Perfect uncertainty - Robert Adams and the American West

Art in America, March, 2002 by Leo Rubinfien

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would ... be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample ... we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! ... Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her.... She flourishes most alone, far from the towns.... Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth. (15)

Though he addresses us gorgeously and with no lack of confidence, Thoreau was already in his own time a dissenter, a solitary, not much of a democrat, and well on the way to the skepticism of the 20th century. The more popular view of the natural world, then and now, was expressed by Emerson, who wrote that "Nature is ... made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mold into what is useful." (16) From here it is a short way to the extermination of the plains buffalo and the inundation of Glen Canyon, and to Walt Whitman, who loved and, more important, trusted the vulgar crowd that Thoreau reviled. Whitman follows directly from Emerson with a glorious paean to the transcontinental railroad, the "passage to India":

   ... seest thou not God's purpose from the first?
   The earth to be spann'd, connected by network ...
   The lands to be welded together.
   A worship new I sing
   You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours
   You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours
   You, not for trade or transportation only
   But in God's name, and for thy sake O soul. (17)

If we still preserve of Thoreau the strain of thought and feeling which has it that people and what they love and make are worth less than water, tree, deer, hawk and cloud, and that you do not own your farm, that it owns you, most Americans have been students of Whitman anyway. We have believed that we can domesticate the continent and build something better than what was here before the first Europeans came over. For most of their history Americans have had that much optimism, that much confidence in their abilities.

In the last 50 years it has been popular to say that we have made Whitman's road to India into many hideous freeways, and that, roaring down them with fear and loathing past the diamond as big as the Ritz, we have come at last into Las Vegas, Beverly Hills and Anaheim, where Frontierland has done a good business since 1955, but to give in so much to self-derision is unjust. In the same year that Frontierland opened, exactly 10 years before Adams began to photograph on the Colorado prairie, John Kenneth Galbraith began the book in which he observed that

the experience of nations with well-being is exceedingly brief. Nearly all throughout all history have been very poor. The exception, almost insignificant in the whole span of human existence, has been the last few generations in the comparatively small corner of the world populated by Europeans. Here, and especially in the United States, there has been ... quite unprecedented affluence. (18)