Blog Archives

Ansel Adams is
born this day in 1902 in San Francisco. His black and white photos of sweeping Western landscapes would become icons of the conservation movement in the late 20th century. He said: “We all know the tragedy of the dustbowls, the cruel unforgivable erosions of the soil, the depletion of fish or game, and the shrinking of the noble forests. And we know that such catastrophes shrivel the spirit of the people… The wilderness is pushed back, man is everywhere. Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere.”

John James Audubon — the American naturalist and artist — is born on this day in 1785. His paintings of American birds were transferred to full-color prints and published in Edinburgh and London starting in 1827. The book, The Birds of America was a sensational hit. Also see Library of Congress “Today in History” page on Audubon.

Nancy Newhall A writer known for This Is the American Earth and many other works for photographers Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Paul Strand, Nancy Newhall was born on this day in 1908. “Like Adams, Newhall was involved with the Sierra Club, and wrote often about issues of conservation. She was sometimes accused of political heavy-handedness on that subject—one uncharitable review of American Earth calls her prose “so full of Message that there is no room for poetry” … but her explication of the political context and motivation of Adams’ work has been important for the Sierra Club and the conservation movement in general.” (Wikipedia)

Walt Whitman, a great American poet, is born this day in 1819. Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, I sing the Body Electric, O Captain, My Captain, and other poems. His success was in speaking to the American people he loved so well. He was, like Emerson, a transendentalist, as is evident in this passage from the essay “Democratic Vistas.” I say the question of Nature, largely consider’d, involves the questions of the esthetic, the emotional, and the religious — and involves happiness. A fitly born and bred race, growing up in right conditions of out-door as much as in-door harmony, activity and development, would probably, from and in those conditions, find it enough merely to live — and would, in their relations to the sky, air, water, trees, &c., and to the countless common shows, and in the fact of life itself, discover and achieve happiness — with Being suffused night and day by wholesome extasy, surpassing all the pleasures that wealth, amusement, and even gratified intellect, erudition, or the sense of art, can give.

Horace Greeley The famous editor of the New York Tribune and a major political force in the mid-19th century, Horace Greeley is born on this day in 1811. It was Greeley who popularized the phrase “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” probably in 1865, but only after he went west himself and wrote about it in his 1860 book: An Overland Journey He was dazzled by ancient redwood trees 90 feet in circumfrence and over 300 feet high. “That they were of very substantial size when David danced before the ark, when Solomon laid the foundations of the Temple, when Theseus ruled in Athens, when Aeneas fled from the burning wreck of vanquished Troy… I have no manner of doubt… I am sure they will be more prized and treasured a thousand years hence from now, should they by extreme care and caution be preserved so long.”

Marjory Stoneman Douglass publishes The Everglades: River of Grass, on this day in 1947, a book describing the natural history, ecology and environmental issues of the Florida Everglades. Partly in recognition of Douglass’ work, Everglades National Park was dedicated by President Harry Truman one month later, on Dec. 6, 1947.

Heinrik Ibsen, author of Enemy of the People is born this day in Norway in 1828. One of the world’s great playwrights, Ibsen wrote Ghosts, Dolls House and Master Builder among others. Enemy of the People was an assault on Victorian era political hypocricy. It concerns a doctor who discovers that the mineral water in a town’s famous health spa is being poisoned by waste products from a leather tannery. Rather than forcing the tannery to move, as the doctor naively expects, everyone in the town denounces the doctor for interfering with their main source of income. It’s clear at the end of the play that disaster is looming for the doctor as well as the entire town.

Environmentalism kills Or at least, so claims “Jurassic Park” author Michael Crichton in remarks to the Commonwealth Club on this day in 2003. According to Crichton: “The DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide.” Actually, the claim was totally  unhinged from fact and reason, and to put environmental science on a par with Attila the Hun is obviously fiction. The unrestrained use of DDT in agriculture was the issue; DDT was never banned for human health uses (such as mosquito netting), and better alternatives are in use anyway.  Histories of science and public health need to be seen in light of the full spectrum of facts, historian Elana Conis says in “Beyond Silent Spring.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,  author of the famous gothic novel Frankenstein,  is born on this day in 1797.  She was married to renowned romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein while on vacation in Italy in 1816. Challenged by her husband’s friend Lord Byron to write a tale of the supernatural, Mary Shelly had a dream in which: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

Moby Dick is first published in London on this day in 1851. Herman Melville’s tale of an obsessive whaling captain who leads his crew to ruin was loosely based on the wreck of the whaleship Essex thirty-one years earlier. The book has become a classic in the canon of American literature. As a metaphor for the dawning ethic of nature, echoed also in H.D. Thoreau’s Walden (published three years later) the novel depicts the fight between humanity’s domineering impulse and nature’s resilience as one that neither side can win. Great quote: “Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul … I account it high time to get to sea…”