Abstract:
In the modern outdoor recreation community (and the $887 billion annually U.S. outdoor industry), there is the concern that outdoor recreationists are “loving our [crags, trails, rivers, summits] to death.” At the same time, conservation-minded outdoor recreation organizations such as the Access Fund, a non-profit dedicated to protecting outdoor climbing spaces in the U.S., see outdoor recreation as an essential element of wilderness conservation. Looking to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century natural history and travel narratives, this dissertation addresses the questions of what landscapes came to matter and why in early American environmentalism. How did natural history writing and artistic expression influence the early preservation movement? How did the practice of outdoor recreation become perceived as a moral act? And how did early forms of outdoor recreation arise from intertwined practices of natural history and aesthetic appreciation?
This dissertation examines the various entangled fields of natural history, science, travel writing and environmental aesthetics, spanning the time period from the dawn of the “age of wonder” to the rise of the early environmental conservation movement. John James Audubon’s great work of natural history and art, the Birds of America and the accompanying Ornithological Biographies, depict the entanglement of science and art, which deeply informs the Audubon Society’s approach to conservation. Frederick Law Olmsted’s southern travel narratives and John Muir’s Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf also contributed to the architecture of environmental aesthetics at the early stages of the American conservation movement. Muir and Olmsted’s discomfort with slavery and with the appearance of both farms, swamps, and forests in the South strongly influenced their later ideas about how Americans ought to enjoy and benefit from parks and recreation. The influence of mountaineering writing on environmentalism did not begin with Muir, but had already developed important aesthetic patterns in eighteenth-century Europe. As mountaineers wandered the high places of the earth amid changing scientific and aesthetic perceptions of wild landscapes, the growth of natural history and the ascendency of the sublime aesthetic, their writing reflected the intertwined and interdependent nature of science and art in the Romantic period.