Who Cares about A. Humboldt's 19th-century Exploits?

Part II with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.

WF: I'll ask the manuscript reviewer's question: why do we need to know about Humboldt's 19th-century exploits?

AS: Because, again, Humboldt helps us to see both history and the present through a different--and, I hope--more hopeful lens. For me, anyway, he provides a reminder that no historical trajectory is inevitable. That's potentially a spur to both thought and action. As the historian Carl Becker said, it's part of our obligation as scholars to "think otherwise." Nineteenth-century American expansion and social and environmental exploitation could have gone in different directions; at the very least, some people argued that those trends should have been reconsidered. Today's environmental movement could also develop in a number of different ways. In the 21st century, it has generally struck me as weak and intellectually limited, though in the last year the issue of global warming has suddenly gained much more cultural purchase. But we still need to think harder about environmentalism's social context, and Humboldt helps us do that.

WF: I've always been intrigued by the Hudson River School (HRS), using their images in as many classes as I can. Does Humboldt fit into a story in which the HRS landscape images also fit? I don't mean to be obscure by that. Let me try again: I find HRS landscapes especially useful in discussions about environmental ethics and history. Does Humboldt fit there too?

AS: I think this is an excellent and apt question, actually. I'm also very fond of the HRS painters, and they are probably going to play an even bigger role in my next book. In The Humboldt Current, I try to suggest a development in the HRS between the time of Thomas Cole, when the leading landscape work was allegorical, and the time of Cole's student Frederic Church, when--for a brief decade or two--the leading work was more scientific, or Humboldtian. The distinction I try to draw between Cole and Church parallels a distinction I see between Emerson and Thoreau. Cole and Emerson both clearly placed their perception of "spirit" higher than their perception of nature--so that, in the context of landscape painting, nature scenes became instrumental. Even if Cole at times objected to the "progress of civilization" and the unthinking and unbalanced exploitation of natural resources, his critique came less from any proto-ecological awareness than from a desire to tap into the power of a more pristine nature to transport human observers to a more divine realm. Church's focus on nature's details, on the other hand, signaled an attempt to balance humanity and the environment--to celebrate both equally and work out a long-term mediation between the two by emphasizing their interconnectedness and interdependence.

WF: It's a different environmental ethic, then, of associating human and non-human nature in a particular way.

AS: Yes, so that more broadly, for me, the HRS painters point to the question of the pastoral tradition in American culture. There are so many scenes of "civilization" just starting to be established in the woodlands of the northeast--scenes full of railroads and cabins and small factories and clearings and tree stumps. What do these scenes mean? The current interpretation among art historians, following the quite brilliant lead of Leo Marx in his 1964 book The Machine in the Garden, is that these are nationalistic images showing how American culture joined together an appreciation of nature with a full-on commitment to industrial development--how the culture in a sense elided the problem and made industry and the environment seem perfectly compatible. My own sense is that the images are much more ambivalent. Some scholars insist that to see stumps in the 1850s as signs of an environmental critique is to be blinded by the concerns of the present, since at the time stumps might well have represented Progress. To me, though, that assertion is itself a kind of presentism, since I have seen quite a bit of evidence demonstrating that in fact a number of writers, artists, scientists, and explorers were leveling environmental critiques at American society during the antebellum period.

WF: In both cases, though, it would turn on shifting concepts of progress.

AF: We would be wrong simply to embrace the current assumption that everyone in the nineteenth century endorsed Manifest Destiny. Indeed, some of the most complicated HRS paintings from the 1840s, 50s, and 60s seem to me to be desperate reminders that, for all of the benefits of civilization to be gained through, say, the coming of the railroad, Americans were in the process of destroying what could have been a well balanced society based on agriculture, horticulture, human-scale cities, and a modicum of respect for the wild lands surrounding the towns and farms.

WF: Another ethics question, but this one pushing away from a pastoral tradition toward more of a work-based or engaged tradition (what I look at as the "georgic" tradition in my own work): an underlying ethic in this history of exploration deals with how one knows nature through experience in it--as opposed to disembodied laboratory study. What do you make of that (possible) contrast?

AF: Thanks for asking this question. As I've suggested above, the experiential angle is an important one for me, and one that I feel has been either ignored or misread in some reviews of the book. Ultimately, it's an epistemological question. I use experience not as the ultimate way of knowing, but as a spur to constant questioning: I depict these explorers in dialogues with mainstream culture where they continually bounce back and forth between what they know from their educations and from cultural osmosis and what they know from their experiences in various new kinds of frontier settings.

WF: How does it tail back to your environmental thinking?

AS: In those terms, I realize my book may (tonally, at least) romanticize or even fetishize a very intense kind of experience of wild nature. At the same time, I hope it becomes clear that I am endorsing a more metaphorical exploration. It's about constantly seeking out different contexts for your ideas. I don't believe everyone needs to immerse herself in nature. Rather, I'm trying to argue that the lab alone is never enough; schooling alone is never enough; the theory alone is never enough. And we always need to preserve the possibility that at least some people could experience organic nature at various levels of development. Ecology won't help us much unless it connects not only humanity and nature but also human thought and embodied human action. To adopt Gregory Bateson's phrasing, my book tries to use the history of exploration to explore the "ecology of mind."