We are delighted to have just published Christof Mauch’s Paradise Blues in English translation (by Lucy Jones). The prologue invites readers to jump in to a book described by Don Worster as ‘a new kind of history for a world seeking hope’ and by Serenella Iovino as ‘a rich and unpredictable epiphany of stories’. The full text can be purchased from our website, with 25% discount until 31 January 2024 (use voucher code Paradise24); and it is also available Open Access online.
America is a country of dreams, desires and longings. Millions of visitors from all over the world flock to the USA to experience its extremes – from city adventures to the vast wilderness, the plunging Niagara Falls to towering skyscrapers, the glitz of Las Vegas to the glaciers of Alaska, Memphis blues to Florida’s swamps, from giant sequoias to canyons and rivers. A trip from coast to coast by car or campervan is still considered the ultimate pilgrimage through America’s great outdoors.
My work as an environmental historian has involved exploring the USA for decades. Washington DC was my home for fifteen years and the jumping-off point for my travels all around the country. For all its contradictions, it’s a nation close to my heart: a paradise of unlimited possibilities on one hand and, on the other, the epitome of political megalomania. For some, it’s the land of the free, for others, the land of slavery, role model and cautionary tale rolled into one. But it wasn’t until I experienced the USA at first-hand and studied traces of its inhabitants that have been inscribed in the landscape down the centuries that I discovered a country beyond the common clichés and well-known dichotomies.
To understand America, it’s helpful not to focus solely on its politics and economy, its presidential office and its almost uninterrupted succession of wars since 1945 but, rather, to survey its people’s relationship with and handling of their environment. Trying to grasp a nation’s identity as a whole by travelling to its very different parts might seem like an odd idea at first but, by doing this, I gained a range of unexpected insights – and Paradise Blues lays these out.
‘Any good history begins in strangeness’, said the American historian Richard White. Things we find strange but not daunting make us curious to discover more. However, exploring landscapes – the crux of this book – can unearth new mysteries. The scars left on the topography of rural America reveal some grim stories lurking beneath its breathtaking façade. On my detours through nature, I frequently discovered the familiar in unfamiliar places – and found the unfamiliar in places I thought I knew. This realisation opened my eyes, for example, to the tight link between one of America’s most popular tourist attractions, Niagara Falls, and one of the most infamous toxic waste scandals in US history, the Love Canal disaster. Similarly, Florida’s transformation into a paradise for leisure and citrus fruit is slowly but surely destroying its fragile ecosystems and water supply.
America is often called ‘nature’s nation,’ as if its landscape were homogenous.[i] The comparable architecture in each state capital and the similar appearance of many suburbs disguise regional differences. Clipped, lush lawns in suburban Philadelphia and Denver, for example, look surprisingly alike although these two cities are further apart than Brussels and Moscow. Philadelphia has a temperate climate with frequent rainfall while Denver’s arid atmosphere means that a well-kempt lawn is only possible with intensive irrigation and fertilisation.[ii] Homogeneity in America is rare, especially in terms of climate, which ranges from Florida’s subtropical zone to arctic Alaska. You’ll find alligators in the south and reindeer in the north. Along the Mississippi and in the southeast, the population has to battle with floods and hurricanes while dry periods and droughts ravage the region west of the Mississippi and California is endangered by terrible wildfires.
The common language connecting America’s people, along with the national highway system, the omnipresence of fast food, supermarket and hotel chains, and phrases like ‘the American way of life’ suggest that a national uniformity exists: but, in terms of the country’s physical geography, this is an illusion. To understand America, as I learned on my travels, you have to grasp its diversity.
America’s different landscapes have also produced distinct cultures since time immemorial. Indigenous communities spoke up to a hundred languages and built over twenty types of dwellings, from simple brushwood shelters to multi-storey pueblo buildings, nomadic tepees and subterranean pit-houses that serve as models for modern ecological housing.[iii]
Unlike ‘nature’, the word ‘environment’ conjures few positive images where the USA is concerned. Americans are known for emitting more CO2 per capita than citizens of any other nation. The country produces more waste, uses more packaging and exploits more surface area to construct houses than any other. Over the past 200 years, no other nation has tapped its natural resources – water, forests and earth – as rigorously as the United States. Especially from a European perspective, the details and differences of how America treats the environment stand out all too clearly, both in the negative and positive sense. After all, the United States can lay claim to the invention of large nature reserves and national parks, a model that has been successfully copied throughout the world, from the Kruger National Park in South Africa to the Bavarian Forest in Germany. With the non-profit Sierra Club, America benefits from a politically influential conservation association. And activists like Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill, members of groups like Earth First and environmental thinkers like Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson are among the most important pioneers of movements that have gained traction far beyond the USA.[iv]
Americans’ relationship with nature is unique. An account that took a national historical standpoint, therefore, would have its appeal. At the same time, a bird’s eye view of national politics and abstract environmental thinking is missing a crucial element: the ‘down-to-earth’ aspect of being on-site, an approach that takes in landscapes and natural phenomena, including the feeling of mud on one’s shoes that environmental historians pride themselves on.[v]
Over the past few years, I’ve visited all the places mentioned in this book. My search for American nature has resulted in a travelogue through culture and history in these selected locations that comments on their transformation over long periods. Even though they were selected subjectively, they are an attempt to represent the whole. What interests me about each place is that it is symptomatic. Dodge City, Kansas, for example, with its vast plains, sandstorms and huge cattle herds stands for a Midwestern prairie. St Thomas, Nevada represents the desert and artificially irrigated and militarised landscape in America’s South West. Wiseman, Alaska, embodies the exploitation of natural resources like gold and oil, but also wilderness preservation. Memphis, Tennessee is a stand-in for other places along the Mississippi that have spawned their own cultures entirely. And Malibu, California, is an example of those towns on the southern Pacific coast that live in our imaginations like paradise on earth but are in reality plagued by natural disasters of all kinds.
Paradise Blues was inspired by William Faulkner’s Requiem For a Nun. In it, one of his protagonists says, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ On my travels through America’s nature and history, I worked like a detective to discover the past and future hidden behind the present and what immediately meets the eye. Travelling, driving and walking are amateur activities. This way, I came across things I’d never have found out but which I could systematically research using my professional craft as a historian.
This book spans an arc from the Brooks Range in Alaska all the way to Portland, Oregon in the final chapter, although each section can be read independently. I start by exploring a region where humanity’s interventions are minimal and I finish with a portrait of a city that has been dubbed ‘the most sustainable town in the USA’ and whose environmental politics and campaigns have resonated throughout the world. While searching for traces in America, I wanted to counteract the ubiquitous story of ‘the end of nature’ with something positive.[vi] I didn’t always manage but sometimes my wish was granted. This history of the American environment unearths grand hopes and bitter disappointments. Even in paradise, the blues are sometimes playing.
[i] Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace, 1998).
[ii] Ted Steinberg, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Christof Mauch, Amerikanische Geschichte: Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen (München: C.H. Beck, 2016), p. 166 f.
[iii] See more recently Heike Bungert, Die Indianer. Geschichte der indigenen Nationen in den USA (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2020).
[iv] Christof Mauch and Kiran Patel, ‘Umwelt: Naturschutz und Raubbau’, in Wettlauf um die Moderne. USA und Deutschland 1890 bis heute, ed. by Christof Mauch and Kiran Klaus Patel (München: Pantheon, 2008), pp. 97–123.
[v] Donald Worster, ‘Doing Environmental History’, in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. by Donald Worster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 289.
[vi] Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 2006).
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