Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America. - Review - book reviews

E: The Environmental Magazine, Sept, 1999

ABSORBING NATURE

Jennifer Price offers a unique history of America's perceptions of nature in Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (Basic Books, $23). Instead of heading to the woods or mountains, Price cleverly traces how Americans incorporate nature into their urban and suburban lives--through fashion designs (the 1800s' feathered hat craze), lawn ornaments (plastic pink flamingos), television shows (Dr. Quinn), malls (The Nature Company), advertisements (automobiles that will deliver you to nature) and homes (nature calendars and relaxation tapes). Price concludes that these "connections" actually distance us from nature. She writes, "All of us consume nature from within cities or markets where its wildness arrives commodified, transformed, already dead and out of context."