I. Nature and Civilization in Conflict

A. Ecological effects of industrialization: air pollution from coal used in furnaces and steam engines, water pollution from sewage, wastes from iron, tanning, and textile industries; soil deterioration from cotton and wool production for textile industries; milldams that block spawning of fish.

B. Factors bringing about contradiction between Nature and Civilization

1. Population: Demographic transition to smaller families occurs. Nationwide, women marrying in 1800 bear 6.4 children; in 1849, 4.9; in 1879, 2.8. Nineteenth century sees later marriage ages, conscious efforts at family limitation, promotion of contraceptives, repression and sublimation of sexual expression. Cities and industrial centers grow.

2. Market: After the market and transportation revolutions, a dynamic industrial-agricultural economy develops in the interior of the United States, exemplified by textile factories in New England; shoe, gun, ammunition, brick manufacturing, quarrying, brewing, tanning, and detachable shirt-collar production, iron and coal (bituminous and anthracite) mining; metal working industries; and specialized, sectional, agricultural production. McLane Report (1832) states that 106 large manufacturing units in the United States have over $100,000 in capital investment.

3. Technology: New England textile industry develops with Samuel Slater's 1790 copy of the English Arkwright and Strutt waterframe for spinning, Francis Cabot Lowell's copy of the power loom for weaving, and the Waltham system of integrated production under a single roof. Steam engines power steamboats, locomotives, mills, industries. Blast furnaces, forges, and slitting and rolling mills arise. Cort puddling process is used for iron melting; Bessemer converter for steel manufacture after 1855. Iron railroad tracks, steamship hulls, and plowshares are manufactured.

4. Social Relations: Individuals or corporations provide capital for development with wage labor supplied by women and immigrants in the textile mills. Putting-out systems in homes produces items such as palm-leaf hats, braided rugs, and silk twist buttons. Iron plantations directed by ironmasters employ woodcutters, charcoal burners, furnace and forge operators, and farmhands. Iron mills use Cornish and Irish workers; slaves and Indians are used in lead mines.

5. Attitudes: Factory model of nature arises in which factory is treated as isolated from its environment, just as machine is isolated from its surroundings. Mechanistic worldview reduces nature to atoms acted on by external forces. Fundamental tension arises between the advantages of advancing civilization and the disappearance of wild nature. Industrial capitalism needs nature as resource for production; elites need nature as refuge and escape from civilization. Classical idealized nature (for example, Phillis Wheatley) changes to romantic wild nature. Thoreau (1845) develops radical critique of market farming, agricultural improvement, and machine technology (such as railroads), as oriented to profit-accumulation and luxury commodities. Instead he advocates a preservationist ethic based on retention of subsistence farming infused by an ethic of minimal impact on the land and little management, except as necessary to produce food for subsistence. Emerson (1844) promotes the merchant's economy and the exploitation of natural resources through technology, while seeing all of nature, including human beings, as part of a fundamental unity--the Oversoul, or universal mind. The Hudson River school of painters contrasts rugged, wild, dark nature with peaceful, calm, light civilization, screening out effects of environmental pollution. In "Life in the Iron Mills," (1861) Rebecca Harding Davis articulates awareness of the environmental consequences of mining and metal industries on land, water, air, and their effects on human life.

1. What examples of the transportation, market, and industrial revolutions can you find in the documents and essays? What were the environmental effects of each of your examples?

2. What conflicts between the values associated with nature and the values associated with civilization can you find in the documents? How do you account for the ambivalence?

3. Compare and contrast George Catlin's view of Indians with the attitudes of earlier writers. How do you account for any changes?

4. What is meant by transcendentalism and how is it exemplified by Emerson and Thoreau? Why might such a philosophy have arisen in nineteenth century New England?

5. What similarities and differences can you find between the idealized subsistence farmers of Crèvecoeur and Jefferson (Chapter 5), and Thoreau (Chapter 6)? How would you characterize Thoreau's ethic concerning nature?

6. In what ways does Robert Kuhn McGregor's reconstruction of the activities of a female fox reflect a nonanthropocentric perspective on environmental history? Compare McGregor's "female fox's perspective" and James O'Brien's "beaver's perspective" (Chapter 3) as approaches to environmental history.

7. Drawing on the poems of Phillis Wheatley and the essay by Annette Kolodny, as well as earlier documents, discuss the various ways in which nature is gendered (for example, nature as female, virgin, mother, or wife, or the sun as male). What are some potential implications of gendering for the environment?

8. Examine the three paintings by the Hudson River School for specific ways in which the artists contrast nature and civilization. How, according to Michael Heiman, did environmental perception, as expressed in the works of these painters, differ from the reality of how nature was used?