| In the United States, the landscape is as much a part of American mythology as the nation's founding documents. Landscapes depicted in popular media are frequently shaped by aesthetics that were widely disseminated in nineteenth-century American landscape paintings and engravings: the pastoral, the picturesque, the beautiful, and the sublime. During the nineteenth century, these aesthetics were frequently wedded to the nation-building ideology of Manifest Destiny. With their promise of natural resources waiting to be plumbed, Manifest Destiny aesthetics often reinforced a class-based system of environmental degradation and occasionally preserved the view. Although they continue to evolve across time and geography, the pastoral, the picturesque, the beautiful, and the sublime remain deeply imprinted on American tastes. Yet in contemporary forms, such as advertisements and corporate and political promotional materials, landscape images constructed according to these aesthetics---particularly when combined with allusions to the frontier---often reflect the ideology of the Manifest Destiny era. Because we remain a largely visual culture and because they are transmitted through all types of media, Manifest Destiny aesthetics continue to inform mainstream perceptions of landscape, environmental policies, and representations of national identity, or patriotism, sometimes at great cost.;Part memoir and part mythography, this interdisciplinary study fuses analyses of literature, history, art history, material culture, and cultural geography to examine the relationship between American landscape aesthetics and the rhetoric of patriotism, as well as their dual performance in contemporary culture. I use three western, working landscapes to show how nineteenth-century ideologies about landscape, patriotism, and consumerism operate in contemporary culture. Landscapes include the Nevada Test Site, which served as the nation's nuclear proving ground for more than forty years; gas fields in western Wyoming; and Oregon's Andrews Experimental Forest. In the context of visits to these places and their bioregions, I examine tensions between landscape mythology and utilitarianism in an increasingly fearful and consumption-oriented culture, and analyze the effects of this tension on the environment. |
