Bio/Research
My general focus is on nature and culture: I wander through parks, cemeteries, and wilderness areas (often with my kids), stare at landscape paintings and photographs, and re-read Thoreau, all in an effort to figure out how ideas about nature have changed over time and how those changes have matt...
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Bio/Research
My general focus is on nature and culture: I wander through parks, cemeteries, and wilderness areas (often with my kids), stare at landscape paintings and photographs, and re-read Thoreau, all in an effort to figure out how ideas about nature have changed over time and how those changes have mattered in the western world. Currently I'm exploring the cultural and experiential dimensions of modernity, through a study of Herman Melville and the 20th-century urban theorist Lewis Mumford, who participated actively in the rediscovery of Melville in the 1920s. Both of these writers explored the trauma of radically transformed environments and environmental relationships, trying to cope with the hum of machinery, the reek of coal smoke, and the taste of mass-produced food, and experimenting with alternative ways of moving through the world.
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