This Land is My Land: On David Nye's "Conflicted American Landscapes"

David E. Nye | Conflicted American Landscapes | MIT Press | 2021 | 280 Pages

Despite a national imaginary laced with appeals to the land, the American landscape is one of complexity and contradiction rather than unity. Ours is a country where messy urban grids extend into pedantically ordered suburban spillover; where relics of mid century industrialization sit a short distance from expansive tillage; where droughts plague some regions while flooding threatens others. As such, David Nye argues in his recent book, Conflicted American Landscapes, that there is no single articulation of what the American landscape is and how it should be ordered. Instead, conceptions of and debates regarding the environment are characterized by cacophonous disagreement and irreconcilable difference. From these multifarious conceptions of the land, Nye contends, a disharmonious national politics has emerged that confounds collective action on one of the most pressing contemporary issues. 

Six voices take center stage in Nye’s sweeping history of the American landscape and the ideas tied to it. The most dominant are the “primitive view,” which emphasizes undisturbed nature; the “pastoral,” a perspective best summarized as the lovechild of Jeffersonian idealism and Transcendentalists aesthetics; and “utilitarianism,” which emphasizes the resources and environmental services provided by nature in service of anthropocentric ends. Three marginalized positions complete Nye’s list — “secular creationism,” indigenous practices, and an extreme, sometimes militarized, utilitarianism — providing resistance to and supplementing these dominant articulations of land ethics. Through case studies, Nye illustrates the convergence and conflict between these competing notions of order, unraveling an American history of the ideas, infrastructures, and institutions that have mediated our relationship to the land.  

The first case study deploys Detroit’s River Rouge as a “microcosm of North American history.” Nye narrates its development from “untouched” (read: uncolonized) pre-Columbian nature to a contested landscape of postwar (de)industrialization. The prime mover in Nye’s telling is the Ford Motor Company. The river had variously supported the indigenous Mound Builders (ca. 1000-1200), the Hurons, who resettled the area during European colonization centuries later, and colonial land tenure and river-based trading outposts. In contrast with these earlier land use patterns, Henry Ford hoped to convert the River Rouge area into a utilitarian landscape capable of supporting closed assembly line production. The River Rouge, following Ford’s incursion into the area, thus came to host a behemoth automotive plant, the largest industrial complex in the world at the time of its completion in the late 1920s. This monument of Fordist production segmented and disciplined the landscape, erecting upon it a temple of industrial progress. 

The plant did not, however, completely crowd out other articulations of the landscape. Ford, like many Americans at that time, harbored appreciation for the utilitarian as well as the pastoral position, and created an idealized museum village near his River Rouge plant. The city of Detroit similarly invested in the creation of a pastoral landscape in the form of River Rouge Park upstream from Ford’s factory, helping to soften its utilitarian bent. Although the factory’s contribution to the industrial war effort in the 1940s helped to once again bolster the river’s utilitarian image, in recent years efforts to salvage a landscape scarred by decades of industrial pollution have emerged from encounters with local environmental limits (the river caught fire in 1969, less than four months after the infamous fire on the Cuyahoga). The River Rouge has thus been characterized, per Nye, by an ecologically precarious utilitarian-pastoral symbiosis that has been one dominant paradigm in the United States. 

These transformations in the symbolic and material significance of the River Rouge are the makings of a conflicted landscape: different people at different times held competing views about what the river represented and what purpose it should serve. This is a story that plays out repeatedly in the case studies that organize Nye’s chapters, which variously cover the Colorado River, the skyscraper-studded urban landscape, and the toxic “anti-landscapes” created by nuclear development, amongst others. With this approach, Nye delves into the polyphonic influences that have shaped both policy around and perception of our landscapes and reveals how formations, such as the Grand Canyon, can simultaneously entertain discordant notions of pristine geological sublimity, biblical flood geologies, and high modernist utilization. 

Nye, an eminent American studies scholar, reintroduces concepts drawn from some of his numerous other publications, including the “technological sublime” and America’s propensity for “second creation.” He similarly revives a practice — once foundational in the early days of environmental history — of examining the complex interrelations between landscapes and American self-perception. Somewhat lacking, though, is a more systematic analysis of the ways in which conflicted landscapes and various forms of power (state, capitalist, racial, gendered, etc.) are co-produced. Though these themes flit in and out of Nye’s case studies — for example, in addressing the theft of indigenous lands or the US military’s indiscriminate nuclear testing — they can sometimes come across simply as tacit acknowledgements of the dominant power dynamics which have shaped, and been shaped by, the American landscape and its past. In this regard, Nye’s account lacks the critical thrust of other recent books which have explored the intersections of land, ideas, and power, such as Jedediah Purdy’s This Land is Our Land or Dianne D. Glave’s Rooted in the Earth. 

Regardless, Nye’s case studies provide a lexicon and a history with which we can think through some of the current conflicts over land and the environment. His final two chapters adopt this task more explicitly by weaving together the historical dynamics of contested landscapes with a political history of the past half century. While Americans had long been able to juggle various land ethics and generate consensus, Nye argues, this increasingly dissipated in the late twentieth century in tandem with widening polarization, the culmination of which is best illustrated by the 2000 presidential campaign between George W. Bush, the second-generation oil executive, and Al Gore, the Democrats’ foremost ecowarrior. In these chapters, the dividing lines between competing land ethics are increasingly the same as those that define partisan difference. Indeed, these chapters read like a prelude, of sorts, to the psychic split in American climate politics between existential alarm and outright denialism.

The final chapter proffers a “pragmatic” solution, though one must wonder whether the collective procrastination on concerted environmental action still leaves room for pragmatism. Nye suggests a reconciliatory synthesis of the various land ethics into a “new pastoralism” that breaks the tripartite classification of wilderness/pastoralism/utilitarianism and instead reinscribes human intervention within the bounds of the natural world. It is a suggestion that perhaps belies the structural challenges to collective action and smooths over the chronic conceptual and material conflicts of our landscape’s history. Nevertheless, it is also a suggestion that resonates with another of Nye’s parting assertions: “It is not morning in America, it is the Anthropocene.”