Toward the end of reading Jim Sterba’s new book, Nature Wars, I was stung by a self-recognition. Sterba was writing about feral cats, and how pet owners get very unhappy when they discover that their no-longer-wanted cats and dogs are unlikely to be adopted at animal shelters, and will probably be euthanized. They believe that someone ought to want their animal, even if they no longer do. Because the dog or the cat is still healthy and loveable, &c &c.

On a table in the blue room, there’s a small plastic basket loaded with stainless-steel flatware — knives, forks, and spoons, and also a host of measuring spoons. It’s all perfectly good, useful stuff, decently heavy and nicely decorated. But I don’t want it anymore; I’ve upgraded to better. Better measuring spoons, and much more stylish flatware. (Why, I like it even better than our silver!) Surely somebody wants my castoffs — there’s nothing wrong with them.

I take that back. It’s not evident to me that somebody wants my castoffs, as I’ve written recently about the collection of books that I call “my library.” So I’m not going to offer the stainless to the young people I know, who might know someone who’s just starting out, &c. I’m going to put it all in a shopping bag and take it to Goodwill on my way to lunch tomorrow. And that will be that.

But I remain stung, because, even if I know better, I rationalize my agreeable but strictly unnecessary houseware upgrades by assuring myself, in advance, that the serviceable items that I’m about to unload will find a welcome somewhere else. How generous of me to give them away!  

I’m sure that there are people in every culture who are afflicted with wobbly thinking of the foregoing stamp. But I wonder if, to the rest world, American culture itself appears to be deluded about the nature of its generosity.

***

Nature Wars is full of fun and a joy to read; I read about half of it aloud to Kathleen. It’s a reporter’s book, brimful with information but also tonally skeptical, as older reporters tend to be when they finally accept the sad fact that most people don’t share their passion to look into things. The drawback to the journalistic style, even when, as in Sterba’s hands, developments are chronologically traced, is a certain paleness in historical perspective. Sterba is writing about problems besetting Americans today — or, as in the case of Canada geese and Flight 1549, until quite recently. How we got here is of great interest to him, and he follows many pathways back through the wrinkles of time. But Nature Wars is indelibly a book about the transformation of the American landscape by a virulent plague of careless and forgetful human beings. Americans like to think that there is something in the land they inhabit that brings out the best in them. Maybe it does, but it certainly seems to have brought out the worst in their forebears. And Americans still don’t know how to pay attention; they can only obsess. Nature Wars is stuffed with enough evidence to make this case five times over, but it doesn’t interest the genial writer. He is content to show how American ideas about nature came into conflict with American housing preferences, and he does that very well.  

The big question at the outset of the book is this: why did nobody notice the reforestation of the Eastern seaboard while it was taking place? Farmers began abandoning New England in the early Nineteenth Century. Today, something like three quarters of American forests stand east of the Appalachians. As forests go, these Eastern woods are densely populated by animals and human beings alike — that’s the Nature Wars problem in a nutshell. Americans who know about Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon even before they visit have little or no idea that the oldest part of the country has reverted to the condition that it was in when it was the only part, if now with roads and houses. How come? Sterba draws an answer from Michael Williams’s Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (1989).

So imagine what happened when farmland began to be abandoned to forest in the nineteenth century. To let precious land, cleared by backbreaking labor, go untended, unprotected from an invasion of trees, as the opposite of progress. As Michael Williams interpreted it, the process was “retrogressive, difficult to comprehend, and even sinful to contemplate.” It was an abdication of a farmer’s responsibility to be a good steward of the working landscape (although farmers themselves didn’t mind giving up scrub acreage), and as such it was largely ignored by government statisticians.

Step back for a moment, and you can see that American history went West. What happened back East ceased to matter; it even began to look suspiciously European. But, for all that farmers gave up on New England, the East was hardly abandoned. The population of the colonial states skyrocketed, and it remains both dense and high. The density, I surmise, is the problem; there’s something unamerican about density. New York may be a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Even if, from a strictly environmental point of view, it made the most sense, as indeed it does. (And there are millions of trees within the city limits, Sterba reminds us.) No, America is a nation of open spaces — where nobody lives. Go figure.

I do wish that Sterba had made more of the material that he has amassed showing that Walt Disney’s visions of nature and American life, bogus through and through, seem to have overwhelmed the more useful and correct views that one would hope to find taught in schools. That’s another problem, like the reforestation that Sterba examines so fruitfully, of which not many Americans seem to be aware. It’s a problem with education, I hasten to note, not a Disney problem. Disney is entertainment. Writing about the “denatured life” led by Americans today, out of touch (literally) with any kind of nature, Sterba touches the problem lightly:

What that meant was that early boomers were the last generation to be able to appreciate a nature presentation on film for what it was and not confuse it with the real world. They knew the difference from experience as subsequent generations could not. As a preboomer, I certainly did.  We farm kids of the late 1940s and 1950s put down our Porky Pig comic books and went out to slop the hogs. We watched Bugs Bunny on TV and then watched Dad shoot a rabbit and Mom skin and cook it for dinner. I watched Daffy Duck cartoons and also accompanied my uncle into the swamp come autumn to shoot green-headed mallards I dubbed “Daffy ducks.”

It isn’t just nature that has been denatured for Americans, but America itself. George Saunders does a fine (if disturbing) job of satirizing the results. It would be helpful for a reporter to anatomize them.

Not that I’m complaining!  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2013 at 4:48 pm.