Thomas McGuane: Nature, Environmentalism, and the American West

The recent writings of Thomas McGuane show a particular interest in environmentalist concerns, examining the role played by inherited mythologies of the frontier in the ecology and politics of the contemporary American West. McGuane's explorations reveal complex and ambivalent responses to these subjects, in part liberal, radical and conservative.This essay will discuss these issues in relation to contemporary American attitudes to nature. The basis for my approach will be to assume that conceptions of “nature” are socially constructed, and that “nature” and “culture” are separate but mutually interdependent. The relationship between human societies and the natural world will therefore be considered as an ongoing process in which the term “nature” must not be wholly subsumed under that of “culture.” Environmental history is, as Donald Worster puts it, “a story of reciprocity and interaction rather than of culture replacing nature.”Thomas McGuane's writings tend both to repeat and to question what may be called “traditional” or “Romantic” attitudes to nature. In particular, he combines both aesthetic and utilitarian perspectives: nature as a scene of spiritual restoration through the appreciation of beauty, and as the object of technological mastery and control. In practice, these two approaches are historically interrelated, in that they are both responses to, and constructions of, nature produced within an urban capitalist society. As Walter J. Ong has argued, a necessary precondition for Romantic attitudes to nature is a society that has confidence in its capacity to dominate nature, through the use of the very industrial technologies such attitudes ostensibly reject.