Will Meyer | Longreads | October 2019 | 14 minutes (3,738 words)
"Seen clearly, nature and landscapes are palimpsests of history and social violence more than they are respites from these things," observes legal scholar and environmental writer Jedidiah Purdy in his new book This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle For A New Commonwealth. This is an echo from his 2015 book After Nature, in which Purdy recalled the role of early American landscape paintings in a project of "collective self-creation"; these paintings, pioneered by the influential Hudson River School painters during the 1830s, obscured the settler violence inherent to the United States' colonial project while presenting scenes from the fledgling countryside: the vistas, railroads, and faraway cities that were central to early imaginations of the nation. Not only were these images important to constructing a civic identity, they "yoked ideas of nature to nationalist and imperial projects and to new aesthetic and spiritual claims," Purdy wrote — that is to say, seeing meant believing. Fusing together notions of landscape, nature, and narrative was critical to the success of the settler project — and remains so today, Purdy argues in This Land. Indeed, this violent visual history pulses through the slim book, which aims to make a case for a Green New Deal — "a commonwealth of shared dignity and mutual care." Read more of this post
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