The attack on greenery: Critical perceptions of the American man-made landscape, 1955--1969

This dissertation traces the legacy of George Perkins Marsh's conception of man's role as steward of the land with specific regard to how distorted this notion was to become by the mid-twentieth century. The starting point for this research is Marsh's idea, articulated in his Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864), of man coexisting in an indissoluble relationship with nature, while acting as the main agent of its transformation. Marsh's central contention was that if man was the force that shaped his surroundings, then in order for him to exercise his stewardship well, he needed to generate local knowledge with which to understand the material conditions and likely consequences of his interventions in the landscape.;This work argues that in the fourteen-year period spanning 1955--1969, diverse voices committed themselves to evaluating man-made changes to what, according to one important strain of landscape ideology, was once considered to be "wilderness" or "virgin land." These voices converged in criticizing the use and mass promotion of greenery either as a vegetative cover veiling man-made alterations to the physical face of the American landscape, or as an artificial medium to preserve the idea of nature as something unspoiled, or as an interchangeable synonym of landscape. In so doing, they forced a reconsideration of Marsh's notion of "harmonic landscape interventions," setting forth the idea of landscape as something that is visibly man-made and cultured, hence not a stage created to conceal the hand of man and manufactured to resemble unspoiled landscapes through decor featuring green grasses, trees, and bushes.;In 1955, the scholars taking part in the interdisciplinary symposium Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, also known as "The Marsh Festival," identified and highlighted the threat of the earth's destruction due to man's change in attitude from fear to aggressiveness, reflected in an increase in population numbers and urbanization rates, the dominance of technology, and the consequent exhaustion of natural resources. The participants' attack on the use of greenery to veil what were considered man's abusive actions led them to conclude that the existence and maintenance of what was left of nature or wilderness or the environment depended on protecting it as a place where man could visit but not stay, a gross misrepresentation of Marsh's argument.;In the same terms that the participants of "The Marsh Festival" targeted the use of vegetation to disguise and beautify man's actions upon his surroundings, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) condemned one, if not the main artifice involved in such operations. The book that awakened public opinion to the fatal consequences stemming from the use of domestic pesticides also proved that while man used chemicals to maintain a synthetic notion of the American pastoral vision, or the greenery of suburbs, country clubs, and highways, he destroyed the very landscape he was trying to idealize and protect.;While Silent Spring's conclusions widened the conceptual gap between man and nature, John Brinckerhoff Jackson's journal Landscape: Human Geography of the Southwest (1951--1968), diverged from anti-human trendiness to reinterpret Marsh's link between man and nature through the concept of landscape as nature manipulated for the purposes of human occupation. As such, Jackson's attack on greenery was based on the promotion that landscape needed to be studied in order to understand man-the-inhabitant's key role in the transformation of his surroundings with dwellings, towns, and roads. Jackson's approach of observing, reading, and interpreting the landscape recovered Marsh's ideas and ideals by emphasizing the role of human beings in shaping what was considered to be nature.;Finally, Ian McHarg's Design with Nature (1969) stated that man himself was a "planetary disease," and although uncontrollable in his capacity for spreading across the globe, this was not an argument to prevent him from altering his surroundings or to allow him to set aside and hoard natural areas. If there were ecological interactions connecting bedrock geology, soils, water sources, flora, fauna, and man then, said McHarg, all physical and social factors should be considered as basic data when making decisions not only about resource use, but also for land planning and design. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...