An Artifice For America

Of course this take seems as out of keeping as Hennepin's reaction to the falls: isn't "horror" the proper response here? I suppose that someone will accuse Strand, or at least her friend, of estheticizing human misery: how many people died from the toxins in this earthwork? But after a certain point, what else is a writer to do? That's the job description. Strand doesn't try to hide devastation behind a hedge, she's done more than her share of raking the chemical-infused muck and she's drawn from her story appropriately solemn (if vague) lessons about the relationship between humanity and nature. "Environmentalism is a way of seeing. It's time to look the world squarely in the face and try to understand our role in it … We are [nature] and it is us … We must consider the natural world not as merely waiting to be of service or to be saved, but must respect it as an equal partner in shaping the future of our planet."

But writing, too, is a way of seeing, and Strand can't help seeing gratuitous marvels in her ruined and dying landscape: electrical transmission towers resembling "broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, metal linebackers striding across the Mohawk Valley," two abandoned shopping carts "stuck together as if mating," a squirrel in a brownfield "with two racing stripes of mange down its back." Unlike the Olmsteds of the world, she doesn't confuse beauty with prettying-up, and finds in nature no inherent moral or spiritual uplift: "What does the waterfall say? The world stands for nothing. The waterfall says just that: water, falling. Water, falling." Coleridge said it in his 1802 "Dejection" ode: "In our life alone does nature live." That is, we humans bring the beauty, whether to the waterfall or the transmission tower; nature just brings the nature. On the other hand, in nature alone can we live. And as the planet heats up, Niagara Falls, where both man and nature are about to go over the edge, is Everywhere.

© 2008