Forces of Nature: Voices that Shaped Environmentalism (Exhibition Review)
Cheryl Sadowski
On a bright, blue-sky morning in late December, my friend and I visited the National Portrait Gallery to view Forces of Nature: Voices That Shaped Environmentalism. It was 56 degrees outside. Making our way through a snowless Holiday Market toward the gallery’s entrance on Eighth Street felt simultaneously cheery and eerily relevant.
Cognitive dissonance, it turns out, is the right mindset for this exhibit devoted to 25 writers, artists, activists, scientists and politicians who have influenced attitudes toward the environment from the nineteenth century onward. Curated by Lacey Baradel—then historian for the National Science Foundation (now assistant curator for the U.S. Senate)—the exhibit draws upon historic engravings, family photography, gelatin prints, sculpture, and iconic Time magazine covers to provoke complex questions: What is our relationship with the natural world? What are our responsibilities to it? What is meant by environmentalism and sustainability? And how do moral considerations factor into our decisions?
More than a century of conservation, resource management, biodiversity protections, environmental justice, and climate science are succinctly highlighted. The range of viewpoints and approaches compels us to face two realities: environmental history is complicated and imperfect, and economic freedom is rarely compatible with nature’s vitality and human wellbeing.
The pantheon of late nineteenth, early twentieth century American writers and conservationists is well accounted for: Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt. The former president’s contributions feel diminished in the small, historic photograph of his camping party beneath the giant sequoias in California’s Mariposa Grove—the trip that initiated the birth of America’s National Parks. Roosevelt went on to create the U.S. Forest Service and sign into existence the Antiquities Act, five national parks, 18 national monuments, 55 national bird sanctuaries and wildlife refuges, and 150 national forests.
Julie Packard by Hope Gangloff. Acrylic on canvas, 2019; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. © Hope Gangloff
Other well-known figures such as Edward O. Wilson, Rachel Carson, George Washington Carver, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas appear alongside lesser-known names: George Perkins Marsh, who sounded the alarm as early as 1847 about the effects of industrialization on the planet’s climate; conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy, who drew scientific and celebrity attention to the global impacts of deforestation of the Amazon; and Dorceta Taylor, a leading scholar of environmental sociology who works at the nexus of urban agriculture and racial disparities.
Memorial designer Maya Lin and marine biologist Julie Packard bring important dimensions to the exhibit. Though she appears as a diminutive figurine encased in glass, Lin’s artistic vision looms large: her controversial design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is indelibly etched into the national consciousness. Her fifth and final memorial, titled “What is Missing?” is devoted to species and places that have either gone extinct, or will soon, if we do not act to protect them.
Packard helped found the world-renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium and its Seafood Watch program. Her portrait, painted by artist Hope Gangloff in vivid blues, greens, and corals, ensures that overfishing, plastic pollution, and the ocean’s role in global health are part of the conversation.
Forces of Nature portrays a spectrum of grassroots activism: there is civil rights leader Dolores Huerta rallying the United Farm Workers against the use of chemical pesticides; citizen Mary Workman holding a glass of brown, undrinkable water drawn from her well in southeastern Ohio, a representation of her battle with the Hanna Coal Company; and Russell Means and Dennis Banks, Oglala Lakota leaders in the American Indian Movement whose 1973-armed occupation of Wounded Knee drew national attention to the Native American fight for land sovereignty.
The Portrait Gallery is among my favorite museums in Washington D.C. for the way it combines visual artistry with storytelling. We consider faces and biographies amid our own narratives and ideas, and innumerable perspectives that are neither framed nor curated: those of Indigenous people, laborers, factory workers, and everyday citizen activists. The Smithsonian Institution acknowledges the limitations and incomplete picture rendered by portraiture.
Forces of Nature does its duty bringing forth alternative views, including Gifford Pinchot, first head of the U.S. Forest Service, who considered the environment a resource to be managed; James Watt, a polarizing figure from the Reagan era, who turned conservation into a political issue with his promise to “undo 50 years of bad government”; and Dixy Lee Ray, fiery zoologist, outspoken supporter of nuclear power, and critic of the environmental movement within the Democratic Party.
For those who are scientifically inclined, Forces of Nature explores some of the critical discoveries that have furthered our understanding of earth’s limitations and possibilities: for example, Nobel Prize winning scientist Mario Molina’s research on chlorofluorocarbons’ destruction of the ozone layer; and quantum physicist Freeman Dyson’s prescient vision for nuclear powered space colonies and genetically engineered plants.
Where Forces of Nature succeeds most is upending the idea that environmentalism and sustainability are terms of shared understanding. For many, these words translate into conservation and stewardship; for others they mean protecting endangered species and biodiversity; and for others they represent access to clean air, clean water, and real food.
While it should be apparent that all of these matter, Forces of Nature depicts the vast array of opinions and stances that comprise the environmental movement. The idea of nature as a “resource” to be managed for economic opportunity and human wellbeing—not for nature’s own merits and right to exist—may be repugnant, imperative, or plain reality depending on individual values, beliefs, class, and race.
Environmental progress arises from the momentum of mass movements, and from the bedrock of science and research. Yet it is difficult to find that which supposedly springs eternal. The diverse composition of Forces of Nature points to something more palpable than hope: the continued evolution of human understanding of the interdependencies of all life. How long that evolution may continue in light of the crises we create for ourselves—and for the animals, plants, and elements that constitute our planet—remains a matter of debate.
Forces of Nature: Voices that Shaped Environmentalism is at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Museum, in Washington, DC, through September 2024.
