4.1: U.S. and Land

Mooallem's assertion that the U.S. is an "infinitely receding Eden" draws on the results of westward expansion, land use, and extinctions (7). As Europeans colonized western territories, animal extinctions (and Indigenous genocide) simultaneously occurred. In the early to late nineteenth century, such extinctions influenced explorers like William Temple Hornaday (see the video below) and Carl Akeley to create museum habitat dioramas in order to preserve dying species and habitats for public viewing, giving rise to natural history museums, where many of us have exposure to species we may never see in their natural habitats (if either the species or the habitats still exist).

Please watch both of these videos, taking notes and asking questions.

Such education on habitats and potential extinctions changed cultural knowledge of evolution, extinction, and the age of the Earth, especially with the bone wars of the nineteenth century. Just as there were gold rushes in U.S. history, there were also dinosaur rushes in the nineteenth century as museum “bone wars” sought to lay claim to skeletal dinosaur remains for museum display, enabling the public to understand extinctions in a new way by the mid-twentieth century. Emily Alder writes that understanding “common ancestry” in the “evolution of species, and the ecological entanglement of life on earth set out in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) challenged humanity’s position as divinely created masters in the world, separate from other animals” (1084-85), and understanding contemporary land use and species extinction. Related, John Bruni writes, "according to Scientific American and Popular Science Monthly articles at the time, scientific practice became deeply enmeshed in an early-twentieth-century shifting worldview” of which evolution was one of the “dynamic components” (John Bruni 1-2). These brought on a paradigm shift by midcentury with an understanding that Earth hosted life well before humans, which grew along with human understanding of our own destruction after the world wars and with Leopold's expanded view of community to include land and species.