William Bartram and the Nature That Could Have Been

Two hundred fifty years ago, on the eve of the American Revolution, William Bartram, the young naturalist, illustrator, and observer of indigenous customs traveled the Southern backcountry. His journey was a rich and rhapsodic description of nature and of landscapes largely undisturbed by colonial settlers. The result of his journey, the 1791 publication TRAVELS, is a beautiful rendering of the plant and animal world, and a vivid account of native American villages and people, providing us with a baseline of ecological conditions. WILLIAM BARTRAM AND THE NATURE THAT COULD HAVE BEEN looks back at the nature described by Bartram, as well as the vast changes and seemingly irreversible damage inflicted upon the American landscape since that time. It is a reflection upon the choices made by a country that diverted from Bartram's view of nature and the holiness that was imbued within it, and that chose a more utilitarian, extractive, and exploitative path that inflicted irreversible damage.