Review of James Conaway, Vanishing America: In Pursuit of Our Elusive Lanscapes (Berkeley, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007), 320 pp. $24.95.

In Vanishing America, James Conaway recounts visits to a number of sites that he regards as “physical and spiritual barometers” of the state of our nation. The result is a remarkable achievement, at once a hymn of praise to what America is, was, and can be, and a lament at what it is fast becoming. This is conservationist writing at its best—not mired in the abstract scientism of the global warming debate, but startling in the particularity of the losses it recounts. What merely statistical analysis of deforestation, soil loss, air and water pollution, and climate change cannot do, Conaway’s writing achieves with force: it demands that we face up to the tremendous cultural and ecological costs rung up by the commercialization and industrialization of the American way of life.

But it does more than that. Though Conaway never makes this an explicit theme, Vanishing America also exposes what we might call the flatness of our contemporary aesthetic: the complacent satisfaction with appearances, with little consideration given to the natures that they are supposed to reveal. Huge, invaluable parts of our country are indeed vanishing, but their absence is carefully obscured by the maintenance of façades that give the impression that things are just as they have always been. We are reminded of the essentially two-fold significance of the notion of a landscape—the word applies at once to the representation of a bit of natural scenery, and also to the bit of land itself that is represented therein—and called to account for our willingness to expect no more of the latter than the merely perceptual satisfaction that is the province of the former. The land itself may be destroyed, but that is tolerable so long as the looks of things are kept intact.

In the national forests of Wyoming, the federal government offsets their increasing willingness to allow companies like Exxon to drill for oil with careful attention to making their activities as invisible as possible. Writes Conaway: “The forest service had come a long way since it considered the national forests preserves. Now its agents looked at color chips so buildings could be painted the same hue as surrounding terrain. Even chain-link fence was color-coordinated. Helium balloons had been flown at the height of prospective drilling rigs, to determine if they were visible over the next ridge.” There is something deeply dissimulatory going on here—Exxon’s “aesthetics” representative speaks of “visual resource management,” of the need to keep things from looking “repugnant to passers-by.” If we’re going to make a mess of things, Conaway remarks, we might as well make it “a color-coordinated one.” In this way, our skill at screening off the effects of our actions ensures that, short of an environmental calamity, whatever damage we do will remain out of sight, out of mind.

Similarly, on a camping trip through the rivers and forests of north-central Maine, the region that Thoreau immortalized in The Maine Woods, Conaway’s guide remarks on how much of the land has been preserved—“Thoreau could not have foreseen that so much of this would remain.” But things are not in fact that simple, as Conaway notes later on: “[C]lear-cutting has eliminated vast stretches of forest just beyond the tree-lined banks, and now there is little but cut-over country a few see-fars from the last drinkable river on the eastern seaboard. These lovely woods are little more than a screen for one of the great timber bonanzas of all time.” (A “see-far” is a woodsman’s term for the distance one can see into the woods from a river’s bank.) While the semblance of wildness has indeed remained, the wilderness itself—the very thing Thoreau set out to come to terms with—has been stripped brutally away. This is nature as art: the trees that remain serve well to suggest the presence of a forest behind them, but in the end they are hardly more than an especially vivid piece of movie scenery. Mere representation serves our purposes well enough.