Perceptions of Nature in US Culture

In the fall of this year I will be starting a graduate program in city planning. In my day-to-day life I think a lot about the intersection of nature and human development, and where the two overlap. Using multiple essays I’d like to explore concepts related to human perception of nature, shaped by culture and history, and how that relates to what our cities look like, how we integrate green space into the built environment, and what it says about our values and societal culture as a whole. In this essay I’m focusing on binary perceptions of nature in the United States and how it relates to religion and inequality, with most of my research taken from Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, a collection of academic essays edited by William Cronon and published in 1995.

How do you perceive nature? Not all people approach the idea of nature, or how to use it, in the same way. Is nature a pristine thing that’s separate from modern society, away from our cities and suburbs? For some it is a place to commune with the world, free of the hustle & bustle of our normal lives. For others it may feel uncomfortable and they may miss the ease of civilization. Is it a place you are unfamiliar with and do not feel welcome in? Green space, both in urban areas and recreational parks, has historically been reserved for white, wealthier people, and that has had lingering effects over several decades. For many people who live in cities or suburbs, nature is separate from the “real” world. Something that is at times mysterious and either to be protected or extracted from.

The way we view nature is a human constructed perception, there is not a party communicating on behalf of nature to influence how we define, view, and experience it. The way we perceive nature is a reflection of a time period, of culture, of human’s ability, or inability, to understand something, & relates to our penchant for identifying & putting something in a clearly labeled box. How we define and use ‘nature’ speaks to the cultural, socioeconomic, and political background of society. Nature, and how we define it, is not a fixed thing, but rather based on deeply embedded ideas and practices that may change over time. One particularly influential aspect, as described in Uncommon Ground, is the intersection of religion and nature:

“Our ways of thinking about the natural world are powerfully shaped by our time, our place, and our culture. When people use the word “nature” to refer to the whole of creation, they are echoing a long semantic history that tracks backward to the medieval church and even to classical antiquity, implying without much reflection that nature is One Thing with One Name, a monolith that can be described holistically in much the same way as God. Nature in Western culture is the product of a monotheistic religious tradition; it is often unrecognizable for people whose cultures have not taught them to worship a lone deity.”

William Cronon discusses the relation of Nature and religion as it pertains specifically to the Garden of Eden, the idea of a paradise developed by Christianity. Nature has become a place (in our minds) that harkens back to a pure time, based on a specific Christian mythology. Nature is a safe haven that nurtures us and renews us in its purity, outside of the harsh, mundane and stressful realities of modern society: “the Edenic myth becomes the vehicle for casting our adversaries into the heart of darkness, demonizing them as allies of the dark angel who so long ago seduced us into this, our present exile in a fallen world. Even those who do not subscribe to the Judeo-Christian imagery can fall victim to its moral dualism, because that is how Eden tempts us. It is a place of absolute good and absolute evil, of actions that are unambiguously right and wrong. When we project its polarized, black-and-white myth onto the ambiguous world of gray on gray that we actually inhabit, the power of its imagery sparks our passions but darkens our vision.” The world is a complex and confusing place, and so framing Nature in this simplistic duality creates a more tangible purpose and control of our environment.

I see similarities in the current trends for spiritualism & wellness, this desire to get back to something that never really was to begin with. (Make American Great Again, anyone?). Through retreats and “rituals” various groups and individuals in New Age wellness have glommed onto a romanticized primitivism and created the latest iteration of natural escapism, where it is assumed that by adopting practices pulled from a curated perception of the past, that we can somehow “come back to ourselves” It’s not to say there aren’t legitimate grievances with society. But the method in which it’s done ignores the harsh realities that have always existed, and that cannot be removed in a sanitized version of the past. And exemplifies how a mostly white and financially secure group can cherry pick things from the past in order to fit a fictitious narrative, and escape the toils of modern life without attempting to address issues in our environments. This dynamic is not new in American culture. There have been a number of movements throughout the United States history that aim to harken back to “good ol’ days”, to a mythological place that uses cultural appropriation and a Western and colonial perception of land. Examples such as the late 1800’s early 1900s frontiersmen, rugged individualism of President Teddy Roosevelt and Western novel author Owen Wister, as well as the Back to the Land Movement of the 1960s, both embody a desire for a simpler way of life in the country, a pure existence that cut out the complexities and problems of the rapidly changing fast paced modern world. These movements were largely led by white, wealthy Americans. Most of which had never actually lived off the land, and envisioned an empty landscape, void of the people who actually lived in these “wild” or “pastoral” places, who usually were people of color and/or lower income.

In the late 1800s, amidst an industrializing United States and a rise in immigration, a trend developed among wealthier, white society for a nostalgic return to the frontier or “natural” spaces. The myth of the frontier, though not new, developed within people a romanticized idea of a simpler, more primitive living. This idea of the frontier related to United States mythology of individualism, manifest destiny and conquering the unknown. It left out the fact that Unite States expansion forcibly removed and caused the genocide of Native Americans. The land was never in the bucolic state of being untouched, virgin, and ripe for the taking. It had always been inhabited. William Cronon says:

“The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living — urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field…Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land.”

The duality of nature versus society upholds and reinforces a false history and perpetuates a social model wherein wealthier white people can change a historical narrative to fit their needs, “escape” from the many inequalities of society, and refuse to address or improve densely inhabited spaces. This isn’t to say that every time a family or individual wants to go on a hike or for a camping trip that they are evading social inequality, but it is worth looking at how divided we intentionally and unintentionally make our spaces out to be. Putting wilderness and Nature on a pedestal has its consequences for where we live, work and play every day, away from the trees and majestic views. Cronon notes, “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home. Most of our serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it.”

Over the past five years I have developed an interest in city planning as a result of learning more about the places I live in, the environmental history and the environmental psychology of a place. I have a dual interest in understanding how the history of a place influences current trajectories of society and land use, along with a desire to mold spaces to be better for human well-being and health. I was deeply influenced by two books: The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege, which describes how geography influences history, to the point that humans are not always the sole reason something happens or does not happen, and The Nature Fix by Florence Williams which unpacks how city/suburb areas can be bad for our mental and physical health and how being in nature alleviates some of those stressors. I have become enamored with the idea that if you incorporate facets of the physical environment in planning to help well-being that you can control and curate to improve life. But I also have to question this desire to tweak our environment and create improvements.

Some of that desire to curate the environment relates to control and cultural concepts of optimization. How can we control, or at least have the perception of control in an environment that truly has no rules, no Eden, no good & evil, no off switch. And are the desires we have to make changes to our environment based in something that is ultimately good for the planet and people, or rather based in temporary cultural fixations and tied to political and economic motivations. In regards to optimization, I have come to question all desires and interest, to see if in what part they are rooted in an underlying capitalist drive to optimize and be productive. Should the goal be optimal health? I have, at this point, come to the conclusion that making environmental changes for health of citizens and the planet alike, are in and of themselves counteracting a capitalist system that aims for efficiency, homogeneity and maximization of profits over the more egalitarian desire to improve wellbeing of people and places. There is city design literature that talks about making our neighborhoods and cities healthier and more efficient so as to improve productivity. That is not my desire, I want healthier communities that improve quality of life for humans and the planet, full stop. But given the nature of capitalism and how deeply embedded it is in the culture, it’s important to assess the underlying factors in one’s interests and goals.

The biggest takeaway for myself in this particular analysis of relationships of nature, people and places, is to consider how we evade the problems in front of us, and what narratives we carry that are romanticized or unrealistic, and how we can be understanding of the influencing factors when we do work on the spaces we inhabit. In a way that acknowledges our humanness and inevitability that we will be influenced by forces unseen, while also still working to create better things. Our perception of nature as something separate from us is untrue, nature is all around us, and does not have to be a majestic thing, far from society, in order to be appreciated and provide reprieve. And it should never be something only for the elite. And we really need to stop imagining that there’s something else out there better than what we currently have, and instead fix what we have now. As a current example just look at the billionaires wanting to go to space…a new-fangled but no less silly form of romanticized frontierism, wasting money on endeavors that only benefit the elite, not helpful to fixing real problems, and based on a romanticized idea. A culture that keeps looking for the next best thing, and perpetually reinforces inequality, will not be able to prioritize the right things in our present environments.