Overview

Americans' cultural love affair with their country's landscape started in the nineteenth century, when expansionism was often promoted as divine mission, the West was still the frontier, and scenery became the backdrop of nationalist mythology. With a promise of resources ripe for development, Manifest Destiny-era aesthetics often reinforced a system of environmental degradation while preserving the wide and wild view. Although the aesthetics have evolved, contemporary media are filled with American landscape images inspired by the nineteenth century. Terre Ryan examines this phenomenon by exploring the overlapping trails of national mythology, landscape aesthetics, patriotic discourse, and public policy. Tracing her journeys around bombing grounds in Nevada, logging sites in Oregon, and energy fields in Wyoming, she argues that business and government agencies often frame commercial projects and national myths according to nineteenth-century beliefs about landscape and bounty. Advertisements and political promotional materials following this aesthetic framework perpetuate frontier-era ideas about the environment as commodity, scenery, and cultural trashlands. Transmitted through all types of media, nineteenth-century perspectives on landscape continue to inform mainstream perceptions of the environment, environmental policies, and representations of American patriotism. Combining personal narrative with factual reportage, political and cultural critique, and historical analysis, Ryan reframes the images we see every day and places them into a larger national narrative.

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9781558498730

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Reviews

Ryan displays a mastery of a wide variety of contemporary environmental writing, combining green philosophy with an adept use of something closely akin to green investigative journalism. . . . She is very persuasive in using personal experience and cultural analysis to establish the idea that nineteenth-century ways of seeing the American landscape continue to cloud our national vision.--David M. Robinson, Oregon State University This Ecstatic Nation is a serious effort to consider environmental harm in the context of religious heritage in the US through the review of three specific issues: atomic energy research in Nevada, clear-cutting in Oregon, and fossil fuel extraction in Wyoming. . . . [Ryan] offers one of the best criticisms of carbon trading that this reviewer has seen. Recommended.--Choice This is a thoroughly researched book, and Ryan has included a significant Notes section, tracking her sources diligently; her research is informative and thorough, whether about art history or the U. S. Department of Energy. Ryan keeps picture postcards above her desk to remind her of the West that she loves, but she now realizes that these representations are 'far more complicated than a glance at the surface reveals.' this book helps us understand what other true stories exist beyond the myths, and the way history and its language have created cultural beliefs now desperately in need of revision.--Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments [This Ecstatic Nation] is an exciting addition to the growing body of environmental literature and creative writing aimed at spurring our imagination, stirring our emotions, and exposing to the light our personal beliefs about the environment. In Ryan's beautiful prose, readers will appreciate, and perhaps even share, her enthusiasm for the West and her longing for those once sublime landscapes. She reminds us all of the importance of place.--Environmental History [Terre Ryan] hopes in the end to see more of what she calls an emerging green patriotism, a new way of thinking about the land that she believes is being advanced by scientists, artists, historians and others who can about the U.S. landscape: 'an ethic of caretaking that transcends outdated divide-and-conquer landscape mythology and political party lines.--Daily Hampshire Gazette Ryan is a writer, and she is in her element when turning a phrase that captures the discomfort we all feel when confronting the discrepancy between our yearning to be light upon the land and our utter dependence on the grinding, relentless consumption of earthly resources.--Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review Ryan offers an intriguing use of the personal narrative as a gateway for understanding how the American West is currently imagined and represented. Her book makes the case for recognizing the role that affective responses have played in the representation of America's landscapes.--American Literature Ryan leaves the library and takes ecocriticism for a ride, out into the streets and on the road.--American Literary History

Author Information

Terre Ryan completed her MA in creative writing at City College of New York and her PhD in English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is an assistant professor in the Writing Department, Loyola University Maryland.

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