culture has had a dramatic effect on how Americans perceive the natural and artificial environments around them. Before World War II, Americans did not know what the word television meant, but now at the beginning of the twenty-first century Americans average seven hours of television a day (Postman:1995). This has cut back on the amount of time Americans spend connecting with nature in an unmediated form. Architecture in the United States before World War II could not be grouped into one type of design. But a boom in growth after the war put homes up faster than ever before in American history. Most of the housing was in the suburbs, which would fit in between the “garden” and the “city” in Leo Marx’s famous study The Machine in the Garden (1964), which outlines different perceptions of the American landscape. The suburbs were a new phase in the American taming of the landscape. As Alexander Wilson points out, “In the twentieth century, millions of North Americans left rural communities and settled in cities and suburbs, disrupting their traditional physical relationship with the non-human world. Yet in the construction of suburban yards, victory gardens, and, later, shopping malls, community parks, and wild gardens, people have addressed and replicated nature in other ways, developing new aesthetics in the process”(Wilson,90:1992). These aesthetics have played a large part in how most Americans understand their environment and what they visualise as pristine nature. Americans have been at once comprehensive and naive in their interpretation of the environment.

Changing Landscape of the Suburb
Landscape design can be seen as place. In this view every landscape is a locality, an individual piece in the infinitely varied mosaic of the earth. As D. W. Mening explains, “it is landscape as environment, embracing all that we live amidst, and thus it cultivates a sensitivity to detail, to texture, color, all the nuances of visual relationships, and more, for environment engages all of our senses, the sounds and smells and ineffable feel of a place as well (Mening,45:1979). The post World War II boom in artificially designed environments such as strip malls, shopping centres and suburban housing, caters to utilitarian ends but the boom also aspires to something more, to images that reflect communal values and ideas, to a kind of visibility that demands attention rather than use. Whereas literary works and paintings can afford to direct our attention to the sad and offensive, buildings should not because their primary function is to support life. This has never been more the case than in post-war landscape design, which has been focused around the automobile and allowing homeowners mobility. The mass building techniques that have become custom in the United States promote uniformity.  Wilson takes us through this planning by describing in detail the steps that are taken in the new age of American housing design: “To build on land, property owners first have to clear and level it. Everything must go. Once they put up the structures they replant the land. Biological life is allowed to reassert itself, but it is always a life that corresponds to prevailing ideas about nature (Wilson,91:1992). This comment points out that not only do our perceptions of the environment lead to our ability to understand it, but also how it can affect how we plan our own artificially created environments that interact with nature.

The Cinematic Portrayal of Nature
 Pop culture has helped Americans frame their environments according to the different contextual objectives they deploy. There is an embedded contextual nature of public opinion in daily life that has led to Americans interpreting their environments through the constitutive role of discourse (Macnaughten/Urry,93:1998). This has stimulated cultural traditions in shaping attitudes towards the environments. Nowhere is this better displayed than by American television and movies and their representation of our environment. We will first look at the role nature movies and documentaries play in showing the ‘natural’ world and will then move on to examine two movies which portray urban America in much the same light as wild nature was back in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Now that America is an urban country it has taken many of the stereotypes leveled against wilderness and applied it to the ‘urban jungle’ of today.  American ideas about nature are drawn not just from movies and television, but also from one’s experience with the land. But as consumption of movies and television have increased rapidly since World War II, it has had an ever-bigger influence on our perception patterns. 

The first entity to bring nature movies into the realm of the everyday American is also one of the major corporation in the latter half of twentieth century, Disney. The Disney studios popularized the genre of the wildlife movie in the early 1950s, and the influence of their work was felt in nature education for the following two decades (Wilson,118:1992). Disney framed their stories on nature to be one of living worlds that humans could enter at any time and leave with an understanding of the non-natural through human forms and emotions. Emotion was a centre point for all of the Disney movies. While giving some pertinent scientific information on the species or landscape being discussed, the central focus was on building an emotional connection between the non-human and the human. What Disney films also managed to do was show the color of life and the harmonious relationship between humans and nature while not discussing the effects of the massive industrial development of the time. As Alexander Wilson describes “like 19th century accounts of the ‘winning’ of the American West, these postwar nature stories were told over and over again. They were fictions of victory for the new century of progress”(Wilson,119:1992). 

Disney “feel good” nature movies slowly disappeared in the latter part of the twentieth century. Since that time nature movies and documentaries have become a strong tool used by conservation advocates to garner support. A good example of this can be seen in the 1984 movie Never Cry Wolf. Wolves have until recently (and still to a minority of Americans) represented all that was wrong with wild nature. They had been nearly exterminated by a government-sponsored program in the late nineteenth century. But with their near extinction came a wave of sympathy from an American public now seeing an intelligent animal that closely relates to us. It is interesting to note that much of the support for the reintroduction of the wolf has been from urban centers, while the people who live on the land where wolves will roam still stand diametrically opposed to their reintroduction. What Never Cry Wolf did that was new to the genre of cinema was show how we looked from the wolf’s perspective. This helped bridge an understanding of the wolf to humans and the movie was endorsed by many prominent American environmental organizations. Wildlife movies have become documents of nature. In many cases they portray and idealised version of the natural that no longer exists. Today one of the most popular nature shows is the Crocodile Hunter, hosted by an Australian, Steve Irwin. Without questioning Irwin’s intentions concerning wildlife (he gives out biological information on the animals he is focusing on), it seems that the reason he has become so popular with Americans is his ability to get close to poisonous snakes and large animals such as alligators that can pose a direct threat to humans. The popularity of Crocodile Hunter rests not on its ability to connect humans with nature, but rather its ability to show how we can be fearless in front of these animals and control them. It brings us back to a utilitarian ethic towards the land, which has been evidenced since our founding as a nation. 

Wildlife movies, documentaries and television have maintained their popularity among Americans by showing idealised state of nature that in many cases does not exist. While there have been a number of shows and movies highlighting the degradation of nature (for example The Bear (1988) and the PBS special Cadillac Desert (1997) ) none of these has had enormous commercial success. Americans have used nature movies as a way of reconnecting themselves with the natural. As American society has become ever more urban, people thirst for ways to recapture the ‘rural splendors’ that no longer fit into our day-to-day existence. The mode of television and cinema has helped many Americans see the beauty of the natural environment through its ability to take us to far off lands, but it has also solidified the artificial hold we have put around nature and has created the lens through which we perceive the natural environment.

A Case Study in the Changing Cultural Perception of Nature
As America has continued its transformation from a rural agricultural society to an urban industrial one, the classical definition of wilderness which was accepted two hundred years ago by the majority of Americans has now been turned on its head and is being used to describe the urban landscape. According to the classical view of wilderness, human society is the standard by which the world is measured and, hence, conquest of the non-human areas-the wild-signals a form of human achievement, “a victory over the dark forces and a measure of social progress” (Light/Bennett,139:1999). The visual medium (movies, television), which has grown so rapidly since the end of World War II, has followed this change in looking at the urban ‘wilderness’ as a hostile and unforgiving environment. The dominant myths of America are non-urban. They are often anti-urban: the image of European sophistication and corruption (Tuan,193:1974). Andrew Light presents the idea of urban wilderness in American movies in his excellent study Boys in the Woods: Urban Wilderness in American Cinema. Light outlines that the classical view of wilderness which can be summarized as emerging out of three related and often overlapping theses:
1.	Separation. Because the wilderness is bad, evil and cruel, it must be separated from humans-it must be marked off as distinct and kept out of civilized spaces.
2.	Savagery. The inhabitants of the wilderness are non-human beasts and accordingly are to be demonized and vilified.
3.	Superiority. In contrast, civilization (and its inhabitants) may be celebrated for its superiority over wilderness as a haven of virtue (Light/Bennett,139:1999)

As John Rennie Short has noted, “the (classical) Wilderness becomes an environmental metaphor for the dark side of the human psyche” (Short:1991). This metaphor ran through American society for much of its history until Romantics and Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau depicted it as that form of nature that has remained close to its “pristine” state, meaning that it has not been “corrupted” by human intervention. Although contemporary even American pseudo-Romantics tend to be neutral to wild nature,  the idea of an unknown evil at the edge of society still haunts us (Light/Bennett, 138:1999). 

This thirst by Americans for an unknown evil that cannot be controlled still persists and is now framed through the lens of pop culture mainly through a cinematic lens. A good recent example that evolved from a literary lens to a visual one is The Perfect Storm (2000). A best selling book that was turned into a blockbuster movie, it depicted a group of Massachusetts fishermen defying logic by trying for the perfect catch in the midst of a hurricane force storm. While the Perfect Storm plays back many of the stereotypes of a harsh and unforgiving environment that were exemplified in the classical definition of wilderness, it also sets its characters at the edge of society struggling for survival in a dog-eat-dog world. But what it promotes also in its final scenes is a certain tranquility that can only be found in an environment where man has control. So while it details the harsh environment with scenes of crashing waves and black skies, it also turns away from the classical definition of wilderness by showing the purifying powers that “pristine” nature hold. 
Light sees a whole new trend in American cinema towards showing the urban environment as the unforgiving environment where demons lie. This is a complete turnaround from the classical definition of urban life in America throughout most of its history which saw the city as symbolising “order, freedom and glory” (Tuan,248:1974). As Europeans, the majority of Americans have come to think that nature is no longer an evil place. We have outlined previously some of the modes that have been responsible for this shift in perception. But while this shift has been taking place over the last century, mainly through the lens of pop culture, it has still persisted in some rather unusual areas. The metaphorical legacy of classical wilderness is the claim that urban areas are a sort of wilderness. The primary vehicle for this transformation is the shift of the cognitive dimension of wilderness to focus on cities (Light/Bennett,140:1999). What is so worrying about this shift in perception of urban areas is that instead of promoting beneficial reforms, cinema has focused more on a vilification of urban inhabitants and urban spaces in the same way that wilderness was demonized in the past.

Falling Down
The  movie that Andrew Light focuses on in detailing this perceptual shift is Falling Down (1992), In examining the movie, Light uses the three theses that the classical definition of wilderness has been linked with before: savagery, separation and superiority. Light’s critique of the movie Falling Down helps us to understand how popular films change our cultural perception of an urban area. Falling Down (1992) is an urban fable that follows the life of an out-of-work, Los Angeles defense worker (played by Michael Douglas). The setting of Los Angeles fits the urban stereotype of a city that maintains a rigid separation between white suburbanites and inner-city racial minorities trapped in “concrete jungles.” Douglas goes through a series of crises as he traverses the urban landscape of a predominantly Hispanic area of Los Angeles, a journey that transforms him from an easily angered, but as yet non-violent, average Joe into a gun totting killer of the supposed scum of the city. As Douglas’s character assumes a warped new image of the new white hope of the inner city, we can tell that he, like Joseph Conrad’s Mister Kurtz, has been corrupted by his journey into the heart of darkness (Light/Bennett,141:1999). 

The role of separation is obvious throughout Falling Down, in which as one sees a separation of inner city Los Angeles from its civilized suburban surroundings. The thesis of separation comes out sharpest in two persistent themes throughout the film: (1) the inner city is just as dangerous, violent and chaotic as the most uninformed outsider would imagine; and (2) the separation of one part of the city from another is justified and rational.  It is almost as if the classical definition of wilderness appears to of the inner city is an object of preservation, similar to an area set aside by the U.S. Wilderness Act. As Light proclaims the separation occurs in the film as “We” would not even think of allowing “them” into our areas, so we ought to control this wild place and keep it separate as best as we can and as long as possible” (Light/Bennett,145:1999). Light moves on in his analysis of the film by continuing to impose his three models in his observation. He looks at the aspect of ‘savagery’ in the film by correlating with separation. The separation is maintained because the savagery of the inner city corrupts those who find a way in. This is best exemplified by the fact that Douglas’s character that at the end of his movie is not confronted by East Los Angeles gangsters, neo-Nazis or wealthy capitalists, but rather by middle class people like himself. He remarks to his advisory Detective Pendergast (Robert Duvall) at the end of the movie, “I’m the bad guy?” How did that happen?  He is now the savage. Light declares that this transformation controls the perception of the audience and their interpretation of the urban ‘jungle;’ “ By empathizing with him, we in the audience are supposed to realize how we could similarly be transformed by the wilderness” (Light/Bennett,148). Even :1999) during his descent into savagery, Douglas’s character tries to maintain his superiority and the superiority of rational, middle America.

 The director of the film, Joel Schumacher, suggests that film is about a society that “seems to give people today a general sense of having been cheated or shortchanged” (Light/Bennett,148:1999). But it can be contested that the force behind the theme of they movie is provided by the inner-city environment in which Douglas’s character is placed. If the city is the inheritor of classical wilderness, worries about the effects of this shift on the inhabitants can be easily ignored. Just as the idea of the classical wilderness was in part motivated by real dangers” “out there,” characterization of an urban wilderness is justified due to the actual (soberly perceived) dangers of life in American inner cities. As Light surmises in his final comments about the effects of a film like Falling Down on society, “it may reflect the real attitudes of middle America towards its inner cities, but without the designation of the inner city as the alien savage place, is it not plausible that a more reasoned discussion of its problems could be accomplished?” (Light/Bennett,150). :1999) The power of the cinema to shape the perceptions of Americans is great. What makes the portrayal of the city as a wild, savage place plausible to us is at least in part our cultural memory that the city can be legitimately described as a jungle. Society must work harder to get out from under the ideology of classical wilderness because it shapes and distorts our understanding of the city and detracts from a comprehension of the truly complicated diversity of urban life. 

America has become a technological power since the end of World War II. With this power we have created powerful yet artificial tools that help shape people’s perceptions of the environment; television, cinema and more recently the internet are all good examples of this. But what has not changed is an American perception of an evil environment lurking in the shadows, waiting to transform its prey. This evil environment used to be in “desolate” and “wild” areas as Roderick Nash examines in his classic work Wilderness and the American Mind (1973) but today, through the scope of pop culture, that perception of the environment is changing from the ‘natural’ rural wilderness into the ‘unnatural’ urban wilderness. While two different entities physically, they both have the same cultural underpinnings and have become modern ‘nature’ icons, which represent the antithesis to a wholesome society. This fits a thread that Karl Marx already could see in the nineteenth century when he proclaimed that “nature which presided human history no longer exists anywhere” (Adam,26:1998).

The Artificial American Landscape
This last section we saw that Americans are inundated with different symbols of nature on a daily basis. These symbols have obscured our true understanding of nature behind its mediated forms. All of the forms from the historic examples of literary forms (Cooper) to the philosophic (Thoreau) to the modern mediated norms (cinema, television) have altered the American perception of nature. But at no time in history have Americans had more mediated forms thrown at them than now. We have come to see our world and nature as a transforming agent. We have allowed the automobile to simulate the experience of feeling the natural. It is almost as if the simulated experience of driving through a state on an interstate highway is natural. The American post war landscapes are empty and stand for modernity and the rejection of the complexes pf European society. Baulliard has suggested that America undertook to make utopias real, to realise everything through the strange destiny of simulation. Culture in America is “space, speed, technology” (Baudrillard:1988). This simulated artificial environment has become the object of America’s transformation . Tim Ingold describes this cultural shift whereby “the universal agent-man is said to have replaced the natural environment with one which to an ever-greater extent artificial. Thus the construction of the human order appears to entail the destruction of the natural one, as production entails consumption” (Ingold/Milton,40:1993).

The consumption of nature has never been more present and embedded in the daily life of Americans. Through the different forms of mediated nature that American culture presents to the populace, a myriad cultural identity has been formed. The main problems that the environment presents us in the new millennium-such as global warming and ozone depletion-are not especially ‘cultural’ at all. They are material issues that are culturally inflected, bound up with beliefs and identities, and increasingly enmeshed in doctrinal systems (Eagleton,131:2000). The Cultural forces presented here have become more instrumental in shaping the modern American’s perception of nature than in any time in the past.

A Model for the American Cultural Landscape
Two central concepts play into the organising of one’s cultural beliefs and values: mental models or cultural models. The term mental model refers to a simplified representation of the world that allows one to interpret observations, generate novel inferences, and solve problems. The difference between the two models is that  mental models are referred to by psychologists as being held by individuals. The cultural model occurs when people of the same culture construct the same models, even though they are never discussed explicitly (Kempton,10:1995). These models can be controlled by mediated images that change our perception and cognition. As Pierce Lewis outlines, “For most Americans, ordinary man-made landscape is something to be looked at, but seldom thought about” (Mening,11:1979). America still has tremendous natural landscapes such as the Yellowstone Geysers and the majestic peak of Mount Rainer, but the fact remains that nearly every square millimeter of the United States has been altered by humankind somehow, at some time. This has created a human landscape as opposed to a natural landscape. All human landscapes have cultural meanings. They are observed every day from automobiles, airplanes and other mediated forms.

The study Environmental Values in American Culture by Willet Kempton, Jamesa S. Boster and Jenifer A. Hartley gives qualitative data related to my approach on how Americans have seen the cultural landscape change their perception of the natural landscape. They take an anthropological approach that fits my model on environmental perceptions in the United States and their effect and inclusion in the processing of the 
human landscape and their understanding of the natural landscape.

Cultural Models of Nature
The Kempton study examines how lay people view environmental problems by describing the cultural models Americans use to understand nature and humanity’s interaction with it. In their cultural model they seek to understand how a separation from nature can lead people to appreciate it. This agrees with my belief that the human landscape alters Americans’ perceptions of the natural landscape by showing a mediated form that prevents unfiltered observation of nature. The Kempton study uses qualitative methods in its approach:
•	Semi-structured interviews
•	Surveys
One question in particular holds up a cultural model consistent with Americans having perceptions of nature that are influenced by mediated forms. The statement reads as follows: 
•	Nature is inherently beautiful. When we see ugliness in the environment, it’s caused by humans.
The survey has a sample size of 121 for each group and asks two disparate groups at the opposite ends of the spectrum of ideological values towards nature. The two groups are:
•	Saw Mill Workers
•	EarthFirst! Members
Sawmill workers rely on the environment for economic security while EarthFirst! Members work towards protecting the environment from exploitation through civil disobedience and other radical means.  The two groups differed in their answer to the question but still showed significant bias towards correlating the human and natural landscapes together. The final results to the question were as follows:
•	77 EARTHFIRST! Members saw that ugliness in the environment is caused by humans.
•	33 Sawmill workers saw that ugliness in the environment is caused by humans (Kempton,209:1995).
While these results may seem to show a large gap between the two groups, it is the question with the closest gap than any other question on environmental perception that is asked by the study. The conclusion that the Benton study makes on contrasting the views of disparate groups who have had strong images placed on them by the media is that these groups have more or less the same beliefs as other Americans (Kempton,209:1995). This cultural model then suggests that while groups maybe have different levels of willingness to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of nature they still see nature, through the lens of the human landscape.

This can be seen a corollary of cultural change in America. If there is one axiom in understanding the loss of Americans’ identity with the natural, it is that the human landscape-our houses, roads and so on-represent an enormous investment of money, time and emotions. People will not change the human landscape unless they are under heavy pressure to do so (Mening,14:1979). This observation serves as the perfect conclusion to the Benton study. The mediated forms which cause one to cry out in defense of the wolf that they see trapped on television does not apply to the local strip mall development replacing wetlands down the block. This is not to say Americans do not fight human landscape development. What I do propose is that the human landscape becomes accepted by the majority of Americans to the detriment of the natural landscape.

Conclusion: The Role of Mediated Forms in the Perception of American Nature

I began this study by asking what is nature and how is it shaped by cultural assumptions in everyday American life. This led me to explore how culture shapes our view of nature, either artificial or natural. This thesis has made me examine the multitude of ways culture shapes the lens through which humans examine nature. The reading and production of nature is something that is learnt. It is a cultural process and varies greatly between different societies, different periods and, among different social groups within any society (Macnaghten/Urry,15:1998). The United States has been in the unique position of having seen its citizens perceptions of nature change from a negative connotation of nature into a positive one that is reinforced by a plethora of images through cultural modes. These mediated forms have caused the destruction of rainforests in Brazil and the Exxon Valdez oil spill to garner public attention and spark debate on the degradation of the planet Earth. But the power behind the images broadcast to the public are multinational corporations who have a bottom line goal of being an economically viable business in a free market economy. This helps sustain the post-industrial division between human interaction and nature. I have examined through an historical context the different ways humanity perceives nature in order to show the role culture plays in our outlook towards the natural. I contest that the rise in artificial contact between humans and nature helps sustain a cultural cycle that is not compatible with the health of the environment.

All human experience is the precondition for the emergence of an identifiable social structure: conflict, domination, and subordination are the forms which give society shape, texture and resilience (Jackson:1984). The American experience with nature is critical in shaping the modern American perception of nature. The pioneer and his bias against nature that had been shaped from Biblical times to promote domination of the earth’s resources is still a central utilitarian ideapromoted by our acting President George W. Bush. The Romantic notion that was spread through literature and philosophical writings helped start the American conservation movement and the ‘cult’ of nature that is ever present today. These experiences help construct the cultural model of nature that is presented to us. But this model is artificial in its essence due for it lacks true spontaneity and is based upon trying to keep a consumer attentive rather then shape perceptions. Ulrich Beck has outlined how the human consciousness can be touched by a more direct experience with nature: “The threats to life in the development of civilization touch commonalities of the experience of organic life that connect the human vital to those of plants and animals.” Levels of a human consciousness of nature are wounded and awakened which undermine the dualism of body and spirit, or nature and humankind (Beck,74:1992). Americans will benefit from turning off their televisions and learning to experience nature through the least artificial means necessary.

The traditional symbol of the machine and its preeminence in modern American life has been instrumental in projecting an image of America as a society built on hard work and personal freedom. “No summary in paraphrase will convey the subtle influence of industrialization upon mass consciousness. To see a powerful efficient machine in the landscape is to know the superiority of the present to the past” (Marx,192:1964). This symbolism has been played out in the mediated forms that Americans interpret nature through every day. The movie Falling Down serves as an example of the post-industrial lens that has presented urban America as the new antithesis of what society should be. This reaches back to the classical definition of wilderness and its historic interpretation in American society as a negative influence . While pop culture now helps in projecting the positive image of nature, it still plays into the stereotypes labeled upon it. 

So can culture help assimilate people with nature through an artificial lens? I see limited possibilities in this becoming a reality. Mediated forms are too strong for consumers of them not to be influenced or to gain certain biases. We have created myths about nature through the constant use of mediated forms in which they are presented. As Denis Cosgrove observes “myths may both shape and be shaped by landscapes, not only by those localized and specific landscapes visible on the ground but equally by archetypal landscapes imaginatively constituted from human experiences in the material world and represented in spoken and written words, poetry, painting, theatre or film” (Cosgrove, 282:1990). 

In order for nature to be truly experienced by humans there must be direct contact. Americans cannot continue to be besieged with images about nature through artificial mediated forms or an ecological conscience that has been present in all of society since the dawn of time. An artificial representation can cause great risks in the uneasy relationship between humanity and nature. John Urry gives an excellent example of one of the major artificial forms Americans now experience nature through, the television. “The TV has become incorporated into normal domestic space and domestic routines, part of the dwelling place of at least a billion households” (Urry,90:2000). The power that this has created is immeasurable. It has transformed modern American culture into a collage of visual images that produce not perceptions, but rather interpretive images and sounds. 

This paper has shown that there has been a constant thread of mediated forms that has gone through American culture since its inception and has led us to the point we are today in our understanding and perception of nature. The case study I used highlights that Americans at completely opposite ends of the political and social spectrum (sawmill workers, EARTHFIRST! Members) still have some commonality on their perception of nature. But in order for Americans to be able to find more common ground on nature and its many meanings and interpretations, we must experience it through the least artificial means possible. As the philosopher Aldo Leopold concluded, “The shallow minded modern that has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise” (Leopold,279:1947). This is a responsibility that we must take in order to help American culture be restored to its role as a facilitator in helping humans connect with nature through as many unmediated forms as possible.

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