portraits of corporate and government efficiency-mindedness with some-
thing else, something greener. Donald Worster, brother materialist, is my
favorite agro-ecological historian; but he is also a historian of ideas, espe-
cially Anglo-American ecological science, and he is a literary stylist to ad-
mire. Alfred Crosby’s extraordinary, global writings are essential, as are
those of Stephen Pyne, global historian of fire. I have ever been a reader
of Carolyn Merchant and Vera Norwood, genderers of environmental his-
tory and more, and of William Cronon, Richard White, Alan Taylor, and
(on subjects European) Simon Shama. Robert Pogue Harrison’s spellbind-
ing meditation on forests, mostly European ones, as ‘‘shadow of civiliza-
tion’’ continues to inform my own sensibilities about nature, too. John
Reiger, indefatigable outdoorsman and historian, memorably tied upper-
class hunters to the origins of conservation in nineteenth-century America.
Parallel to the development of environmental history, meanwhile, has
been a school of landscape studies identified with the late John Brinkerhoff
Jackson and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Jacksonesque landscape
studies never suffered early environmental historiography’s plaguing pre-
occupation with ‘‘wilderness’’—that is, nature without humanity, nature as
monument.^3 To Jackson, most landscapes were ‘‘vernacular,’’ or ever chang-
ing for whatever reason, especially the passing occupancy of people who re-
shape, rebuild, redecorate, and so on. Jackson’s former student and succes-
sor at Harvard, John Stilgoe, carries on, teaching more graduate students in
his own imaginatively interdisciplinary fashion. My own sensibilities about
ourselves-in-nature comfortably comport with this tradition, to which the
word ‘‘landscapes’’ in my subtitle alludes.
Finally, I have been a reader of fiction, memoirs, letters, biography, and
a bit of poetry, as well as a green reader of certain movies. That I have been
deeply in love with two dead literary women from Florida becomes obvi-
ous early in the text to come. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Zora Neale
Hurston themselves were forces of nature, and I regret beyond words that I
did not know either of them in person. William Faulkner, yet another south-
ern nature writer of note, makes appearances, too. The ‘‘southern’’
film,O Brother,Where Art Thou?(creation of the witty auteurs Joel and Ethan
Coen) appears twice here, both times with landscape-ish interpretations. A
few other films, plus some still photography, come into play, too. Of popu-
lar (or at least, admired) nature writing, I confess that I cannot read Annie
Dillard’sPilgrim at Tinker Creek(), which is set in the upper South; like-
wise the neo-agrarian essays and poetry of Wendell Berry. But I have been
an avid fan of Peter Matthiessen and of John McPhee’s works, one of which,
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