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( How a forgotten environmental tradition of the pre-Civi...)
How a forgotten environmental tradition of the pre-Civil War era may prove powerfully useful to us now Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the countryside into rapidly expanding cities, making nature accessible to all and serving to remind visitors of the natural cycles of life. In this unique interdisciplinary blend of historical narrative, cultural criticism, and poignant memoir, Aaron Sachs argues that American cemeteries embody a forgotten landscape tradition that has much to teach us in our current moment of environmental crisis. Until the trauma of the Civil War, many Americans sought to shape society into what they thought of as an Arcadia—not an Eden where fruit simply fell off the tree, but a public garden that depended on an ethic of communal care, and whose sense of beauty and repose related directly to an acknowledgement of mortality and limitation. Sachs explores the notion of Arcadia in the works of nineteenth-century nature writers, novelists, painters, horticulturists, landscape architects, and city planners, and holds up for comparison the twenty-first century's—and his own—tendency toward denial of both death and environmental limits. His far-reaching insights suggest new possibilities for the environmental movement today and new ways of understanding American history.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300205880/?tag=2022091-20
He graduated from Harvard University in 1992 with a Bachelor of Arts in history and literature, and from Yale University, with a Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies, in 2004.
He teaches at Cornell University. Sachs interjects himself often in this book, weaving between the history and his own physical and intellectual wanderings. He sees himself as a Humboldtian explorer and in this book he invites us to come join him on the journey.
This ambitious book overreaches at times, and it can be disjointed, as the author tries to trace a set of loosely defined ideas through many different intellectual currents.
But the portraits of these early environmentalists are compelling, particularly the surprising depiction of John Muir.
Foreign all his achievements, Sachs argues, Muir in his later, influential years came to believe that man had no permanent place in nature.
The Humboldt Current is not lacking in resonant voices. Sachs’s subjects are strong, and he describes them in extensive detail.
The difficulty is that there are perhaps too many subjects and too much detail — digressing at length from Humboldt. As interesting as his followers were, their stories beg for a fuller portrait of the extraordinary figure who inspired them.
( How a forgotten environmental tradition of the pre-Civi...)
Quotations: Sachs has taken the nineteenth century historian Francis Parkman at his word when Parkman wrote that writing history should rely “less on books than on such personal experiences as should, in some sense, identify with his theme.".
Quotes from others about the person
As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of him, he was “one of those wonders of the world.. who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind.”.
