Cemetery of Mount Auburn

I’ve come to believe that we Americans have a long tradition of creating and celebrating such landscapes.See Aaron Sachs, “American Arcadia: Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Nineteenth-Century Landscape Tradition,” Environmental History 15 (April 2010), 206–35. It is not nearly so well known as the one that venerates the majestic waterfalls at Niagara and Yosemite, but it deserves to be, for at times it was even more central in American culture than the wilderness mythos—and it may well be more relevant today. The nature lovers of the nineteenth century, in particular, embroiled in their society’s desperate struggles over the transition from agrarianism to urban-industrial capitalism, bequeathed to us a cornucopia of productive environmental ideas, as well as actual...