How I See It — My Place

An Exhibit of Photographs and Writing by California Teens

In the Footsteps of Thoreau

By Patricia Hunt

How I See It — My Place, a project for young people that encourages exploration and discovery of participants’ local space, is rooted in a great American tradition — the questioning and informed individual consciousness responding to his or her environment. While the project centers on the individual effort, another element of our cultural heritage provides a ground for that effort — the public library and the support and encouragement of a community of like-minded people.

This questioning individual consciousness appears in some of our earliest American literature when Jonathan Edwards views the wilderness through a Calvinistic lens and finds an order there that manifests a divine hand. To many European settlers, including the Puritans, who came in search of both religious freedom and profit, the New World appeared a vast wilderness, lacking a significant history. The complex ways in which Native peoples had lived and shaped the American landscape for centuries were not noted or acknowledged by more than a few insightful thinkers. Instead, most of the newcomers, and their descendents, saw America as Nature’s Nation, a landscape defined as environment, shaped not by human activity, but by natural forces or divine hand.

By the 1830s, a period of industrial take-off in the United States, a relatively urban eastern seaboard and a middle landscape of farms and small communities bounded by wilderness characterized our country’s features. Technology’s advance into the landscape and the conflicting values that advance represented formed a theme that permeated the evangelical pantheism of the Transcendentalists. While Emerson’s “Nature” preached the alignment of man’s vision and his moral center with a natural world that reflected the divine spirit, it is Thoreau’s spirit one thinks of first when reading the project’s core text, Outside Lies Magic by John Stilgoe.

To walk in the woods, as Thoreau testifies in his essay “Walking,” is to encounter correspondences between the evidence of the natural world and its moral lessons to man. He walks “like a camel which is said to be the only beast which ruminates while walking,” and he prefers to follow a westerly path away from eastern civilization and in the direction of wildness and freedom. These walks in the woods record a constant interaction between the text of the natural world and the questioning consciousness of a learned mind informed by books.

In the time since Thoreau sauntered through the Maine woods, the physical aspects of this country have changed dramatically. Precious little wilderness remains in our contemporary world, and with the landscape’s change in character from that of the 19th century, the lens for studying our environment shifted its focus to the activities of man in shaping our earth. Rather than reading the natural world as a conduit to the divine, studies became centered on landscape as a revelation of culture and history. John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s work represents this new spirit — and its focus on the vernacular, man-made landscape is central to the purpose of How I See It: My Place.

Jackson mentored the young John Stilgoe, a historian whose work ranges from studies of America’s common landscapes to the vernacular speech characterizing the salt marshes and estuaries of our eastern shore. In Outside Lies Magic, Stilgoe does not walk through the woods like Thoreau, but traverses the contemporary landscape on a bicycle, reading its evidence, asking questions, providing factual information, and finding social and political meaning.

And walking in Thoreau’s footsteps and following Stilgoe’s path, the young people participating in this project went out into the territory near their libraries, recording what they saw, raising questions about the significance of their discoveries by interpreting, writing, photographing and making public presentations of their work. These young people continued a great American tradition, and in their journeys they sometimes found evidence of a fallen world, sometimes a manifestation of unexpected beauty in their daily environment.

Amanda DeLallo examining her subject for the perfect angle,
South Lake Tahoe.

While the efforts of these young Thoreaus were clearly individual, they received support from a community that included peers, specialists in local history, a photographer who taught them how to use their digital cameras to record discoveries, and, not least, the guidance of that great community resource, librarians.

It is significant that the public library, that repository of “book knowledge,” extends its efforts beyond its walls and into the community, and that librarians have become guides to our young people as they traverse their neighborhoods in a search for meaning and identity that has characterized much of our history. What better example of American values and attitudes could one find than those in How I See It: My Place?

Patricia Hunt, Ph.D.
Humanities Scholar-Consultant
Patricia Hunt’s academic work has been focused on the study of nature and culture and the teaching of writing and critical thinking. She holds a doctorate in American Civilization from the University of Iowa, where her dissertation investigated the sense of place in Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, and located this work within the tradition of American pastoralism. Her postdoctoral research, a comparative culture study supported by a NEH Research Fellowship, explored Canadian and American views of the myth of the garden. While teaching at Northland College in Wisconsin, she participated in NEH supported cross-curriculum development that centered on North Country values and the sense of place. In 1980, she joined UCLA Writing Program and its efforts to redesign an undergraduate, cross-disciplinary curriculum in writing.

In 1983, Dr. Hunt became a continuing education specialist at UCLA Extension, working first in the Department of Education where, in concert with the State of California and Los Angeles education offices, she developed writing conferences and courses to support teacher education. In 1987, she joined Extension’s Department of Business and Management, where she directed and developed continuing education programs in communication and management until her retirement in 2005. During her years with Extension, she continued her teaching interests within the Landscape Architecture Program, developing the course Landscape and the Imagination, which she taught for 17 years.

You can reach Patricia Hunt at patricia_hunt@sbcglobal.net