Mind over Matter

Abstract

In 1983 the New York artist Barbara Kruger released a photomontage showing the face of a female model, resting on a grassy background, with her eyes closed and covered by two leaves. Kruger completed the piece by adding the statement, “We won't play nature to your culture.” In many ways, this image marked a turning point in America's popular and intellectual response to the issue of the environment. Twenty-one years earlier, in 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had launched a new era in the environmentalist movement, prompting many Americans to begin associating their own physical health with that of the environment. But whereas the publication of Silent Spring and the establishment of Earth Day in 1970 contributed to a far-reaching shift in the ways both scholars and laypersons thought about the practical implications of humanity's physical engagement with nature, Kruger's statement represented yet another approach to considering this relationship.Rather than being born out of a concern for the physical effects of the interaction between humans and the environment, Kruger's image emerged from a postmodern intellectual tradition that sought to critically engage with the concept of cultural construction, as well as with contemporary feminist scholarship. With this image, Kruger critiqued prevailing cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity that associated women with nature and men with civilization. These dual identities, Kruger charged, served to culturally reinforce women's exclusion from spheres of power and influence, and transformed them into passive objects, able to be viewed but unable to return the gaze.1In addition to being notable landmarks in the history of the environment in America's popular consciousness, Silent Spring, the first Earth Day, and Kruger's untitled 1983 photograph also provide a noteworthy parallel to the evolution of the study of the environment's impact on social equality, human health, and the body. The field has its roots in the study of the concrete, tangible effects of humanity's interaction with the environment, but over time it has broadened to address a variety of abstract concepts. This includes not only the now-traditional cultural constructions of race, class, gender, but also the ontological reality of the concept of nature itself.2One of environmental history's first and most enduring contributions to the larger field of history is its ability to use the issue of the environment to investigate socioeconomic inequality and issues of social justice. This approach has become a popular subject for urban environmental historians, but its origins can be found in a less metropolitan context. Samuel Hays's classic 1959 text, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement 1890–1920, made a seminal contribution to the field of environmental history. This work, which would come to shape not only environmental history but also the history of the Progressive Era, examined the ways in which reformers developed conservation policies for national parks and wilderness areas. In an effort to recreate an uncorrupted image of natural wilderness areas and enforce a conservation policy that emphasized efficiency and corporate progress over individual access and use, these reform-minded leaders ultimately privileged the land rights of large-scale land users and the middle class over more marginal populations.3Following in Hays's footsteps, Karl Jacoby's Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation extends this approach through a series of case studies that examine the ways in which the conservation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries replaced local traditions of land use and management with formalized legal codes. While Hays's national study focuses most heavily on the American West, Jacoby includes a detailed case study of the Adirondack State Park in New York (which Hays's study also includes, but does not as closely examine). Jacoby finds that, in the park's creation in 1892, the goal of providing middle- and upper-class Americans with a retreat from the city in the form of natural recreation and wilderness conflicted directly with longstanding local land use policies. In order to create a wilderness park that appeared to be uncorrupted by humanity, thousands of people already living on the land had to be displaced. As a result, battles erupted over property, logging, and hunting rights, all of which had previously fallen under local codes of use. Local response to this dilemma varied, as some residents burned the forest or poached game out of protest, while others accommodated by becoming guides, and some cooperated with rangers to legally extend local-use rules.4As the field has matured, this attention to socioeconomic divides and inequality has broadened in scope to reconsider the boundaries of what is and is not a “natural” environment.5 In confronting the cultural construction of nature, environmental historians have addressed the need to examine natural and built environments in urban as well as wilderness settings. With this development has come increasing attention to the issue of the environment and social justice in urban and suburban settings. Such works examine how racial, ethnic, and economic divides can manifest themselves in the form of environmental health and quality-of-life concerns. This approach has also focused on the ways in which historical social justice movements and grassroots political organizations have agitated to address environmental inequality in their own communities.6A good example of this approach in the Mid-Atlantic can be found in Matthew Gandy's Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, which explores all of these themes in a broadly defined study that addresses urbanization, popular conceptions of what is and what is not natural, the harnessing of natural resources in the construction of manmade capitalist enterprise, industrialization, and environmental decline, as well as issues of the environment and social justice. Gandy frames the urban ecosystem not as an unnatural, manmade divergence from the environment, but as a distinct metropolitan form of nature, shaped by the dynamic and ongoing interactions between human and nonhuman forces, and by the ongoing contestations among the city's inhabitants over the meaning and allocation of resources. Gandy also highlights the ways in which unequal distributions of power in the city—especially control over public funds—determined the physical distribution of natural resources for desirable aesthetic and practical features such as parks or water infrastructure. He also focuses directly on the ways in which environmentalism and political activism merged in the 1960s and 1970s for a number of community leaders and movements representing New York City's underserved populations. These groups organized to advocate for public health and environmental planning reforms, and to protest the ways in which the city privileged influential communities over poor and minority populations with regard to waste removal and proposed large-scale waste incinerators.7Other historians of the urban environment have also focused on the disproportionate accumulation of environmental toxins and hazards in poor and minority neighborhoods. In “Reconstructing Race and Protest: Environmental Justice in New York City,” Dolores Greenberg situates environmental health concerns within the larger framework of historical black social and political mobilization. After examining the ways in which racial and economic forces have divided New York City's neighborhoods since the seventeenth century, Greenberg details the process by which environmental reform movements that followed in the wake of Silent Spring met the needs of white neighborhoods but failed to address ongoing toxic dumping or abandoned toxic sites in minority neighborhoods.8Such concerns are not limited to the city, however, as evidenced by Elizabeth D. Blum's Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism, which reveals how the politics of race, class, and gender took shape over the course of a battle for environmental justice that ultimately led to landmark legislative action and a cultural shift in Americans' awareness of the problem of toxic waste. According to Blum, in addition to being remarkable for these impacts, the example of Love Canal serves as a powerful case study in the empowerment of usually marginalized populations, as the grassroots activism around the crisis relied heavily on the engagement of women, African Americans, and the working class. While their marginal social status was what made the residents of Love Canal vulnerable to exposure to toxic waste in the first place, it was also what provided them with the tools to combat their condition.9Blum's research reveals that many of the working-class women addressing the crisis closely allied their mission with that of second-wave feminism, while African American residents, particularly renters, found their race to be both a resource in terms of allying their cause with that of the broader civil rights movement and their engagement with the NAACP, but it could also be a barrier to interracial cooperation. Economic barriers existed as well, chiefly between those of middle-class nonresident activists who felt comfortable working in cooperation with systems of power, and those working-class residents who felt alienated and disenfranchised by these systems. Likewise, Blum reveals that while the movement to address toxic waste in Love Canal relied on activism from both men and women, each group publicized its concerns in markedly gendered terms; men addressed the crisis's impact on their role as economic providers, while women strategically protested their plight in terms that highlighted their roles as mothers.As Gandy demonstrates, however, the intersection of social inequality and the environment can be revealed not only by examining the distribution of environmental hazards, but also through the allocation of and levels of access to environmental assets such as city parks. Scholars such as the environmental sociologist Dorceta E. Taylor have compellingly argued that the underlying power dynamics of a city were made manifest in the construction of parks, their distribution, and the enforcement of rules of conduct within the parks. In “Central Park as a Model for Social Control: Urban Parks, Social Class, and Leisure Behavior in Nineteenth-Century America,” Taylor finds that the original motivation for the construction of Central Park in New York City lay in middle-class conceptions of natural space as a tool of social enlightenment and as a retreat from urban ills. Parks served as a source of not only well-being, but also social control. As the middle and lower classes mingled in these public spaces, the management of these parks and the efforts to enforce normative middle-class ideals and behaviors turned Central Park into a key site of social and political contestation over the nature of public space and the purpose of natural environments.10More recently, Taylor has made a similar argument on a much broader scale in The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s–1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change, which examines urban environments nationwide over a span of three hundred years. In addition to revisiting New York's Central Park as a site of social control, this work examines issues of poverty, disease and sanitation efforts, housing and open space reform, working environments, land use, and urban planning within the context of race, gender, and class. Taylor argues that while environmental historians have only recently begun considering the urban environment, social inequality in the city has historically been tied to the allocation and redistribution of environmental assets. Thus, Taylor encourages historians to reconsider the traditional narrative that has been assigned to the environmental movement, demonstrating that it was in the cities, not in the wilderness, that the American tradition of environmental activism was born.11The environment's relationship to human health and well-being can also be investigated outside of a social justice context. Just as broader popular and critical attention to the environment gradually expanded from the tangible, physical history of human and nonhuman interactions to encompass the more conceptual and theoretical postmodern concerns of cultural construction, so too has environmental history come to embrace more of the social and cultural meanings of nature. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, widespread intellectual and critical attention to issues of race, gender, and social construction have encouraged environmental historians to more closely examine the real and culturally constructed relationships concerning nature, race, and gender (particularly in regard to women). This approach can study how culture represents the sexes and nature, as well as analyze the role gender plays in political and cultural debates about nature.12One example of this latter perspective can be found in Susan Rimby's work on the environmental activism of the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women during the Progressive Era. Rimby concludes that this group, composed primarily of upper- and middle-class women, saw conservation and urban environmental reform as a means of furthering social reform of the working classes—one of the more traditional goals of Progressive women's social reform societies. They saw nature as a healthful and morally uplifting antidote to the troubles of life in the city. Rimby argues that while their status as women served to limit their access to political authority, the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women made use of their social identities as mothers and caretakers to lay claim to an exceptional, natural authority in the field of social welfare. This authority was then used as a springboard to bridge the gap between social welfare and environmental activism. Building constituencies with other politically underprivileged populations based on shared concerns regarding environmental health and access to resources, these women built alliances with other to mobilize for change.13The vast majority of historical research on gender and the environment has focused on women, particularly within the Mid-Atlantic. Some work has been done, however, that should also encourage the study of masculinity and the environment in this region. Paul Sabin examines the ways in which gendered language and imagery were manifested in the early oil industry of Pennsylvania. He argues that the astonishment and excitement of Pennsylvanians who witnessed the abundance, and frustrating unpredictability, of early oil strikes resulted in a public discourse that feminized oil, portraying it as temperamental yet indispensable. This made the conquest of oil a test of manhood. In the struggle to understand and harness the oil reserves, the men who drilled sought to make the unpredictable familiar through the use of language that embodied “Mother Earth” in the form of women's bodies, and which sought to establish sexual and productive control and dominance over both women and the earth.14As historians have continued to mine the concept of social construction, our understanding of the human body itself has been revealed to be laden with cultural meaning and interpretation. Just as recent decades have seen environmental historians begin to question the culturally imposed boundaries of what is and what is not nature, historians of the body have likewise begun to examine more closely the ways in which bodily differences, perceptions, and experiences are likewise culturally constructed.15 Given the earlier examples detailing the close relationship between environments and human health, it should not be surprising that these two fields have frequently overlapped.For example, in Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676, Joyce Chaplin details the belief of European colonists on the Atlantic coast of North America that health, as well as bodily differences such as race, were at least partially attributable to factors in the environment. This conception of the relationship of the body to the environment led colonists who witnessed the decimation of Native American populations by disease to conclude that their own relative health meant that their bodies were not only superior to Native American bodies, but also better suited to the environment of North America, thereby giving them a stronger claim to the land.16Other studies of the interactions between the environment, health, and the body have focused on medical theories of miasma and germ theory, the sanitary movement, nativism and the perception of immigrants as carriers of disease, and the growing awareness of the risk of environmental toxins in the years after 1960. In many cases these histories, like Chaplin's, have focused on the cultural construction of the body and of nature, the various ways that humans have conceptualized the boundary between nature and the body, and historical beliefs about the relationship of the environment to physical health and the human form.17In works such as “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History” and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes, Gregg Mitman has argued that, while recent studies of environmental health have frequently focused on urban environments, there is a largely untapped history of ontological, intellectual, and cultural relationships between the healthy or ill bodies and the healthy or ill landscapes of urban environments, as well as wilderness areas, suburbs, rural regions, and frontiers.In the case of Breathing Space, this relationship is made manifest through the study of the history of allergies in relation to the changing American environment. In an argument that brings to mind Bruno Latour's 1991 work, We Have Never Been Modern, Mitman tackles the culturally constructed boundary between the body and nature. In efforts to control or improve environments, Mitman argues, humans have created an affliction that is both natural and manmade. In clearing abandoned urban buildings, in developing sprawling suburbs, and in maintaining shady lawns that fit the suburban ideal, Americans also created vacant lots that harbored ragweed, dramatically increased pollution related to traffic, and introduced sources of pollen. In response, Americans fled the cities and suburbs, seeking escapes and new residences in “healthy” landscapes such as Denver and Tucson, which, in the process of adapting to these new populations, were themselves transformed from “healthy” to “allergic” environments.18In summation, the field of environmental history has made tremendous gains in the decades since it first emerged, and has grown to address a wide range of social, political, and ideological issues as they relate to natural world. Despite these gains, however, much work can still be done, particularly in the mid-Atlantic region. Following Mitman's lead, we can still make significant progress in challenging our own culturally ingrained assumptions about the boundaries of nature, society, and the body. Furthermore, urban environmental historians should be encouraged to branch out beyond New York City, particularly with respect to the issue of social justice and community parks. Historians of other regions and scholars in other fields have provided excellent examples of the type of work that could inform the Mid-Atlantic's environmental history in this regard.19 Additionally, while the linkages between conceptions of nature and of femininity are well underway in the Mid-Atlantic region, comparatively little has been done with respect to masculinity, particularly in light of recent successes in examining the role of masculinity and the environment in other regions.20 Perhaps a new photomontage from Barbara Kruger, this time with a male figure in nature, could inspire scholars to address this historiographical gap for the Mid-Atlantic region and continue the growth the field has enjoyed in recent decades.