Book ID: CBB672995317

Conflicted American Landscapes (2021)

unapi

Nye, David E. (Author)


MIT Press


Publication Date: 2021
Physical Details: 280
Language: English

Amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties: Americans invest much of their national identity in sites of natural beauty. And yet American lands today are torn by conflicts over science, religion, identity, and politics. Creationists believe that the biblical flood carved landscapes less than ten thousand years ago; environmentalists protest pipelines; western states argue that the federal government's land policies throttle free enterprise; Native Americans demand protection for sacred sites. In this book, David Nye looks at Americans' irreconcilable ideas about nature. A landscape is conflicted when different groups have different uses for the same location—for example, when some want to open mining sites that others want to preserve or when suburban development impinges on agriculture. Some landscapes are so degraded from careless use that they become toxic “anti-landscapes.” Nye traces these conflicts to clashing conceptions of nature—ranging from pastoral to Native American to military–industrial—that cannot be averaged into a compromise. Nye argues that today's environmental crisis is rooted in these conflicting ideas about land. Depending on your politics, global warming is either an inconvenient truth or fake news. America's contradictory conceptions of nature are at the heart of a broken national consensus.

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Reviewed By

Review Joel A. Tarr (2023) Review of "Conflicted American Landscapes". Technology and Culture (pp. 283-284). unapi

Review Robert Campbell (2022) Review of "Conflicted American Landscapes". Environmental History (pp. 570-572). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB672995317/

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Authors & Contributors
Shih, Ashanti
Yajun Mo
Jadviga M. da Costa Nunes
Hamilton, Sarah R.
McCreary, Tyler
Westbrook, Eric C.
Concepts
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Landscape; landscapes
Nature
Science and culture
National identity
Science and literature
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
20th century, early
21st century
20th century, late
Places
United States
Netherlands
Germany
Arctic regions
Southern states (U.S.)
Hawaii (U.S.)
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