Go west, young man, and put solar panels on your McMansion!

In Manifest Destiny/Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape, a catalogue for the 2008 exhibition at the Loyola University Museum of Art, essays by Michael Hogue and Peter John Brownlee trace the evolution of American attitudes toward the environment from the days of the earliest European settlers to the mid-20th century. Through the lens of relevant art produced during this time, particularly landscape painting, both essays draw similar conclusions. They assert that the settlement of America was founded on the belief that cultivation (of nature and of other people) was of moral value, rooted in Christian religious doctrine. Over the next 250 years or so, these beliefs gradually morphed with political and cultural trends, from the agrarian populism under Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson's aggressive removal of Native Americans from their land. The story told by these essays ends with the perception of nature as a place for metaphysical discovery and mysticism, worthy of protection, delicate and finely balanced. This brings us to the modernism of the first half of the 20th century, filled with abstraction and color - simplified.

Brownlee and Hogue both legitimately suggest that we can learn much about where we are today by understanding the history of our cultural relationship with the American landscape. This is quite true, but much has happened since 1950 and this moment of environmental crisis in 2009. As scientists issue increasingly dire predictions about what might happen and just how soon that might be, it's worth taking a look at the last half century to see how we got here. I can't really do this justice in the space of this blog entry, but I'll try to connect some dots.

Along with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 came a new public awareness of interconnectedness of nature, and out of this came the modern environmental movement. We realized that it was important to not only protect pockets of wilderness, but to also protect the larger ecosystems. It seems that over the last 50 years this understanding has fallen by the wayside, undermined by the explosion of suburbia and the urge to own a piece of nature. Our lives are busy - convenience and willful ignorance allow us to fill in wetlands and flatten mountains without a thought.

Suddenly though, the environment, this delicate thing in need of our protection, now seems a little more threatening. With Katrina at the helm, this current string of natural disasters has shaken us. Nature no longer seems quite so simple or harmonious - the unbalanced nature doesn't simply shatter and die off passively, it seems poised to take us with it. The way we position ourselves in relation to our environment seems to be changing. We've discarded the purity of modernism, where nature is nature and human is human, and replaced it with a new kind of hybridity. It's not the touchy-feely Gaia/Mother Earth interconnectedness of the 1970s; it's a kind of pragmatic, unromantic hybridity - a recognition that nothing is pure or untouched. Our metaphoric hand has even touched the far reaches of the arctic, melting ice that has been frozen for millennia.

There is something of that hybridity in the Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus' pictures from an ongoing series called The New Painting.

Elina Brotherus, Der Wanderer I, 2003

Elina Brotherus, Der Wanderer III, 2004

Elina Brotherus, Der Wanderer IV, 2005

In this series, Brotherus, herself the figure, stands looking out over vast landscapes, recalling the heroic explorers that populated Romantic paintings of the 19th century (see below). Instead of appearing heroic, these figures are still and quiet, as if contemplating a loss. In comparison with the Romaintic paintings, the expanse these figures survey doesn't seem wild, mysterious, or terribly dramatic. Between the land and the figure, there is no longer the dynamic of conquest and conquerer or protectorate and protector. Both seem rather impotent. The title of the series, The New Painting, reflects the hybridity of the work itself - she has taken the language and subject matter of these old paintings and recontextualized them with a new medium.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818