12 The New York Review
them had his or her own landscape
which was part of the way they related
to the wider world. [Landscape is] a
place with which we have daily con-
tact.... It is where we live and work and
celebrate together.”
Landscape magazine’s inaugural
1951 issue—subtitled “Human Geog-
raphy of the Southwest”—was funded
entirely by Jackson, written mostly by
him, and circulated in a small print
run, which Jackson (always a good
networker when the need arose) gave
away to those he considered influential
and hand-sold to local bookshops. The
project might well have stopped and
sunk there, for its focus on the built en-
vironment was out of kilter
with the picturesque register
of landscape writing at the
time, and most small maga-
zines die quick and noiseless
deaths. But Jackson per-
sisted. He quickly enlarged
the scope of the magazine
from the American South-
west out “to the broader
field of human geography,”
as Horowitz puts it. He drew
in a wide range of writers,
including city planners, ar-
chitects, anthropologists,
and “wise citizens,” and
tasked those contributors
not only with mapping the
past and present of Amer-
ica’s “human landscape”
but also with improving its
future.
A measure of the maga-
zine’s preoccupations might
be taken from some of Jack-
son’s own contributions,
including “The Westward-
Moving House”—a brilliant
comparative analysis of an
early settler farm in New
England, an Illinois home-
stead from the 1850s, and a one-story
house in modern Texas—and “To Pity
the Plumage and Forget the Dying
Bird,” an impassioned account of the
neglect of what he calls “small-city”
America, which reads now as a precur-
sor to recent attempts to explain the
rise of Trump with reference to this
overlooked realm. “Economic poverty
and political inertia are certainly not
confined to the rural small-city coun-
tryside in America,” wrote Jackson
in 1967, “but here they are a peculiar
kind of menace, because they are well
disguised.”
By the time he stepped down as
Landscape’s editor in 1968, the maga-
zine had helped drive a “cultural turn”
in American geography. Jackson began
to teach at Harvard and Berkeley, and
to give numerous public lectures. In
1970 the first collection of his writing
was published; Landscapes gathered
around a dozen essays that originally
appeared in the magazine, together
with lectures presented at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts in the mid-
1960s. Several more essay collections
followed, including The Necessity for
Ruins and Other Topics (1980) and A
Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (1994).
At Harvard in 1973 Jackson taught
a course unprepossessingly called
“Studies of the Man-Made Environ-
ment Since the Civil War”; the students
quickly nicknamed it “Gas Stations.”
Jackson was usually good at titles.
Scanning down the contents pages of
his essay collections, it’s hard not to
want to guzzle them all: “A Puritan
Looks at Scenery”; “The Mobile Home
on the Range”; “Agoraphilia, or the
Love of Horizontal Spaces.” He was
good at first lines, too: “I am very pro-
automobile, pro-car and pro-truck, and
I can’t imagine what existence would
be without them.” “Like millions of
other Americans I have no great lik-
ing for wilderness and forest, but like
the majority of Americans I am fond of
trees.” You might not agree with these
gong-banging openings, but you surely
want to hear more.
His written voice is often testy, brac-
ing, or prickly. He likes to demand as-
sent and provoke dispute. He upends
pieties, amplifies counterintuitivedetails. Strange flickers of faith are
visible in his writing, for though he
distrusted mysticism, he was a life-
long churchgoer, unembarrassed by
referencing a “divine law.” His prose
lacks the crystalline clarity of Barry
Lopez (whose 1989 essay “The Ameri-
can Geographies” is a landmark piece
in this field) or the broader political
drives of Wendell Berry toward agrari-
anism and pacifism, but it is often
hard to resist its peculiar passions:
“The loading dock is a feature of the
modern factory not much discussed
in architectural circles, but it is not
only an essential part of the building,
it has to be designed and built with
great precision.” I relish a person who
can write and mean a sentence such
as that.
Loading docks in; mountains out:
Jackson hated the modern American
conservation movement. His published
writing resounds with potshots at envi-
ronmentalists. This was partly ground-
clearance work; to direct people’s
attention onto the vernacular landscape
of human labor and leisure, he needed
first to wrest that attention away from
its traditional objects of “national parks
and national forests.” But it was also a
bigger political disagreement with what
he perceived as environmentalism’s de-
sire for a return to “the pretechnologi-
cal purity of the past” and its endorsing
of a “static social order.”
The Hudson School, the Sierra Club,
and the 1964 Wilderness Act, withits stipulation that humans should
“visit” rather than “remain” in cer-
tain areas—these were anathema to
Jackson, for whom the human imprint
was always beautiful. He denounced
environmentalism as “shrill and self-
righteous,” in denial about its covert
millenarian theology, and commit-
ted to an “arch reactionary” narra-
tive of decline whereby the American
landscape had “gone downhill ever
since the Civil War.” He rightly called
out the baked-in racism of aspects of
American environmentalism, includ-
ing the “racial quotas” of membership
in the Sierra Club in its early years,
and the presence in the conservation
tradition of the eugenicist Madison
Grant, who campaigned to save red-woods and the American bison, but
also advanced anti-immigration and
“anti- miscegenation” laws, and wrote
The Passing of the Great Race (1916), a
grotesque and influential work of white
supremacism.
In contrast to what he snortingly
called the “wilderness experience,”
Jackson argued for a “vernacular,
urban, contemporary perception of
nature... a demystified, demytholo-
gized definition which automatically
includes human participation.” On this
basis he would, I think, have approved
of Trump’s decisions to open the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge for drilling,
and to shrink the extent of the Grand
Staircase–Escalante and Bears Ears
national monuments in Utah—even as
he would have disliked the targeting
of Trump’s public-lands populism at a
white working- class base.I thought of Jackson when I made
my first visit to Muir Woods, north of
San Francisco, last June. It was a sun-
lit Sunday morning among the giant
coastal redwoods, and I shared the
boardwalks that wound between the
trunks of those giants with hundreds
of people of diverse backgrounds,
speaking dozens of languages. Though
I have been a mountaineer for more
than thirty years, and am drawn to
lonely summits in ways that Jackson
would consider escapist, I was moved
to be part of that mixed and awed con-gregation of worshipers. For we were,
unmistakably, all at church that morn-
ing. It did not matter to us that we had
to queue to stand beneath the tallest
trees, or that in the gift shop you could
buy a plastic-packaged sequoia seed
to take home and plant, germination
guaranteed (I did buy one; it didn’t
germinate, to the anguish of my young
son, who had expected a six-hundred-
foot redwood to rear overnight out
of our suburban lawn in Cambridge
like Jack’s magic beanstalk). Here
was a place where, for a while at least,
the arboreal sublime meshed won-
derfully with contemporary “human
participation.”
But I also left Muir Woods reflecting
on the absolutism of Jackson’s commit-
ment to “human presence.”
He was not an ecologist, and
it often shows. The strength
of his allegiance to human
geography left him largely
unable to imagine that our
dignity and well- being might
be interdependent with
the fates of other species.
He had no interest in Aldo
Leopold’s 1949 idea of the
“land ethic,” which expanded
the definition of “commu-
nity” to include the crea-
tures, plants, soil, water, and
air with which human life is
made.
Jackson liked to distin-
guish between landscape
“disturbance” and landscape
“damage.” “Damage” he de-
nounced as environmental-
ism’s blanket term for the
consequence of all human
activity. He preferred “dis-
turbance,” which he saw
as having been underway
“since the remote Neolithic
time.” But to character-
ize all human interventions
into landscape as neutral
“disturbance” is blithe, at best; can the
Deepwater Horizon disaster really be
categorized just as a “disturbance,” or
the mass extermination and displace-
ment of Native Americans by settler-
colonialism? “Man is a maker of new
plants and new plant communities,”
writes Jackson optimistically. Some-
times. But “man” is also an expert and
high-volume destroyer of communi-
ties and organisms, as current extinc-
tion rates lay bare. As human activities
drastically deplete life’s diversity on
earth, so the possibility of what the
feminist ecologist Donna Haraway
calls “sympoiesis”—the comakings
and mutualisms out of which new life
springs—is correspondingly depleted.
We are, certainly, a damaging as well
as a disturbing species.The final fifteen years or so of Jack-
son’s life took a strange turn. From his
ranching days before the war, Jackson
had been drawn to manual labor. In
1980 he enrolled in a night class for
auto mechanics in Texas, where he
indulged his motorhead fondness for
engines, and tinkered with shopcraft-
as- soulcraft philosophical epigrams:
“Learning to be a good auto mechanic is
learning to be civilized.” He got a BMW
motorbike tattoo on his upper arm and
disengaged himself from teaching. In
1984 he set up as an odd-jobman in
his hometown of La Cienega, work-
ing as a painter, roofer, trash hauler,HelenLefkowitzHorowitz‘Telephone Poles’; drawing by J.B. Jackson, 1947