INVENTING NATURE IN WASHINGTON, D.C. - Inventing for the Environment - page 73

NOTES
1. On how individuals and cultural groups mentally “invent” their own environ-
mental experiences, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction:A Social Critique of the Judgment
of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1984); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Every-
day Life (University of California Press, 1984); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of
Space (Blackwell, 1991).
2. Numerous scholars have emphasized the culturally determined nature of the
western concept of nature and traced its evolution over time.Artists, poets, philoso-
phers, engineers, policy makers, and ordinary citizens have labored for centuries to
define the nature of nature and promote their visions of ideal relationships between
mankind and the natural environment. A good deal of the history of western
thought is bound up in this discourse, which has generated a considerable body of
literature stretching back several centuries. Classic mid-twentieth-century inquiries
into the relationships between nature and culture with particular relevance to the
American experience include the following: Hans Huth, Nature and the American:
Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (University of California Press, 1957); Earl
Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West:The Tourist in Western America (Knopf, 1957);
Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature (Knopf,
1967); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale University Press,
1967). A number of geographers, art historians, and scholars associated with the
“cultural studies” movement have also addressed the topic, emphasizing the com-
mingling of economic, ideological, and aesthetic impulses. Important works in this
vein include the following: Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford
University Press, 1973); Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in Problems in Materialism and
Culture, ed. R.Williams (Verso, 1980);Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology:The
English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (University of California Press, 1986); Denis
Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (University of Wisconsin Press,
1998); Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, eds., The Iconography of Landscape
(Cambridge University Press, 1988); Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape
Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Cornell University Press,
1993);William Truettner, Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (Yale University Press,
1994). Environmental historians have also awakened to the culturally constructed
nature of “nature,” examining the resultant implications; see e.g. William Cronon,
ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (Norton, 1996); Max
Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1991).
3. Christian Feest, “Virginia Algonquians,” in Handbook of North American Indians,
vol. 15 (Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 253-270; Fairfax Harrison, Landmarks of Old
Prince William (Richmond, 1924; reprint edition: Gateway, 1987), 19, 20, 143, 445;
Frederick Gutheim, The Potomac (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1949; reprint: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1986), 23-26, 43; Paul Inashima, Archeological Investigation