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Environmental Historian Takes On the Nature Company

The long cherished, Thoreauvian vision of nature encourages us to ignore the whole tangle of connections to nature in our everyday lives. Jennifer Price, "Kilimanjaro in a Can," New York Times.

Pink Flamingos flocked on the lawn of Kendall on a sunny day in September. Installed to advertise the first in a new series of Arts and Lectures, the bright pink birds on wire legs captivated passersby and drew local media. Why such attention to several dozen plastic replicas of a bird that became extinct before 1900? Environmental historian and cultural theorist Jennifer Price explored the phenomenon in her lecture based on the chapter "The Pink Flamingo" from her book Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America. (Basic Books, 1999).

Price, who received her Ph.D. in history from Yale last year, asserts that the plastic flamingo holds "surprising resonance and revelations for what nature has meant to Americans in the twentieth century." She outlines the history of nature vs. artifice in the ways landholders, from eighteenth century European estates to the modern suburbs of America, landscaped and perceived the land around their homes.

Price traces the history of lawn ornamentation and the mid-eighteenth century English movement away from the "artificial" and highly ordered and designed gardens of the French and Italians toward a more natural aesthetic. At the same time, intellectuals -- Hume and Burke in philosophy, Adam Smith in economics, Gainsborough in painting, for example -- propounded natural theories, natural laws, and natural aesthetics. However, in landscaping,"natural" required the creation of hills and berms, the removal of dead trees, the digging of ponds, and the importing of deer and sheep to create a preserve. This typified the kind of confusion that persists today in our discussion of "What is nature?"

What does that confusion have to do with either the pink flamingo or the Nature Company?

The pink flamingo -- created in the new age of plastic consumer items after World War II, first a popular lawn decoration and ultimately the "symbolic excrescence of bad taste" -- became in the 70s and 80s "a signpost for crossing the various and overlapping boundaries of class, propriety, art, sexuality, and nature." To post-war art and culture critics, the pink flamingo was a highly visible and colorful symbol of all that was wrong with mass culture (and its commodification of nature, as exemplified by the "tasteful" Nature Company).

Price quotes critic Dwight Macdonald in 1953 as charging that "mass culture isŠa cancerous growth on High Culture." What better way to rebel against the "good taste" of their parents and American consumerism than to adopt the ultimate in bad taste?

It follows that this rebellion is also a rebellion against the kind of consumerism it takes to maintain good taste and the good life. That consumerism ignores questions of how human beings fit into nature and natural resources; how we interact and are acted upon by "nature"; how we create nature; and, again, what nature is.

Price suggests that the kind of separation between nature and humans that a mall culture of "nature as wildlife" creates is harmful to the debate necessary to preserving resources. The trend toward such "Disneylands" of nature is disturbing, says Price, "not so much because these places are Œartificial.' Rather I fear that they package nature as a separate realm and as an out-of-the-ordinary experience."

The consequences of that, she suggests, is that it prohibits us from asking the most important question, which is, "How do we use human artifice to transform and protect nature more sustainably, wisely, fairly, meaningfully?"

It is not that people cannot use such things to connect to nature, but Price says, "There is no way that a trip to the Rainforest Café in the Mall of America outside of Minneapolis will teach you how to use nature well, or give you an honest assessment of what and where nature really is."

Price was brought to campus by the new Committee on Arts and Letters. The Environmental Studies Program and Students for Environmental Studies jointly sponsored the event. -- KM