I never believed in seasonal depression till I moved to New York City. The winter cold is bad enough, but to look out and see nothing but a flatness of concrete and barren trees... These past few months I fell into a very deep homesickness, one that convinced me I need to move back West once my lease is up. I miss the sunshine and avocados yes but I also miss superlative landscapes. I visited the "Grand Canyon of the East" in western New York state and just laughed. The Catskills look like hills to me. Vermont is beautiful, but you're never really in anything you could call "wilderness". And what else do you want me to look at? Massachusetts? Long Island? Jesus Christ.
The most stirring landscapes I can see on the east coast are in the American Wing of the Met. There I can sit in front of massive paintings of massive mountains and massive thunderclouds and massive trees and appreciate the general sense of, I don't know, awesomeness. Both in the god-fearing way and in the Californian way. Finally, true natural beauty.
Ironically some of these "Western" landscape painters, like Schreyvogel and Moran, were working out of studios in New Jersey. While some landscapes they painted were grounded in reality, many were just a collage of religious symbols. These paintings I admire as depictions of "real" nature, meaningful nature, a place to find yourself and escape the confines of modern life... well unfortunately it turns out that's just me falling for 200-year-old nationalist propaganda like a rube ;(
In her book This Ecstatic Nation, Terre Ryan writes about how landscape painters in the 19th century — amidst Manifest Destiny, transcendentalism, ongoing Native American genocide, and the expansion of railroads — consciously chose to depict Western landscapes devoid of people and beaming with a certain godliness all as part of a "frontier mythology":
As the political scientist John Tirman observes, frontier mythology encompasses "the limitless possibilities of the American dream, the expansion of American values, the national effort to tame faraway places, the promise of a bounty just over the horizon, and the essential virtues of the American people who explore and settle these frontiers."
Painters have promoted this ideology well past the 19th century. As lovely as Georgia O'Keeffe's landscapes are they too sell that same Manifest Destiny fantasy of an unpopulated, mystical West. Indigenous curator Patricia Norby points out that Life Magazine "would feature O’Keeffe’s paintings of the empty desert alongside her photographed collecting bones, walking around, looking very mysterious. And she’s often only depicted alone walking around in these vast desertscapes... This depiction of the entire region as empty really helped to promote what you’re describing as this space for people to just move right in, a place that is unoccupied, which is of course not true." This fantasy persists beyond landscape painting: every truck commercial that tries to convince you you're totally going to be off-roading every weekend in some pristine wilderness, far from dang ol' civilization, is also selling frontier mythology.1
The flip side of this ideology is: for every Eden, there's a Babylon. If some "conventionally scenic landscapes may be protected... others may be devalued and even abused." And we love abusing our landscapes. Sure we cherish Yosemite and Yellowstone, but who cares about barren Nevada? The East Palestine train derailment was sad of course, but who cares about Appalachian Ohio, right? Or Appalachia in general? Who cares about the swamps of the Deep South?
"Even Ralph Waldo Emerson," writes Ryan, "an eloquent lover of nature, subscribed to a 'doctrine of Use.' 'Nature... is made to serve.'" Last year I visited Louisiana's Atchafalaya Swamp2, a swamp larger than the entire state of Rhode Island, as awe-inspiring as Yellowstone, without any of the same protections. Why would there be? Swamps do not fit in with the message of Manifest Destiny, and they're not where rich white people want to live. Since a landscape can't simply exist for its own sake, swamps have to serve, and thus get sacrificed to the oil refineries. It's an ecological disaster most of us choose to ignore. (Though not everyone does. Geography of Robots's outstanding game Norco is, among other things, an unflinching look at what this environmental destruction has done to southern Louisiana. Everyone should play this game.)
The Atchafalaya is not unique in its beauty or its devastation. Mining, logging, fracking, and other damaging acts of extraction play out all over American land, beloved or otherwise. The lush mountain forests of the Northwest may be enshrined by American nationalism, but they too must serve, though frontier mythology demands that extra efforts be made to maintain the fantasy of pristine wilderness: Ryan describes "the practice of veiling clearcuts behind a thin screen of trees so that passersby see the picturesque facade rather than the devastated ecosystem behind it." Do we cherish these landscapes, or do we just cherish the fantasy?
Sitting in the Met, looking at a massive painting of a massive mountain, I do find myself swept up by frontier mythology. I want to be in that untouched, pristine wilderness. But that wilderness was always just a fantasy, and a harmful one. This land was never "untouched": it was, and continues to be, populated and cared for by Indigenous people -- people often omitted from the mythology. And the idea that some landscapes (mountains, forests) are better than others (deserts, swamps) makes it seem more "acceptable" for those latter landscapes to be trampled and ruined, always for the sake of something stupid like capitalism or war. We would never test atomic bombs in the redwood forests of course, but in the middle of Nevada? Sure why not. It's just a wasteland anyway, right?
In his phenomenal essay on the open pit mines of Nevada, Charlie Macquarie describes how the "quiet, empty pit at the end of a long dirt road is a visceral reminder of all the bad ideas that came and went, leaving some ripped-up earth and making someone who lives somewhere else very rich." We love images of sublime wilderness because the ripped-up earth gets omitted. We can pretend this destruction isn't happening. But it is, relentlessly. Every time we dismiss a region or an ecosystem, we cosign its destruction. I do think the forests of the West are beautiful and deserve to be protected, but so do Louisiana’s swamps. So does Appalachian Ohio. So, even, does Long Island. If there's any hope of protecting and healing these lands, it will start by rejecting frontier mythology. We're already in paradise. Why destroy it?
1 Ironically, most people buying these “rugged” trucks just use them for running errands or going on joyrides on nicely paved roads. But they could do something badass with them. In theory.
2 I’d never even heard of the Atchafalaya till I started dating someone from Louisiana. It was on a trip there together that I knew one day I would marry her. And I’m happy to say, as of a few days ago, she and I are now engaged :)