231
“The message was clear . . .”: Stephen Trimble, “Reinventing the West: Private Choices and Consequences in Photography,” Buzzworm, November-December 1991, pp. 46–54. Michael Cohen pointed out (in a note to the author) that the Glen Canyon book sent people in search of that sense of place throughout the Colorado Plateau, generating, among other things, a “plethora of Antelope Canyon pictures.”
232
“I did not consider those years wasted . . .”: Porter, Eliot Porter, p. 29.
232
“During my career as a photographer . . .”: ibid., p. 83.
232
“Over the many years that I worked with him . . .”: Eleanor Caponigro, interviewed by John Rohrbach, January 16, 1995, typescript, p. 3, Eliot Porter Archives.
234
“of comparable sensibility . . .”: Porter, Eliot Porter, p. 45.
234
“The enclosed clipping is a letter I wrote . . .”: Eliot Porter, letter to Stephen Porter, November 29, 1958, Stephen Porter file, Eliot Porter Archives.
235
“Photography is a strong tool . . .”: Eliot Porter, “Photography and Conservation,” manuscript in Notes on Conservation file, box 40, Eliot Porter Archives.
235
“changed Dave’s whole way of looking at the conservation movement. . . .”: Edgar Wayburn cited by Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), p. 293.
236
“The conspicuous success of Wildness . . .”: Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, pp. 318–319.
237
On the links between the books and the club’s campaigns, see Cohen, History of the Sierra Club, pp. 424–426. The Earth National Park ad was one of the last straws in Brower’s relationship with the Sierra Club board, who perceived it as both an unauthorized expenditure and a far too vague and utopian idea to mesh with their commitment to concrete protections and realizable goals.
237
“The idea of playing hardball with big corporations . . .”: Philip Berry, oral history interview, Sierra Club Archives. The club was accustomed to cordial relations with the sources of power; In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World was underwritten by a philanthropic arm of the giant Bechtel Corporation—which built Hoover Dam, countless oil pipelines around the world, and Glen Canyon Dam and now manages the nuclear weapons program at the Nevada Test Site.
238
“was most eloquently stated, really, by Eliot Porter . . .”: ibid., p. 27.
238
“Every acre that is lost . . .”: Eliot Porter, Sierra Club Bulletin, 1969, from Short Statements on Conservation 1958–1971 file, box 41, Eliot Porter Archives.
239
For Hildebrand’s criticism of Porter, see Alex Hildebrand, oral history interview, Sierra Club Leaders, 1950s–1970s, p. 21, Sierra Club Archives. Hildebrand was a Standard Oil executive and part of the club’s old guard.
239
Adams—who had mixed feelings about color photography: Porter often depicted Ansel Adams as an intimidating and difficult figure, and certainly Adams made many disparaging comments about color photography over the years. But Virginia Adams apparently tried to get an early version of In Wildness published, and Adams’s letter of congratulations to Porter for The Place No One Knew is generous. Perhaps because of his many years of involvement with the club, Adams took a more pragmatic view on everything from publications to Diablo Canyon. In those years, Brower annoyed the two artists with his oft-repeated comment that “Porter is the Sierra Club’s most valuable property” (in, for example, a letter of November 16, 1966, in the Publications files of the Sierra Club Archives); Porter did not regard himself as property, and Adams felt disparaged by the focus on Porter. During those years, the Sierra Club letterhead featured an Ansel Adams photograph.
239
“There was a great deal of opposition to the proposal . . .”: Porter, Eliot Porter, p. 53.
239
“other projects have higher conservation priority . . .”: Edgar Wayburn, letter, September 9, 1967, file 2, box 30, David Brower Papers, Sierra Club Archives. Many other Sierra Club board members felt that books should be tied to conservation objectives. Martin Litton tartly recalled, “Along came the exhibit format books. They were done in black and white which, of course, was cheap. In those days not too much color was done anyway. That was the perfect stage for Ansel Adams’s material. You had these terrific books, most of which did not pinpoint any subject. They were just all over the place, like This Is the American Earth. Pretty pictures of America with a little message by Nancy Newhall or whoever under each one about how lovely it is we still have Mount Whitney there. It didn’t do anything political. It showed the Sierra Club could publish books, and books like that weren’t all that common then as they are now” (Litton, oral history interview, p. 79, Sierra Club Archives). Board member August Frugé agreed with Adams and Wayburn when he wrote to Brower on February 2, 1969: “We have little need for coffee table books on the Alps and the Scottish Highlands (planned for 1969), but we desperately need books that will help us save Lake Tahoe, San Francisco Bay, the Everglades, Lake Superior, and many other places” (folder 2:26, Ansel Adams Papers, Sierra Club Archives).
239
“The publications committee of the Sierra Club . . .”: Porter, Eliot Porter, p. 54.
240
“Adams argued that Brower would not accept a position . . .”: Cohen, History of the Sierra Club, p. 421.
240
“During a board meeting . . .”: Porter, Eliot Porter, p. 56. In a letter to Brower on March 4, 1968, Porter wrote, “I am getting a little weary of being told one day that I am a valuable property of the Sierra Club and the next day lectured on my responsibilities to the Sierra Club and conservation. Sometimes I think that you would like me to feel guilty for making any money at all from Sierra Club publications. . . . My contribution to conservation may not be enough in your eyes but after all this is a matter that each of us has to decide for himself. My contribution is considerably different from yours and may be judged considerably less, but whatever the judgment is I resent its being down-graded. And this happens when my books are publicized as Sierra Club publications without credit going to me or my name mentioned.”
241
“There is no subject and background . . .”: Fairfield Porter, The Nation, January 1960, p. 39. Art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, in a review of Fairfield Porter’s paintings, “Porter was born real-estate rich in a suburb of Chicago to a family that had deep roots in New England. His gloomy father was a frustrated architect, his mother a lifelong amateur in social causes and cultural uplift. . . . In 1927, he travelled to Moscow, where he had his first exposure to the paintings of Vuillard and Bonnard, and an audience with Leon Trotsky, who allowed Porter to sketch him. . . . Settling in New York, he became embroiled in radical politics and painted a mural, now lost, entitled ‘Turn Imperialist War Into Civil War’ ” (New Yorker, April 17, 2000). Among the differences between the Porter brothers is that Fairfield found his métier early on and eventually the painting became quite separate from the politics, while older brother Eliot struggled to define a new medium that eventually allowed him to bring politics and aesthetics together.
241
first principle of ecology: Carolyn Merchant, “Feminism and Ecology,” appendix B, in Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, by Bill Devall and George Sessions (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1985), p. 229. Merchant also quotes Commoner.
242
“Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. . . .”: Porter, Eliot Porter, p. 44.
243
“Don’t show the sky . . .”: Eliot Porter, quoted by David Brower in a letter reminiscing about Porter, to curator John Rohrbach of the Amon Carter Museum, September 1999.
245
“the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery . . .”: Thoma
s Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” in American Art, 1700–1960, ed. John McCoubrey, Sources and Documents in the History of Art series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 92.
245
much has been written to revise this idea: My own 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West documents the cost of imagining Yosemite Valley as virgin wilderness—the cost to the Euro-American imagination, Native American rights, and the place’s ecology. Ethnobotanists such as Kat Anderson and books ranging from William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England to Jonathan S. Adams and Thomas O. McShane’s The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion to Alston Chase’s Playing God in Yellowstone have done more to complicate our understanding of the ecosystems we sometimes call wilderness and of the human presence in them. Recently, the Native American writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn published Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice.
246
“The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions . . .”: William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), p. 80.
248
“What has troubled me . . .”: George Marshall, letter to Eliot Porter, May 11, 1965, Eliot Porter file, carton 11, David Brower Papers, Sierra Club Archives.
248
“Most of the photographs . . .”: George Marshall, letter to David Brower, May 6, 1965, Eliot Porter file, carton 11, David Brower Papers, Sierra Club Archives.
250
“was supposed to influence people for conservation . . .”: Eliot Porter, letter to Marcie and Stephen Porter, December 17, 1977, Stephen Porter file, Eliot Porter Archives.
250
“almost always unintentionally softens . . .”: Eliot Porter, address to Los Alamos Honor Students, p. 4, Eliot Porter Archives. Other color photogra-phers—notably Richard Misrach and John Pfahl—have explored the moral quandary implicit in the way that a color photograph likely to attract attention is likely to endow its subject with beauties of color or composition; these two artists have intentionally deployed this flaw to test ethics against aesthetics (a subject I have addressed at length in Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach).
251
“More people currently know the appearance of Yosemite Valley . . .”: Robert Adams, “C. A. Hickman,” in Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (New York: Aperture, 1981), p. 103. As Michael Cohen has pointed out, Adams’s assertion that there are “few converts . . . to be won to the general idea of wilderness preservation” is open to ambiguity now, with the spread of corporate-financed anti-environmentalist groups (such as the Wise Use Movement and People for the West) contributing to widespread suspicion and hostility toward environmentalists among rural, conservative, and working-class people.
253
“In the 1970s came, ironically, a more and more dazzling presentation of those creatures . . .”: Barry Lopez, “Learning to See,” in About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 233.
THE BOTANICAL CIRCUS, OR ADVENTURES IN AMERICAN GARDENING
254
“I came to love my rows, my beans . . .”: Henry David Thoreau, from the “Bean Field” chapter of Walden, in Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 140.
256
“two Squares, each having four Quarters . . .”: A. J. Dezallier D’Argenville, “Theory and Practice of Gardening” (1712), trans. John James, in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620–1820, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), p. 125.
256
“There is certainly something in the amiable Simplicity . . .”: Alexander Pope, 1713 essay from The Guardian, in Hunt and Willis, The Genius of the Place, p. 205.
256
“Adam and Eve in Yew . . .”: ibid., p. 208.
257
“the object of art may be to seek the elimination of the necessity of it . . .”: Robert Irwin in conversation with Ed Wortz and James Turrell in Lawrence Weschler, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 128. Irwin designed the very peculiar garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, a garden that is a sort of sunken basin in whose center is an inaccessible hedge maze surrounded by water. The plantings are abundant, and the decision to eliminate the commanding view of the site with a descent into the wildly varied floral plantings could be construed as a pointed rejection of the monumentally ambitious architecture and looming location on a high hill.
257
“For several decades the nineteenth century had no distinctive garden style . . .”: Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 239.
258
“It was as though the creation was a jig-saw puzzle . . .”: John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 39.
259
“The Wardian case is, with the ha-ha . . .”: Thacker, History of Gardens, p. 236. A ha-ha is a sunken boundary or fence, which visually eliminates the boundary though in fact it remains.
259
“biocolonialism”: See, for example, Tamar Kahn in the Johannesburg Business Day, March 22, 2002: “For thousands of years the San have used the Hoodia cactus as an appetite suppressant and thirst quencher. It helped them endure long hunts, and resist the temptation to eat their kill before they returned to their camps. The cactus is potentially worth a fortune, because it could very well be the first plant to give rise to a commercially viable appetite suppressant drug. In the US alone, with an estimated 35-million to 65-million clinically obese people, the market for such a product is huge and growing all the time. The central issue in the tale of the cactus, the San, and the international drug companies, is what benefits will the San derive from all of this? That question made international headlines last year, when a British journalist revealed that the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) had patented Hoodia’s appetite-suppressing ingredient, dubbed P57, and granted the development rights to Phytopharm, a small pharmaceutical firm in the UK.”
259
“The few plants are strangers . . .”: John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons (New York: Dover Books, 1961), p. 22. On the other hand, consider historian Patricia Nelson Limerick on her first trip out of the arid West in which she was born: “As I drove across Oklahoma, crossing what I later learned was the ninety-eighth meridian, discovery joined up with its usual partner, disorientation. The air became humid, clammy, and unpleasant, and the landscape turned distressingly green. The Eastern United States, I learned with every mile, was badly infested by plants. Even where they had been driven back, the bushes, shrubs, and trees gave every sign of anticipating a reconquest. But the even more remarkable fact was this: millions of people lived in this muggy, congested world . . . and considered it normal” (“Disorientation and Reorientation,” Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West [New York: W. W. Norton, 2000], p. 196).
261
Laura Ingalls Wilder tells a tale: Wilder’s Farmer Boy (1933; New York: HarperCollins, 2004) is a digressive portion of her many-volume fictionalized memoirs of growing up on the American frontier. This book deals with her husband’s childhood on a big farm in New York State, during which he raises a prize pumpkin and worries about having cheated by growing it milk-fed (and the book, as I recall thirty years later, gives details of how he fed this early Miracle-Gro formula to the vine). It must be said, however, that at the Findhorn spiritual community in Scotland in the 1970s, overgrown vegetables became an even more explicit sign of the approval of the gods than did al
l those county fair pumpkins and postcards of freight cars bearing a single peach of America the Promised Land.
263
class war of the roses: “The war of the roses is at bottom a class war. The tracts of old-rosarians bristle with the fine distinctions, winks, and code words by which aristocrats have always recognized one another” (Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Plant’s Eye View of the World [New York: Random House, 2001], p. 84).
263
“Looking at my dahlias one summer day . . .”: Eleanor Perényi, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 46–47.
THE RUINS OF MEMORY
351
“Decay can be halted . . .”: in J. B. Jackson, “Looking at New Mexico,” in Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 62.
353
Victor Hugo poem quoted: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 95.
360
“This was the first of the great fires which devastated San Francisco . . .”: Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (New York: D. Appleton, 1855), p. 241.
360
“But in proportion to the unusual depression . . .”: ibid., pp. 277–278.
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 43
