The Harmony of Nature

Brian: Now, I want us to think back to our childhoods, we’re in elementary school and the homeroom teacher assigns a project that requires you to craft a diorama. So using nothing but an old shoebox, a stick of glue and a handful of foliage you set off to assemble something that looks like a window into the natural environment.
For many of us the shoebox diorama was our first exposure to the wilderness. The diorama was invented in 1822 by a Frenchman named Louis Daguerre. Later known as the creator of the Daguerrotype. These early dioramas were typically large scale, housed in darkened theaters. They were three dimensional exhibits comprised of a landscape painting in the background and plants and rocks in the foreground.
A precursor to the cinema, this immersive experience was intended to give the illusion that the viewer had been transported to some far off natural scene. And by the late 19th century, American conservationist Carl Akeley borrowed from this technology of illusion and incorporated his expertise in taxidermy to pioneer a new diorama called the natural history diorama. Turning a popular form of entertainment into an awareness tool for the conservation movement.

Brian R: So imagine walking into a darkened theater-

Brian: That’s scholar Brian Rasmussen.

Brian R: And at the far end of this theater is an illuminated landscape. A landscape that looks like it’s illuminated from within. And what you’ve got is a mountain scene in the far distance enshrouded in clouds, a large panorama. And this is huge, so imagine 30 or 40 or even 50 feet long, and maybe 20 or 30 feet high.
In the background you’ve got these volcanic mountains shrouded in clouds and snow. Imagine in the foreground you’ve got a jungle scene for example. And framing the jungle scene, we have vines and trees and in the very foreground you have gorillas. So what I’m describing is one of the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History. The silver back gorilla exhibit which is the exhibit is Carl Akeley is best known for.

Brian: What are we supposed to understand about nature and the relationship between man and nature from what you just described?

Brian R: Very often, these dioramas weren’t accompanied by lots of didactic text for example.

Brian: That’s what I gather, right. As your supposed to experience it but somehow come away with something.

Brian R: Right you were supposed to experience on an emotional and psychological level the harmony of nature. That was the explicit-

Brian: I see, [uh-huh 00:41:09].

Brian R: Design of a diorama. And so this is why sometimes scientists felt like dioramas were sort of devoid of intellectual content. But there was a kind of let’s call it natural pleasure in the design of a diorama. The idea being that you were led to some kind of higher understanding of your place in nature through this emotive experience in this darkened chamber. Which was kind of a temple of nature I mean right?
There was a sort of transcendental philosophy behind the whole idea of the diorama. That nature supplied trues that once supplied by religion, that this was a distinctively American religion because of America’s distinctive geography and fauna and flora. That there was something special about that, and so dioramas were designed not necessarily to instruct so much as sort of show you your place in an American landscape.

Brian: I understand that the American mister diorama was a guy named Carl Akeley. Can you tell me something about him?

Brian R: Carl Akeley was born in Upstate New York in 1864 and he eventually came to work for the American Museum of Natural History. Who regarded him as the biographer of the American wilderness. He was what we could call a certain type in the late 19th century, early 20th century. The hunter naturalist type, I think the most famous example of this hunter naturalist type is probably Teddy Roosevelt in that he was an ardent admirer of Roosevelt and they went on expeditions together into Africa.
And he was I guess, he pioneered a lot of the techniques that we now to come to understand as sort of synonymous with the natural history diorama. But he was also a sculpturer. He was one of the first, he wasn’t the first but he was one of the first to kind of marry sculptural aesthetics to taxidermy. So in the middle of the 19th century and taxidermy was mostly a decorative art? It’s commitment to a naturalist, what we might call a naturalist aesthetics was not evident until guys like Akeley came along and sort of raised the bar in terms of thinking about like what you needed to produce an animal that looked real?
So guys like Akeley were interested in going out into the field and doing field observations on animals so that they would produce taxidermied animals that actually looked like real animals as oppose to most taxidermy in the 19th century was done by people who had no field knowledge. So Akeley was at the forefront of that hunter naturalist tradition of naturalists going into the field, collecting specimens, making observation sketches with photographs of whatever. Coming back and trying to produce very naturalist, very realistic animals.

Brian: I wanna stop you right here, and have you drill down into a term that you used, hunter naturalist. Or we’re also talking about conservation at the same time, we’re talking about Teddy Roosevelt shooting animals. What’s the deal here? I mean how can conservation be about killing animals, stuffing them and putting them in museums?

Brian R: So museums didn’t see this as a contradiction in the 19th century. They didn’t see it as a contradiction because they thought that collecting animals was a form of conservation. Many of them were driven by the fear that the landscapes of North America were disappearing.
Around the middle of the 19th century we get a lot of documentation on people registering their dismay and their concern that North American landscapes were disappearing. And the railroad industry cities, the collecting en masse of birds and other animals by commercial enterprises for like the hat trade for example, which reduced the population of all kinds of birds. Maybe even led to the extinction of some.
So there’s this real cognizance in the 19th century, late 19th century that we’re losing these landscapes. That these animals are disappearing to extinction. And so museums saw their mandate as conserving, preserving these landscapes in permanent form in museums. And then to bring those disappearing landscapes to people.

Brian: I wanna ask you about naturalism and nature. You’ve talked about people like Akeley was much better at presenting for instance stuffed animals as natural. But when I think back to the dioramas that I’ve been to, it’s almost too perfect. I think of you know the tigers look like perfect tigers, and they you know … the birds look like … you know they don’t … I live out in the country now. Like animals don’t actually look like that really.

Brian R: Right, what you’re referring to is the idealization of diorama wilderness scenes.

Brian: Yes. Perfect, that’s just the word. They must’ve been idealized.

Brian R: Right, so this is where dioramas were the naturalistic slash scientific slash zoological impulse behind diorama creation runs up against the other big impulse that fed dioramas in the 19th century which is sort of the aristocratic trophy hunting tradition.
So without hunter naturalists like Teddy Roosevelt who belonged to kind of an aristocratic masculine tradition of hunting. Who were hunting game in large numbers, without those guys; who also happened to be the donors and benefactors of these major museums. Who wanted in some sense a place to put their trophies. So we can think of diorama halls at the American Museum of Natural History and elsewhere as essentially extensions of the hunting lodges of these hunter naturalists who were wilderness enthusiasts. And who were going out on expeditions and they needed a way to turn those expeditions into something socially useful and so they saw an opportunity in museums to give their collecting a kind of scientific and educational backing or justification.

Brian: And was there an ideological bend there as well? Was there any sense of hierarchy in these displays?

Brian R: There’s definitely hierarchies evident in these displays. The most evident I think is the order of charismatic nature right? So most of the animals that we see represented in dioramas are large mammals, large mega fauna for example. Birds. There’s this definite sort of preference for a certain kind of nature. It’s a very selective attention to nature evident.

Brian: I have never seen a mosquito in a diorama.

Brian R: Right. Exactly. So by any stretch of the imagination, these are not actual nature. These are idealized depictions of landscapes. And their idealized on a number of levels. They’re idealized because the animals that were collected are the best specimens for example. Hunters want the best specimens. They want the largest specimens. They want the ones with the most beautiful plumage or the richest, fullest coats. So in that regard, they’re picking and choosing the animals that they do include.
They’re idealized also to reinforce the notion of pristine, untouched landscapes. That’s the landscapes sensibility inherent in a natural history diorama, that they’re un peopled landscapes.

Brian: I’m just gonna blurt it out, I mean isn’t this about demonstrated man’s control of nature?

Brian R: Yes, it’s man’s control of nature. Well, this is interesting because man’s control of nature, the consciousness of man’s control of nature in the 19th century is what drove people like Akeley to wanna collect because they understood that once upon a time, the wilderness was a terrifying prospect. The wilderness was you know, it was Jews in the wilderness. It was exile, it was darkness, it was dangerous animals.

Brian: It’s where the term, “howling wilderness” comes from.

Brian R: Exactly. Exactly. And in the 19th century wilderness stops being a howling wilderness starts being something that we understand, we are directly causing the disappearance of.

Brian: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian R: So conservation emerges out of this consciousness. This consciousness that we are, that our domination of nature is directly resulting in the eradication of nature. So we’re not really interested in conserving nature until we see it slipping away.

Brian: And where is the place of the diorama today in an age of film and video, 3D photography, not to mention the whole digital world. Has it gone the way of let’s say silent films? Is it a oddity?

Brian R: In terms of their continued place, we talked a little bit about. They are bound up in all kinds of interesting political issues. Environmental historians will say that this is actually one of the problems of the wilderness myth is that we tend to selectively preserve and attend to nature. We don’t necessarily think about ourselves in nature for example. We tend to think about nature in these pristine, beautiful places. And that’s really great, and a national park is in some ways like a giant diorama.
Right? It’s this attempt to preserve for all time against change a landscape. And that is a way of preserving landscapes and it was instrumental in the creation of national parks, this same idea for example. That went into the national parks, went into the creation of these dioramas. But what happens outside of those places? What happens outside of the preserve landscapes? Do we express the same kind of ethical care to our local, I live in Los Angeles for example. We don’t exert the same kind of care along for example the LA river where I live as we do to say Yosemite or something like that. And so it shows.
So that kind of uneven distribution of our care, may be a legacy of this old wilderness idea.

Brian: Brian Rasmussen is associate professor of English and department chair at California Lutheran University. He’s the author of technologies of nature, the natural history diorama and the preserve of nature.