Storming the Gates of Paradise (32 page)

Or you could steer Higginson, the friend of Dickinson, who was the friend of Jackson, forward to his friendship with the California writer Jack London, who was a socialist but a social Darwinist, and through London reach anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth, who got to San Francisco in the 1920s, attended poetry readings at the socialist Jack London Club here, and undoubtedly knew writers who knew London, and was a mentor to younger poets who still live here, like Michael McClure, and from there go in all kinds of directions—Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, or, well, me. I’m friends with McClure and once received a cherry-flavored Lifesaver from Philip Whalen, who was, along with McClure and two other guys I’ve met, among the six poets who read that famous October evening in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg debuted “Howl” and Rexroth officiated. For that matter, I once talked to Elmer Stanley, an old Native American whose great-grandmother had met James Savage (after whom my book about nuclear bombs and indigenous nations,
Savage Dreams
, is named), who had been part of the U.S. Army seizing California from Mexico and its indigenous owners. That army was led by Fremont, with whom Savage was connected through Fremont’s famous scout Kit Carson, and since Fremont’s father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, was a protégé of Thomas Jefferson, thus goes the conversation on land and aboriginal rights back to its roots with that slaveowning founding father. . . . But since the Englishman Muybridge—despite his un-American respectfulness toward Chinese and Native Americans in that era—shared few values and interests with either the abolitionists or the Beats, this is truly only a string of coincidences, the six degrees of separation between you and Idi Amin or Britney Spears. None of these examples I have given describes the starry points of a new constellation as the words Coleridge, Clarkson, Toussaint L’Ouverture begin to, as a new definition of humanness began to take shape.

This mapping, this construction of family trees, could be played with books rather than persons: reading
Bury the Chains
, I found myself going to Holmes’s Coleridge biography and Kenneth Johnston’s life of the young Wordsworth, but also to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s magnificent
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
, books that cover the same period of time in varying ways, overlapping like habitats for different species.

And perhaps I should use the smallness of the U.S. progressive intelligentsia as justification while confessing that I live in the same town as Hochschild and share an editor with him—the remarkable Tom Engelhardt, who brought us together for dinner last year. It was, in fact, an early excerpt from
Bury the Chains
published on Tom’s online news service, Tomdispatch.com, that excited me about the book and made me interested in reviewing it. Of course, it would be easy to trace a line through Tom, who edits Eduardo Galeano and Ariel Dorfman to . . . But I must stop, before we go the way of Lombardi.

“As I became interested in photography in the realm of nature, I began to appreciate the complexity of the relationships that drew my attention,” wrote Eliot Porter. Complexity is a good foundational word for this artist whose work synthesized many sources and quietly broke many rules, whose greatest influence—an influence that has yet to be measured—was outside the art world. Porter may be one of the major environmentalists of the twentieth century, not because of his years on the board of the Sierra Club but because of his contribution to public awareness and imagination of the natural world.

When his first book,
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World
, appeared in November 1962, it came as a revelation. Nothing like it had been seen before, and though the subject was ancient, the technology that allowed him to represent it so dazzlingly was new. Porter was one of the pioneers of color photography, and his editor, Sierra Club executive director David Brower, enlisted new printing technology to attain an unprecedented level of color fidelity and sharpness of reproduction. The essayist Guy Davenport wrote that the book “cannot be categorized: it is so distinguished among books of photography, among anthologies, among art books, that its transcendence is superlative.” A later reviewer recalled, “A kind of revolution was under way, for with the publication of this supremely well-crafted book, conservation ceased to be a boring chapter on agriculture in
fifth grade textbooks, or the province of such as bird watchers.” Despite its $25 cover price, it became a best-seller in the San Francisco Bay Area and did well across the country. When a cheaper version was published in 1967, it became the best-selling trade paperback of the year. Porter’s 1963 book
The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado
, a counterpoint to his first, was similarly successful and influential. It is impossible to see what those images looked like when they first appeared, precisely because of their success.

There are two kinds of artistic success. One makes an artist’s work distinctive and recognizable to a large public in his or her time and afterward—Picasso might be a case in point. The greater success is more paradoxical: the work becomes so compelling that it eventually becomes how we see and imagine, rather than what we look at. Invisible most of the time, such art may look obvious or even hackneyed when we catch sight of it. Such success generates imitations not only by other artists but throughout the culture: the ubiquitous photography in advertisements, calendars, and posters imitating the color aesthetic Porter founded may tell hikers and tourists what to look for in the natural world, and thus they may experience his aesthetic as nature rather than art. Color demanded different compositions and called attention to different aspects of the natural world than did black and white photography.

Porter’s work came into the world as the product of an individual talent and became a genre, nature photography, in which thousands of professionals and amateurs toil (though most of them value beauty more and truth less than Porter did). His photographs have become how we look at the natural world, what we look for and value in it, what the public often tries to photograph, and what a whole genre of photography imitates. Porter’s pictures of nature look, so to speak, “natural” now, and this is the greatest cultural success any ideology or aesthetic can have. We now live in a world Porter helped to invent. It is because his pictures exist behind our eyes that it is sometimes hard to see the Porters in front of one’s eyes for what they were and are. Thus, understanding Porter’s photography means understanding the world in which it first appeared and the aesthetic and environmental effects it has had since.

Sierra Club executive director David Brower chose to publish
In Wildness
in the centennial year of Henry David Thoreau’s death; each of Porter’s images was paired with a passage from Thoreau. But 1962 had plenty of history of its own. In September of that year, Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
was published, and this indictment of the pesticide industry quickly became a controversy and a bestseller. In October, President John Kennedy announced that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba and that the United States would attack unless they were removed: the world came closer to an all-out nuclear war than at any time before or since. “The very existence of mankind is in the balance,” the secretary-general of the United Nations declared. This context must have prepared the ground for the reception of
In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World
, which appeared in November. At the end of World War II, the revelations of the atomic bomb and the concentration camps had begun to erode faith in leaders, scientists, and the rhetoric of progress; and as the fifties wore on, that faith continued to crumble.
Silent Spring
and the Cuban missile crisis were only the crescendos of events that had long been building, and
In Wildness
may have succeeded in part as a response to these circumstances.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, fear of a possible nuclear war was coupled with fear of what preparing for one entailed. The 1959 discovery that, in many parts of the country, milk—both bovine and human—was contaminated by fallout from atomic testing led to a national outcry. That what ought to be the most natural and nurturing thing in the world contained gene-altering, cancer-causing, manmade substances meant that nature was no longer a certainty beyond the reach of science and politics, and it meant that the government was generating biological contamination in the name of political protection. Similarly disastrous pesticide spraying campaigns in the nation’s national forests had already provoked an uproar by the late 1950s (and Porter was among those decrying their abuse, with letters to his local newspaper). Science and politics had invaded the private realm of biology, reproduction, and health as never before. Carson wrote of pesticides,
“Their presence casts a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure, no less frightening because it is simply impossible to predict the effects of lifetime exposure.” The world faced a new kind of fear, of nature itself altered, of mutations, extinctions, contaminations that had never before been imagined. Porter wrote in a 1961 letter, “Conservation has rather suddenly become a major issue in the country—that is more people in higher and more influential places are aware of its importance and willing to do something about it.”

Pesticides and radiation were only part of the strange cocktail that fueled what gets called “the sixties.” In November 1961, Women Strike for Peace, the most effective of the early antinuclear groups, was launched with a nationwide protest that in many ways prefigured the feminist revolution. In 1962, the civil rights movement was supercharged, the United Farm Workers was founded, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held its first national convention. The voiceless were acquiring voices, and with them they were questioning the legitimacy of those in power and the worldview they promulgated. Some of those with voices were speaking up for nature and wilderness with an urgency never before heard. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the epochal Wilderness Bill was being debated alongside pesticide and radiation issues: nature in its remotest reaches and most intimate details was at stake. It is in this context that the small American conservation movement became the broad-based environmental movement, and Porter played a role in its broadening.

The ecological truth
Silent Spring
tells as a nightmare—that everything is connected, so that our chemical sins will follow us down the decades and the waterways—is what
In Wildness
depicts as a beatific vision. Carson’s book addressed a very specific history, that of the development of new toxins during World War II and their application afterward to civilian uses; and she wrote about their effects on birds, on roadside foliage, on the human body, and on the vast ecosystems within which these entities exist. “The world of systemic insecticides,” she wrote, “is a weird world . . . where the enchanted forest of the fairy tales has become the poisonous forest in which an insect that chews a leaf or sucks the sap of a plant is doomed. It is a world where . . . a bee may carry poisonous nectar back to its hive and presently produce poisonous honey.” Porter’s book
showed the forest still enchanted, outside historical time and within the cyclical time of the seasons (the photographs had earlier appeared in an exhibition titled
The Seasons
, and the images are sequenced to depict spring, summer, fall, and winter). Only one image, of a mud swallow’s nest built against raw planks, showed traces of human presence at all, and that presence is slight and benign.

The year before, Wallace Stegner had coined the term “the geography of hope,” countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few actually entered it. The Sierra Club’s Exhibit Format photography books could be, as environmental historian Stephen Fox points out, a way to bring the wilderness to the people rather than the other way round, to show them the geography of hope and create a kind of virtual access without impact.
In Wildness
was in many ways a hopeful book, an intimate portrait of an apparently undamaged world of streams, blackberries, moths, saplings—and a later Porter book would be titled
Baja California and the Geography of Hope
. These photographic books were in some sense documents, but in another, equally important sense, they were promises: not only did they confirm the existence of what they depicted, but they also showed what the future could hold—and it is a mark of profound change that the best hope for the future in the time of these books was for a future that resembled an untrammeled past, that industrial civilization yearned for Eden rather than the New Jerusalem.