The antithesis of this two-dimensional ideal is expressed by the ecologist who shows Conaway around the Niobara Valley Preserve, a Nature Conservancy–owned stretch of prairie land in northern Nebraska that is home to, among other things, a herd of bison. Disappointed that they have been unable to locate any of the elusive beasts on this particular outing, Conaway’s companion remarks that the place “has existence value even if it doesn’t bring back buffalo, even if no one ever sees it.” The choice of words may be a bit clumsy—“existence value” is the sort of phrase one fears to encounter in mediocre undergraduate writing—but the sense is clear enough, and it is an important observation. This place—this remote, unoccupied stretch of American grassland—has value, not because of what it can be sold for, what it can accomplish, or how it looks, but simply insofar as it exists. It is the neglect of this truth—of the intrinsic goodness of Creation—that leads us to relate the preservation of natural spaces too closely to mere aesthetics, to tourism, to the “survival of humanity” and the conservation of “natural resources.”

Vanishing America is not just about the preservation of “natural” habitats. Part of what sets it apart from standard “environmentalist” rhetoric is the obvious affection that Conaway has for human subjects as well. Some of the book’s most memorable passages—the account of an afternoon with a family of Mormon cattle ranchers in Arizona, for example—relate such personal encounters; and in such accounts we also see the importance of recognizing, and so getting beyond, the “flatness” of the predominant understanding of conservation.

Take the plan to construct a new gymnasium and parking garage for the National Cathedral School for Girls in Conaway’s home neighborhood of northwest Washington, D.C. The plan gives only the outward appearance of respect for Frederick Olmsted’s original plan for the cathedral grounds. Olmsted had called for preserving nearly all of the land on Mount St. Alban’s as woods and open space, to make the passage through the cathedral close a “transforming experience.” Olmsted did not propose to limit the development of the cathedral close simply because of its “existence value”—he also understood the importance of open spaces for specifically human flourishing. Conaway documents the way in which future generations of architects and urban planners were unable to appreciate the true depth of this importance: like Exxon’s “aesthetics” crew, the developers behind the Cathedral School’s expansion plan pay lip service to Olmsted by promising to limit the perceived effects of the development. So they build most of the new gym under the ground, put a covering of sod on its flat roof, and declare it a sports field: “Thus could the building’s two-thousand-square-foot imprint on the close be calculated at a mere 10 percent of its real size, and the cathedral and its associates could claim compliance with Olmsted’s open space requirements.”

This is no more a genuinely “open space” than the few rows of trees along the Penobscot are a forest. After a fast-tracked approval and months of heavy excavation and construction—during which some of Conaway’s neighbors had their walls cracked or basements flooded—the outcome of the development is a quite different sort of “transformation” from the one intended by Olmsted, an unsettling reversal of “the traditional roles of cathedral and ‘village’”: “Those at the [cathedral’s] top had a view of the gym’s sod roof—and of the shiny tops of cars delivering and picking up the students—that did indeed look like open space, while those lesser mortals beyond the close looked up past architectural clutter and a massive granite wall at the diminished symbol of salvation.” For the millions of “pilgrims” who arrive at the cathedral to tour its crumbling confines and change money in its gift shops, this particular inversion goes unnoticed. That it might have disrupted the lives of those, both human and otherwise, with more sensitive eyes or other interests at stake is not of concern to the disengaged technocrats reconceiving the American landscape.

The redevelopment of the island of Nantucket in the 1950s and afterwards, which Conaway relates in another essay, follows a similar course. The town has a proud history, first as a settlement of Quaker refugees from the Puritan mainland who would refuse to fight in the Revolutionary War, later as one of the world’s leading whaling ports. Thanks to the decline of whaling after the discovery of oil on the American mainland, Nantucket settled into a century-long depression following the Civil War: it became “a literal backwater with a barely surviving scallop industry and few tourists, its buildings and natural assets preserved mostly through inadvertence.”