The Politics of Beauty: The Aesthetic Origins of Postwar U.S. Environmental Politics

• In Event: Shaping Cities, Shaping Knowledge

Abstract

In an essay written toward the end of his career, J.B. Jackson, editor of the famed journal Landscape, reminisced on an article he published in the early 1960s. “Those were the years when the environmental movement was more concerned with design than with ecology,” Jackson wrote. Huh? In this paper, I offer a fresh perspective on the origins of U.S. environmental politics in the postwar era, arguing that concerns about aesthetics, not ecology, were the key context for the emergence of “environment” as a national issue in the mid-1960s. My account centers on a short-lived program undertaken by the Lyndon Johnson administration to preserve the nation’s “natural beauty.” Developed in response to widespread concerns about “man-made ugliness,” the aesthetic campaign brought together issues ranging from parks to pollution to historic preservation. To promote these efforts, Johnson called for a “new conservation,” one concerned “not with nature alone but with the total relation between man and the world around him.” Though little-remembered today, the natural beauty program was deemed “revolutionary” at the time, heralded by public and press alike. More than just a forgotten event in postwar environmental politics, Lyndon and Lady Bird’s “war on ugliness,” I argue, marked the very origins of the category of “environmental politics” itself. Drawing on recent approaches from science studies, I use the natural beauty campaign to establish the mid-1960s as a moment before our own taken-for-granted notions of “the environment” had come into existence. Doing so casts familiar events in surprising new light, revealing an overlooked interlude when a broad-based "concern for environment" encompassed issues of the human-made and natural worlds alike.

Author

• Kyle VanHemert, University of Delaware