Picking the "locke" of "nature's nation": Nature, national landscape, and the ad industry

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 75-94

  Coleman, Frank ^a  

^a U S ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADVERTISING; SOCIALISM;

EID: 24944542499     PISSN: 10455752     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10455750500208821     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. John Opie, Nature's Nation (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998), p. 201.
2. Public Lands Law Review Commission, One-Third of the Nation's Lands (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), p. x.
3. Quoted in Niall Ferguson, Colossus, (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 42.
4. Department of Energy, National Energy Plan: 2001 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001).
5. Compare the projections on OPEC and world energy production by Lutz Kleveman and David Fleming, "The New Great Game," The Ecologist, April 2003, pp. 29-38.
6. Gregg Easterbrook, "Axle of Evil," New Republic, January 20, 2003, pp. 27-35.
7. Ansel Adams, Our National Parks (Boston: Little Brown, 1992), p. 16;
8. Barbara Novak, The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
9. On the fungibility of national landscape, see the important article by W.J.T. Mitchell, "Imperial Landscape," in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 14-15.
10. On the semiotic value of the Grand Canyon, see Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert (New York: Penguin, 1986), pp. 286-87.
11. On the idea of the imperial self, see Quentin Anderson's book by that name, The Imperial Self (New York: Knopf, 1971);
12. Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
13. See also Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955)
14. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).
15. Reisner, op. cit., p. 246. Lake Powell, a crown jewel of the Colorado River Storage Project with a potential capacity of 24.3 million acre feet (maf), now holds 10.2 maf due to a prolonged drought.
16. See Denver Post, April 4, 2004, pp. 1A, 10A.
17. See Richard Manning, "The Oil We Eat," Harper's, February 2004, p. 44.
18. See Susan Davis, Touch the Magic," in William Cronon, (ed.), Uncommon Ground (New York: Norton, 1996), pp. 204-217.
19. On the degradation of marine ecosystems, see H.J. Heinz Center, The State of the Nation's Ecosystems, (Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
20. On the cultural contradictions of sublime landscape, see Tim Luke, 1987, op. cit.,
21. and Ramachandra Guha, 1989, op. cit. The contentions of Luke and Guha are indirectly supported by evidence showing that the territorial limitations of the national parks impair their ability to serve the function of species preservation retroactively assigned them. Data analysis of sighting records in the parks demonstrates a loss of species (spotted skunk, white-tailed jack-rabbit, gray wolf) over the most recent 60-year period.
22. See the discussion in David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo (NewYork: Scribner, 1996), pp. 487-495. The literature of the "second contradiction" stresses that the ecological and resource costs of capitalism are diverted from their causes and borne by those least able to resist their impact. Here I focus on the role of triumphal landscape in creating the "second contradiction" while at the same time concealing its effects from view.
23. On the "second contradiction," see particularly James O'Connor, "Democracy and Ecology," Capitalism Nature Socialism, December, 1993;
24. "What is Environmental History," Capitalism Nature Socialism, June, 1997.
25. Commentary on the "second contradiction" is supplied by John Bellamy Foster, et. al., Capitalism Nature Socialism, September, 1992;
26. Sunil Ray, Adriana Vlachou, Capitalism Nature Socialism, March, 1993;
27. Valentino Parlato and Giovanna Ricoveri, Capitalism Nature Socialism, December, 1993;
28. Tim Stroshane, Capitalism Nature Socialism, September, 1997;
29. Stuart Rosewarne, Capitalism Nature Socialism, June, 1997.
30. See particularly, Roderick P. Neumann, Imposing Wilderness (Berkeley: University of California, 1998), p. 25;
31. Chris J. Magoc, Yellowstone: The Creation and Selling of an American Landscape (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1999).
32. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), pp. 423, 497.
33. Compare Anne Whiston Spirn, "Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederic Law Olmsted," in W. Cronon (ed.), 1996, op. cit., pp. 91-114.
34. Quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (NewYork: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 100.
35. Rebecca Solnit addresses the hidden effects of Olmsted's Central Park: "The great irony of Central Park in its early years was that public money and democratic rhetoric were used to make a place most notable for its concessions to the rich, who promenaded there in carriages, while the poor took to private pleasure gardens where less aristocratic pleasures such as beer drinking and dancing the polka were acceptable." Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia, 2001), p. 131. Solnit's comments reveal Central Park's role as an object of scenic consumption by urban elites. Also see the discussion of Emerson above.
36. On the issue of usufruct ownership versus commodity possession see Harry Markowitz (ed.), American Indians, Vol. III (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Salem Press, 1995), pp. 454-55;
37. William Cronon, Changes in the Land (New York: Norton, 1983);
38. Carolyn Merchant, "Fate of the Abenaki in the Colonial Ecological Revolution," in Chris Magoc (ed.), So Glorious a Landscape (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1998), pp. 31-44.
39. Jack Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993), pp. 14-33.
40. Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (London: Marion Boyars, 1986), p. 50, suggests the presence of a hidden interlocutor within the visual frame of advertising.
41. For Emerson, the national landscape unifies the "Self of the nation and of nature" as no other artifact of American culture can do. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Essays, with an introduction by Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 81.
42. A partial listing of ecosystem services: the heat absorbed by the oceans, the repelling of ultraviolet radiation by the ozone layer, the carbon dioxide oxygenated by rainforests, the flushing action of rivers, the resilience of genetic diversity in the presence of habitat change, the carbon fuel deposits generated by eons of geological time, the activity of forests in retaining soils and moisture, the fish stocks provided by coral reefs, pollination, and provision of medical products. See Robert Costanza, Ralph d'Arge, Rudolf de Groot, Stephen Farber, Monica Grasso, Bruce Hannon, Karin Limburg, Shahid Naeem, Robert V. O'Neill, Jose Paruelo, Robert G. Raskin, Paul Sutton and Marjan van den Belt, "The Value of Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital," Nature, May 15, 1997, pp. 253-60;
43. Gretchen C. Daily (ed.), Nature's Services (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997).
44. Existing interpretations of advertising fall into several categories, but they are incomplete, because they do not consider the derivation of ad space from national landscape. Pseudo-therapy. T. Jackson Lears and Roland Marchand say that advertising is "pseudo-therapy." Economies of scale in production, merchandising, and distribution of goods occurring in the latter part of the 19th century created rippling socio-economic effects - instabilities in the family, labor force, and the community. It fell to advertising elites to allay these effects. Advertising duped the public into believing that the goods and services produced by new technologies and management systems could be adopted without disturbing cherished values of family and community. Thus advertising finessed, pseudo-therapeutically, the discontents of modernity. See Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkley: University of California, 1985), p. 359;
45. T. Jackson Lears and Richard Fox (eds.), The Culture of Consumption (New York: Pantheon, 1987), pp. 27, 37. Class persuasion. A second interpretation theorizes advertising as capitalist class persuasion. Capitalist "idealism" is upheld by advertising not so much through propagandistic assertion as by repeatedly affirming that its merits need not be questioned.
46. See especially Michael Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 215-218. An important effect is that class antagonisms are depoliticized. They are deflected downward and away from their actual sources in wealth distribution and conditions of work and into comparatively trivial matters of taste and style.
47. See Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire (New York: McGraw Hill, 1982), p. 265;
48. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 19, 25;
49. Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 79. Social Discourse. Still a third view trades upon anthropological discourse in holding that advertising is simply "social communication through and about objects."
50. See William Leiss, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising (London: Routledge, 1990), pp, 1, 311. The authors note that a "gift" culture such as the Kwakiutl, for example, confers status on the basis of generosity; hence lavish potlatches are a preferred means of social communication. By contrast, in a commodity culture such as our own, status distinction is achieved by acquisition, not by giving goods away. Accumulation, not magnanimity, resonates with our personal lifestyle, communicates success, and trumps all other tokens of social status. Repressive liberalism. Finally, a fourth outlook notes the linkage between advertising and the discourse of liberty. We are addressed by ads as "free" to improvise an identity through commodity purchases. On inspection, however, we are only free to choose the identity they have created for us in advance.
51. Judith Williamson, op. cit., p. 42. We are liberated, then, but only repressively, because the symbolic systems used to lure us into commodity purchases mask a de-sublimating, circular intent. They return us to a commodity culture from which departure was falsely promised.
52. See Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997);
53. Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed In (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, 1988);
54. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
55. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991);
56. Mitchell, 1994, op. cit.
57. References are to John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, edited and with an introduction by C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 37, 41.
58. Ibid., pp. 37, 38, 41, 42.
59. Ibid., p. 37.
60. The literature surrounding expropriation of the English commons and the capture of American lands is extensive. For an introduction, see C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (NewYork: Oxford, 1962);
61. Peter Coates, Nature (Berkley: University of California, 1998);
62. Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology (Berkeley: University of California, 1986);
63. Piers H.G. Stephens, "Picking at the Locke of Economic Reductionism," in N. Ben Fairweather, Sue Elworthy, Matt Stroh, and Piers G. H. Stephens, Environmental Futures (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).
64. The debt owed by Locke's theory of perception to a mechanical universe, one that privileges a mechanical means of imprinting information on the perceptual apparatus (such as the camera obscura), is set forth in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, collated and annotated by Alexander Campbell Fraser (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), pp. 11, 17.
65. Here Locke compares the mind to a "dark room" to which pictures from the outside world are admitted. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983), pp. 50, 91, notes the connection between Locke's epistemology and Kepler's redefinition of the eye as a "picture-making optical instrument."
66. Locke, 1980, op. cit., pp. 32, 35.
67. Ibid., pp. 37, 38.
68. Emerson, op. cit., pp. 6, 81.
69. For a discussion of the commodification of colonial landscape as an object of scenic consumption through creation of national parks, monuments, and landscapes, see particularly Neumann, 1998, i op. cit., p. 25,
70. Guha, 1989, op. cit., pp. 71-83.
71. For a comparative analysis of ecological footprint by country correlated with world system position, income inequality, urbanization, and literacy, see Andrew K. Jorgenson, "Consumption and Environmental Degradation," Social Problems, 50, 3, 2003, pp. 374-394.
72. The U.S. ecological footprint is calculated at approximately 9.7 hectares per person as compared with its closet rivals, Germany and France at approximately 4.7 hectares. An update on the "transparent eyeball" encountering wilderness with the aid of a high fidelity camera is provided by Tim Luke, 1987, op. cit., pp. 44-48.
73. On the general topic of the proliferation of artifacts of human self-extension, see Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: Signet, 1964).
74. See William H. Truettner, "Ideology and Image," in William H. Truettner (ed.), The West as America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1991), p. 40;
75. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1988);
76. Frank Coleman, "The Encoded Frontier," Capitalism Nature Socialism, Spring 2003.
77. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American Life (New York: Dover, 1920), pp. 4-5.
78. Locke is viewed as the sole source of American political ideology in Jehlen, 1986, op. cit.;
79. Hartz, 1955, op. cit.;
80. Bellah et. al., 1985, op. cit.;
81. Jack Greene, 1993, op. cit.
82. The thesis of Lockean ideological hegemony is revisited by Susanne Hoeber Rudolph in "The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World," and Philip Abbott, "Still Louis Hartz After All These Years: A Defense of the Liberal Society Thesis," in Perspectives on Politics, (New York: American Political Science Association, March 2005), pp. 5-14 and pp. 93-109, respectively.
83. Locke, 1980, op. cit., pp. 39, 45.
84. To be sure, the effort is made to rehabilitate "wilderness" and national parks ex post facto by designating them as preserves for wildlife and native plants. This effort has largely failed due to the continuing management of these sites as premier tourist spectacles. For a controversy on whether these sites should continue to possess the privileged status they formerly enjoyed, see J. Baird Callicott, "The Wilderness Idea Revisited: The Sustainable Development Alternative," and Holmes Rolston, III, "The Wilderness Idea Reaffirmed," in John Lemons (ed.), Readings from the Environmental Professional (London: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 95-115.
85. Holmes Rolston, III, "The Wilderness Idea Reaffirmed," in John Lemons (ed.), Readings from the Environmental Professional (London: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 95-115.
86. Quoted in Warren Susman, Culture as History, (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 136.
87. The Bush administration is aggressively pushing to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska to oil drilling. Environmental groups contend that ANWR exploitation is avoidable by imposing improved mile per gallon standards on the SUV and light truck fleet (which jointly consume 1 million to 1.3 million barrels a day). See National Energy Policy, 2001, op. cit.
88. See the excellent analyses by Kleveman and Fleming, 2003, op cit. The emphasis of the present article on the Escalade is misleading in the sense that the inefficiencies characterizing transportation also apply to food production, processing, and distribution.
89. For a discussion of petroleum dependency in the latter see Richard Manning, 2004, op. cit., pp. 37-45.