What happens when true friendship and vibrant scholarship come together?
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#Friendship-ScholarshipCombo
I’m presently reading Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989) by Ramachandra Guha.
And this book, I should confess, took me straight to Harvard Graduate Roderick Nash who is credited with coining the term ‘environmental history’ thereby opening up the now-flourishing field of Environmental History to the world.
And this again took me back yet again, to Nash - his friendships and their scholarship that resulted in impactful transformations to our perspective of ‘wilderness’ and the natural environment.
So before Guha, let’s do a little bit of Nash! 😊
The life-long passion of Nash was to study the impact of human society on the natural environment.
When you have a passion, you necessarily need friends or mentors who encourage and support you in your passion and quest, ain’t it?
This blogpost provides an inspirational take on Nash, and how his ‘scholarly’ friendships coupled with his scholarship had a transformative and therapeutic impact on society.
Eminent environmental historian Char Miller, Pomona College, California, (and a friend of Nash) has given a lovely foreword to the book written by his friend Roderick Nash, (titled, Wilderness and the American Mind) which throws further light on the subject of Environmental History and how it all began.
Nash Saw the Missing Gap
When Nash began his doctoral studies in 1960 at the University of Wisconsin under the direction of the legendary intellectual historian Merle Curti, there was no such thing as environmental history.
Although some scholars and critics had written brilliantly about the human place in nature - notably Walter Prescott Webb, Henry Nash Smith, and Leo Marx - Nash realized that no one had explored the fundamental role that wilderness as wilderness played in the nation's imagination.
So did another lucky break: Nash convinced the university archives to hire him to gather, organize, and sort through the papers of Aldo Leopold, arguably one of the twentieth century's most important conservationists — a perfect job for an aspiring historian committed to tracking alterations in Americans’ ideas about nature.
The Task Ahead of Nash (How he structured his Research)
Nash’s task becomes oddly straightforward - to trace this malleable concept’s evolution across time, to make sense of how succeeding generations of Americans made sense of the wild, what he calls the self-willed (literally, ‘wild’) world.
Assessing the Past Research and Creative Output to Plan for the Future
Nash does so by assessing the wilderness advocacy of such iconic writers as Henry David Thoreau, George Gaitlin, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and John McPhee and by unearthing pithy political speeches that extoll America the Wild.
Newspaper editorials, like varied forms of artistic expression and cultural production, make good copy, as does the slow emergence of legislative initiatives designed to protect the public lands and the wildness they exemplified, culminating in the 1964 passage of the Wilderness Act. Nash's close attention to such an interdisciplinary array of sources, and to some of the quirky details they contained, sensitizes him to subtle changes in tone, texture, and temper.
One of these moments proved pivotal to his narrative and is emblematic of our understanding of a tectonic shift in American political culture.
Until the late nineteenth century, wilderness was a place to be feared, fought, and flattened. This rough terrain, and the native peoples who inhabited it, Euro-Americans argued, must be ‘civilized’, brought under control by gun, plow, and rail. No sooner was this end achieved, however, than a wave of nostalgia for the sharp, formative edges of the Western frontier swept through the urban East.
This psychic crisis - reflected in literature, poetry, and paintings - helped tip the scales in wilderness's favor, Nash argues.
A Newfound Perspective / A Revolution in Meaning
The wealth that came from an industrializing society allowed urbanites to “approach wilderness from the viewpoint of the vacationer rather than the conquerer,” a newfound perspective, a “revolution in meaning!”
Once reviled, a terrain to be grazed over, cut down, or plowed up, the idea of wildness emerged as a tonic for all that ailed modernizing America. A remarkable transition then built on itself.
From Transition to Transformation
By the early twentieth century, an appreciable audience embraced the idea of wilderness’s purity, a sensibility the contemporary naturalist John Muir deified through his odes to Yosemite and the Sierra Mountains, his “Range of Light”.
In time, succeeding generations moved beyond the poetic appeal and drummed up a political demand for wilderness preservation. Among those who mobilized a legion of likeminded followers was Robert Marshall, a radical forester who in 1930 argued for the creation of an “organization of people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness”.
The Wilderness Society and Its Impact on Nash
Four years later, in 1935, Robert Marshall founded the Wilderness Society (with Aldo Leopold as its president), launching a special interest for special places. As its members fought to secure wilderness designations for portions of the national forests and other public lands — a fitful and painstaking process — as they struggled to fend off dams on the Colorado and other Western rivers that threatened to inundate cultural sites, submerge iconic landforms, and pacify whitewater, they also conceived of a broader resolution, the passage of a congressional act that would forever protect remnants of the wild.
Good Friends and their Value to Society
Quite interestingly, Nash was a good friend of Howard Zahniser, (who was also member of the Wilderness Society) and whose canonical essay titled, “The Need for Wilderness Areas” (1956), paved the way for the passing of the famous 1964 Wilderness Act in the US.
Howard Zahniser wrote the first draft of the Wilderness Act in 1956. He chose the word ‘untrammeled’, and made the word connote with the concept of wilderness!
"A wilderness...is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man..." - The Wilderness Act.
Great Friends (Minds) Think Alike!
Howard Zahniser emphasises on the need to be a guardian than a gardener!
Nash also echoes similar views, says Char Miller.
Nash emphasises on the creation of “garden-earth”; that is, a thoroughly and completely guarded planet scrubbed free of its gritty peripheries, a pastoral paradise, whose roots run back through Thomas Jefferson’s deification of the yeoman farmer to the Garden of Eden.
Coming back, how did environmental history begin in India? And yes, what was the role of Ramachandra Guha in playing a pioneering role in the environmental history movement in India?
Stay tuned… for updates! 😊
Courtesy: All quotes are from Char Miller’s foreword to his friend Nash’s Book on Wilderness and the American Mind.
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