A view of the night sky from the Antelope Canyon, Page, Arizona. Photo: Ameer Basheer/Unsplash
Americans invented the idea of national parks. They sing of amber waves of grain and sublime purple mountain majesties. They’ve made the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone shrines of national identity and idealise nature in speeches, literature, painting, photography and architecture.
And yet American lands today are torn by conflicts over science, religion, identity and politics, with contradictory conceptions of nature at the heart of a broken national consensus.
To Native Americans, nature and culture are inseparable, and the identity and the history of a tribe is thoroughly interwoven with specific places, such as Rainbow Bridge or the San Francisco Peaks. In contrast, many White Americans embrace wilderness, defined as nature that is free of human presence, with no roads, telephone lines or electricity. The wilderness is, to them, eternal and pre-human, an idea at odds with b