Conflicted American Landscapes

Synopsis

How conflicting ideas of nature threaten to fracture America's identity.Amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties: American 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 10,000 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' irreconcilably conflicting 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.

Copyright:

2021

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780262362146

Related ISBNs:

9780262542081

Publisher:

MIT Press

Date of Addition:

04/27/21

Copyrighted By:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Outdoors and Nature, Social Studies, Earth Sciences, Politics and Government

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.