| Chapter : | America’s Love of the Land: An Introduction |
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for more than a decade, outdoor photographer Scott Smith poses the following question in High Country News, “Are we exploiting the environment by telling and showing all—the way that some magazines exploit women?”17
In a golden age of farm and conservation writing, stories of encounters with nature—its unforgiving cruelty and its unrivaled beauty—enthralled, as they do in our own age of reality television. Survivor has brought the Golden Age’s obsession with Social Darwinism back to American television screens to the tune of thirty Emmy nominations and a tally of 23 million weekly viewers at its peak.18 Similarly, readers in the Progressive Era devoured the man versus nature novels of Jack London and hunted headlines for news of “wild man” Joseph Knowles. Knowles, whose heroics were celebrated by a 1913 Boston Post headline reading “Naked He Plunges into the Woods,” trekked into the back country to live alone for two months19 in his own version of Survivor: Maine. For the next two months, Knowles titillated readers with missives written with charcoal and birchbark, regaling them with tales of clothes made from woven bark and meals of hand-caught trout and partridge. By the time the Post reported that Knowles had trapped a bear and was wearing its hide as a coat, newspapers throughout the country had picked up the serial story.
Perhaps the most enduring feature of the Progressive Era to resurface in the new millennium is the spirit of land-centered volunteerism, particularly among youth. Many of the youth organizations popularized during the era—most notably the Boy Scouts of America, begun in 1910 by popular nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton, and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA)—were based on physical fitness and life in the outdoors as an antidote to urban blight. As present day iterations of the Progressive impulse, AmeriCorps VISTA,
17 Christopher Smith, “I Came, I Saw, I Wrote A Guidebook,” High Country News, www.hcn.org (accessed September 4, 1995).
18 Steve Rogers, “Episode 4 of ‘Survivor: The Amazon’ Tops Ratings …,” Reality TV World, www.realitytvworld.com (accessed September 4, 1995).
19 Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 141.