The United States - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 18

rates of workers. Public health physicians and nurses improved sanitation,
quarantined the sick, and developed vaccinations. Epidemiology became a
science, and after about 1870, physicians learned of the germ theory.
Even though the majority of Americans were intent on chopping down
virgin forests, building factories and digging mines that polluted the air and
water, there were a few bright spots. Jean Jacques Audubon came to America
to escape conscription into Napoleon's army. He began painting birds, trav-
eling as far as Florida, Missouri, and Newfoundland. His paintings were
drawn from life and were full sized in his Birds of America, first published
in 1827. The complete set had 435 hand-colored engravings. Another art-
ist, George Catlin, went west in 1832 to paint the Indians and the scenery.
Back east, artists collectively referred to as the Hudson River School, painted
that river as well as Niagara Fall, the Catskills, and the White Mountains.
It was a shift from earlier American preference for portraiture. Its leader was
Thomas Cole. 3 Albert Bierstadt, who had studied art in Dusseldorf, painted
the West, as typified in his landscape of the Valley of Yosemite. The artistic
school was influenced by ideas of the European Romantic Movement and
depicted nature as beautiful rather than threatening.
In literature James Fenimore Cooper was the first to write novels, like
the Last of the Mohicans and the Deerslayer , based on American themes
of nature, the frontier, and Indians. Near Concord, Massachusetts, Henry
David Thoreau rejected urban life for a cabin he built with his own hands on
Walden Pond. He lived detached from civilization for two years. He cham-
pioned nature and the human spirit over social conformity and material-
ism. Thoreau published accounts of his travels in the remote mountains of
Maine and on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. Besides his love of nature,
he wrote on civil disobedience, with influence all over the world. His mentor
was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who won fame in 1836 for his essay “Nature,”
which outlined his ideas of transcendentalism, the mystical unity of nature.
Emerson visited England where he met William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, leaders in the Romantic Movement.
As an old man Emerson was one of the first passengers of the new transcon-
tinental railroad, visiting California, including Yosemite Valley.
By the end of the 19th century, a romantic and sentimental view of nature
was widespread. Inspired by a trip to Pikes Peak in Colorado, Katharine
Lee Bates composed what became a classic song, “America the Beautiful.” 4
O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain!