In American mythology, the settlement of the West was the story of hardy pioneers scratching out rugged new lives, though in reality, by the time most pioneers arrived, much of the western landscape was owned and developed by agricultural and lumber interests. According to historian David E. Nye, land left over from government railroad grants was intended for settlers, but it was often sold off to corporations en masse.
By the late nineteenth century, the frontier landscape had been gridded into cities, towns, and neighborhoods in a matter of a few decades. In response to these rapid changes, a movement sprang up to preserve forests and undeveloped tracts of land.
Theodore Roosevelt signed legislation in the early 1900s establishing the five new national parks and prohibiting human habitation on them. Roosevelt’s conservationism—a response to the growing awareness that landscape was being destroyed in the name of progress—is linked to a dark era in American history: the violent removal of Native Americans from their land.
The history of murder and dispossession of Native Americans casts a shadow on the tourist-driven narratives that glorify the “American” pioneer. The success of the parks required that they be considered pure spaces of nature, defined by not only what existed within their boundaries but also what lay beyond them. Much of their appeal came from the way they provided respite from urban life.
Throughout the 1800s, human intervention in the landscape became perceived dualistically, either as progressive or as destructive—and more than a century later, this dualism persists in environmental discourse. Likewise, landscape was most often discussed in dualistic terms—natural/unnatural, beautiful/ugly, pristine/ruined—when, in reality, it is most often both, and something more altogether.
As research for my book The New Explorers, I set out to meet with a group of artist-explorers who engage American land as an ongoing material record of national identity. Their artwork examines the social and political interactions that shape present-day land use practices in landscapes formerly considered the frontier that are organized by epic technological feats epic technological feats of engineering, defined by tourist practices, or filled with subterranean radioactive material.
Landscape is a continuous process, as are human apprehensions and interpretations of it. Painters, photographers, prose writers, and poets played vital roles in fostering American national foundation narratives, underscoring the concept of landscape as not only a material endeavor but also a culturally significant enterprise. In The New Explorers, I examine how these landscape narratives offer valuable insight into a continuing conversation about American identity.