The idea of nature in America

Daedalus

Volumn 137, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 8-21

  Marx, Leo ^a,b  

^a American Academy

^b MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 44649150765     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/daed.2008.137.2.8     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. The essays they produced are reprinted in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (W. W. Norton : New York, 1995).
2. This essay derives from a paper presented at the conference of the European Association for American Studies, in Graz, Austria, April 14- 17, 2000. See Hans Bak and Walter W. Holbling, eds., "Nature's Nation"Revisited: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis (Amsterdam : VU Press, 2003).
3. Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 219.
4. Miller first used the phrase in his 1953 essay, "Nature and the National Ego," in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1967), 209.
5. Elizabeth W. Miller and Kenneth Murdock later used it as the title of a posthumous collection of Miller's essays, Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1967).
6. In his seminal 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Turner argued that American nature, in the form of free land, in effect determined the "peculiarity of American institutions."
7. William Bradford, History of Plimoth Plantation, in Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson, eds., The Puritans (New York : American Book Company, 1938), 100-101.
8. John Winthrop, "Speech to the General Court, July 3, 1625," in Miller and Johnson, eds., The Puritans, 206.
9. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 55.
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), I, 8.
11. Ibid., 10-11. Emphasis added.
12. In Origin of Species, though Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection remained incomplete until the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871.
13. Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," in Paul Shepherd, ed., The Subversive Science; Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 369.
14. See also Leo Marx, "American Institutions and Ecological Ideals," Science 170 (November 27, 1970) :945-952.
15. "In Memoriam" (1850), which he had begun writing in 1833.
16. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York: Mentor, 1958), 74.
17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), II, 74.
18. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1800-1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944);
19. Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1998);
20. Leo Marx, "The Domination of Nature and the Redefinition of Progress," in Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Progress: Fact or Illusion? (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1996), 201 - 218.
21. Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (Boston: Little Brown, 1948), 175.
22. Darwin, Origin of Species, 88.
23. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1991), ix.
24. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco : Harper, 1989). 193.
25. Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology : The Search for a Livable World (New York : Routledge, 1992).
26. Subsequent observations of 'global warming' are widely accepted in the scientific community as evidence of the man-made transformation of Earth's atmospheric envelope.
27. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), 96, 64.
28. Raymond Williams calls attention to the idea of nature's separateness in "The Idea of Nature," Problems of Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 67-85.
29. McKibben, The End of Nature, 58.
30. Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground, 69-90.
31. For a comprehensive collection of the arguments, pro and con, including Cronon's essay, see J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, eds., The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 1998).
32. William Cronon, Nature 's Metropolis : Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), xviiff;
33. Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 117-118.