Quando il ramo si spezza: Una storia naturale del dissenso americano

by Daegan Miller, Sara Bresciani (translator)

Quando il ramo si spezza è un viaggio rivelatore attraverso il continente americano e, in particolare, in quei luoghi abitati da pensatori radicali, coloni e artisti che, nel corso del Diciannovesimo secolo, hanno definito le proprie idee di libertà, progresso e giustizia sociale a partire dalla preservazione del paesaggio. La loro è una storia dimenticata di resistenza e dissenso che apre una breccia nell’immaginario di un popolo conosciuto prevalentemente per aver violato la bellezza naturale del proprio Paese in nome del desiderio di conquista.

Daegan Miller, sostenuto da una scrittura vivida e appassionante, ci fa da guida tra scioperi, riunioni di massa, sollevazioni e lotte che ci portano alla scoperta di comunità antischiaviste, di fotografi sovversivi che boicottano, dall’interno, la Union Pacific Railroad, e di anarchici utopisti che immaginano un futuro più verde e libero tra le sequoie californiane. Partendo da quattro alberi monumentali del paesaggio americano, Daegan Miller si interroga su quali lezioni l’individuo possa trarre dalla Storia per rendere il mondo un posto migliore a prescindere dall’impeto con cui avanza la macchina della volontà nazionale.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Environment, Politics, Nature, Literature, American History

325 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2018

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best recent books on environmental history, literature, and activism I have read. Miller harnesses all the poetic and fired-up greats in his writing style, even while the chapters focus on nineteenth-century lit and art: Abbey, Solnit, Naomi Klein...

I hope EVERYONE takes the time to at least read Miller's epilogue, "Enduring Obligations." It brought me to tears in a way even Klein's motherly epilogue in "This Changes Everything" did not.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's history, it's personal, it's poetic. Take a journey across the historical and emotional landscape of America, tethered to specific trees and anecdotal treasures in this gem of a book, radical in the sense of roots, but also in Miller's unearthing of facts not always laid bare in such a well-researched and thoughtfully exposed context. Carefully selected photographs and illustrations pop out throughout the book.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrical history of an American counter-tradition about freedom grounded local places rather than capitalism.

[Lindsay Bourgoine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was drawn to the underlying theme of this book but struggled to see it appear simply in each of the four acts, which were each written very differently. I sought connectivity whether a subtle suggestion or question to the reader or something to intertwine like personal narrative, which when used, I gobbled up. The conclusion felt like a list, but on the last few pages where an honest narrative appeared to bring the author’s conclusion together, I found myself wanting to hear more of his story and how this book came to be.

[Thomas Wikman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author takes us on a journey through the American wilderness, history, American progress and manifest destiny. The exploits and thoughts of Henry David Thoreau, the Adirondacks in New York, the Transcontinental railroad, the giant Sequoia trees, and the socialist communes in California. He describes the horrors of slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, and gives us an alternative, but not wrong, narrative of the Mexican American War. I learned a lot of interesting things about American history and the book featured a lot of fascinating stories and ponderous thoughts. The book is very well written, it contains a lot of interesting old photographs, and it has a very extensive list of end notes and references. It is often poetic and artistic in its presentation. The author is without doubt an incredibly talented writer. So why not a higher rating? Let me explain.

One perhaps minor issue I have with the book is the author’s narrow perspective. When he talks about environmentalists in general, he is talking about his environmentalist acquaintances in New York (often in a judgmental way) not environmentalists in Brazil, Russia or Sweden. When he tries to lay down the essence of “wilderness” he uses Adirondacks as a template and “the single physical characteristic” as “trees”. I grew up not far from the Tundra and it is too me very much “wilderness”. Tundra covers 20% of the world’s land area, then there’s deserts, prairie, savannah, wetland, and isn’t the ocean wilderness too? There is nothing wrong with a perspective, but when you speak of it as a universal truth it becomes alienating.

His far left political, and may I say “luddite” views, was a bigger issue for me. Most of the book is pretty apolitical but his political viewpoints as well as his narrow perspective of environmentalism becomes increasingly clear and increasingly became a stumbling block for me. He views modernity and scientific/technological progress quite negatively and he has a disdain for free markets and capitalism. On page 226 he refers to capitalism as a cancer.

Personally, I favor nuclear power and I view technology and innovation and science as crucial for solving environmental issues (he doesn’t). I view the free market as a potentially great tool for solving environmental issues (he disdains it). The fundamental problem is not the type of economic system you have. The authoritarian socialist economies in the former Soviet bloc were terrible for the environment. The fundamental problem is that we don’t value the environment, polluting is free and there’s no price on carbon emissions.

Thanks to the interplay of modern capitalism, including the limited liability corporation, and science and engineering the world has gone from an extreme poverty rate of 85% in 1800, 29% in 2000, and now 9%. Poor countries have been lifted out of poverty. The average life span has increased from 31 to 72 over the same time span, violence has been reduced by magnitudes, deadly diseases eradicated. The poorest country today is better off than the western world including the US was in 1900. We can easily feed 7+ billion people today, which was impossible a 100 years ago. Technological progress is necessary for the wellbeing and health of all us, but the way we have neglected the environment is wrong. He claims there is a cancer epidemic, but there isn’t. More people are getting cancer because we live longer, and cancer is very much an old age disease. Cancer incidence at specific ages has not increased (and we are getting better at treating cancer).

On page 223 the author states “I’ve always been more interested in cultural and intellectual radicalism than a movement that first manifested itself to me as suburban, privileged, white and therapeutic”. For someone who calls out others for being “elitist” that’s a pretty rich statement. I personally don’t care if I am called “environmentalist” or not, but this statement by the author summarizes what I see as the problem with the book. It takes all kinds of people to address our environmental issues whether it’s climate change, species extinction, water stress, to pollution, but I feel that the author’s attitude is unhelpful. Not only is his diagnosis of the root causes incorrect, but the rhetoric disincentives people with a different political persuasion from participating in the solutions(s). Economic modeling (MIT/REMI) has demonstrated that the most effective solutions to climate change and other environmental problems use the free market as a tool. What’s missing is the political will, especially among the people who are emotionally invested in capitalism, and whether you like it or not, we do need those people as allies for enacting effective legislation. Talk of deconstructing capitalism is therefore counterproductive.

James Hansen, arguably the world’s leading climate scientist, lays out the case for market driven solutions as well as nuclear power in his book “the Storms of my grandchildren”. I would like to recommend this book as well James Hansen’s research articles. Other than the misguided politics in primarily the fourth act, this is a very well written and interesting book. Despite my misgivings I recommend it but not enthusiastically.

[Liz]

A challenging, uneven read but one that I am ultimately glad to have read.

[kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

the TREES man LISTEN TO THE TREES

[Micol Benimeo · Rating 5 out of 5]

La collana di Black Coffee This Land e LIT (il bookclub de La McMusa) difficilmente sbagliano un colpo. È sicuramente così per questo saggio, libro-mondo che apre porte, fa riflettere e collega con una linea marcata di violenza e propaganda gli albori della storia degli Stati Uniti con quella di oggi. Il confine, la wilderness, la ferrovia, il parco naturale vengono raccontati dai quattro atti del libro e dai quattro alberi-testimone scelti da Miller come strumenti del capitalismo, della narrazione main stream, del progresso ad ogni costo. Fino a quando le storie alternative, le eutopie, un paesaggio dove uomo e natura non solo convivano ma prosperino verranno sistematicamente silenziati e schiacciati non ci sarà futuro. Quando il ramo si spezza ci insegna sopra ogni cosa che non ci può essere ambientalismo senza giustizia sociale e viceversa.

[Zéro Janvier · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Radical Land, A Natural History of American Dissent, est un livre de l’historien américain Daegan Miller, publié en 2018 par The University of Chicago Press, et consacré à des idées et des expériences radicales dans l’histoire des États-Unis d’Amérique, en lien avec « l’espace sauvage », traduction approximative du concept de wilderness inventé au XIXe siècle par les nord-américains.

“The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That's largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent's natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There's much truth in that vision.

But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that's been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California's sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we're still struggling to strengthen today.

Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.

Outre une introduction, un interlude, et une conclusion, le livre se compose de quatre longs chapitres :

1. At the Boundary with Henry David Thoreau, sur la passion éprouvée par l’auteur de Walden pour une rivière et ses alentours, dans le Massachusetts

2. The Geography of Grace : Home in the Great Northern Wilderness, sur une communauté anti-esclavagiste dans les montagnes reculées du nord de l’État de New-York

3. Revelator’s Progress : Sun Pictures of the Thousand-Mile Tree, sur les photographies de la nature prises par un photographe au XIXe siècle, à l’époque de la construction de la grande ligne ferroviaire transaméricaine

4. Possession in the Land of Sequoyah, General Sherman, and Karl Marx, sur une communauté socialiste qui s’était installée au XIXe siècle au coeur de ce qui est désormais devenu le Sequioa National Park en Californie, connu par ses séquoias géants

J’espérais beaucoup de ce livre et malheureusement j’ai été un peu déçu.

D’abord car l’un des quatre chapitres, le troisième pour le pas le citer, m’a laissé totalement indifférent et m’a même vraiment ennuyé, ce qui signifie que je suis passé à côté d’un quart du livre.

Ensuite parce que les autres chapitres m’ont certes intéressé, mais sont malgré tout un peu longs et difficiles à lire. Le style de Daegan Miller est littéraire, c’est très joli à lire, mais pas forcément très accessible quand on s’attend à lire de la non-fiction classique, plus portée sur le factuel que sur l’esthétique. Je trouve tout à fait louable de vouloir écrire de la littérature de non-fiction de qualité, mais en l’occurrence pour ce livre j’ai trouvé que l’aiguille penchait trop vers la littérature et pas assez vers la non-fiction.

Malgré tout, il y a de très beaux passages sans ce livre, qui m’a également appris des choses que j’ignorais totalement sur l’histoire des États-Unis et notamment de sa contre-culture, loin du discours dominant sur le capitalisme triomphant.

Je sors donc un peu mitigé de cette lecture : le thème et les sujets abordés avaient tout pour me plaire, la promesse est en partie remplie car j’en ressors « enrichi » intellectuellement, mais la forme m’a un peu gêné.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hate to criticize a book so obviously well-meaning. Miller's primary target is unrestrained capitalism but his broad swipes at various straw people (mostly white, male, and European) become tiresome almost immediately. That, and the modern trend of weaving himself throughout the narrative turn this from useful history into an occasionally shrill diatribe. The writing varies from passages of pure beauty to elaborate, convoluted paragraphs that never quite clarify their intended meaning, at least for me.

Putting aside the rich rhetoric and the inevitable scholarly allusions (Always cite Barthes or no one will take you seriously!), there is some excellent meat among the fat. The concept behind the book -- describing America's wild places through the stories of people who approached the sprawling landscape as more than a profit center -- is excellent.

Of the four sections, my favorite is the one about the Adirondacks and the African American communal settlements that were planned there prior to the Civil War. The historical arc the author traces, from the first encounters of the Dutch with the great northern wilderness to the transformation of untamable lands into stations of hope, is a powerful example of how America sometimes lives up to its aspirations and of the forces that so often cause us to fall short. The penultimate chapter, on the discovery and exploitation of the California sequoias, is excellent too.

Recommended in spite of the criticisms because there is a solid core here that really deserves to be read.

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not sure why there are so many good reviews for this book. Must be a small, self-selected group of readers. This book was SLOW...slow even for a huge fan of detailed non-fiction. The first few chapters were rambling and there was no driving argument or anything to push the book forward. I couldn’t force myself to read past the second section.

[Walt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful set of essays exploring the connections between the destruction of land and the oppression of people, and how Americans throughout history have resisted both. It sometimes seems hard to think of a way forward, but here are some models that might guide action into a a society of kindness and justice for its land and people.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Words, like boundary lines, make meaning of the world, and some words, like boundaries, bring definition to the brambly landscape of our minds.”

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A frequently digressive but interesting and insiightful look at American environmental activism.

[Owain Delf · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking interpretation of environmentalism and subversive politics told through some of the lesser-known stories of America’s 19th century.

[Erica]

A lovely, thoughtful book that went a long way toward salvaging Thoreau for me! A wonderful mix of history, literature, art history, aesthetics, and Marxist geography. Looking forward to Daegan’s next two books.