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WORK TITLE: This Radical Land
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.daeganmiller.com/
CITY: Madison
STATE: WI
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
dmiller9@wisc.edu
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: two boys.
EDUCATION:Cornell University, M.A., Ph.D.; University of Wisconsin–Madison, A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellow.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, historian, and researcher. University of Wisconsin, Madison, research staff member and editor at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE). Contributed to the first international museum exhibit on the Anthropocene, hosted by Germany’s Deutsches Museum.
AWARDS:Awards from the Southern American Studies Association, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, and the Forest History Society; funding grants from the A.W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities (two), and Cornell University.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, edited by Gregg Mitman, Robert Emmett, and Marco Armiero, University of Chicago Press, 2018. Contributor to periodicals, including Aeon, Edge Effects, the Hypocrite Reader, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Places. Contributor of biographies to the educational platform/organization “Americans Who Tell the Truth.”
SIDELIGHTS
Daegan Miller grew up in rural upstate New York. In the fifth grade, he discovered Walden by Henry David Thoreau at the local one-room library. Although he studied history in college, Miller always wanted to be a writer. A contributor to literary periodicals and professional journals, Miller writes about a wide range or topics, from fatherhood to cancer to photography. His primary interest, however, is landscape and the environment.
In his debut book, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, Miller presents essays that look at dissent in nineteenth-century America via a connection to environmental awareness and destruction. With a focus on capitalism and anti-capatilist beliefs, Miller provides a look at radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who in some ways opposed the capitalistic onslaught that threatened the American landscape.
Among those discussed by Miller are the writer and naturalist Thoreau and the nineteenth-century photographer A.J. Russell, best known for his photographs of the Civil War and the Union Pacific Railroad. Miller also writes about African-American physician and abolitionist James McCune Smith and Burnett Haskell, a printer and attorney who came to embrace journalism and published the International Workingmen’s Association journal titled Truth.
In one essay, Miller explores a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness in upstate New York. Settled by free African Americans and escaped slaves, the community flourished for some time in the 1850s. In his essay about the Kaweah Colony, a socialist commune founded in the 1880s in central California near the state’s giant redwoods, Miller tells the story of how the commune was eventually dispersed by competing views of the value of wilderness, one held by the railroad interests and the other by preservationists. The essay featuring photographer A.J. Russell and his photographs, which includes the famous photograph of the completion of a transcontinental railroad, shows how his commercial photographs included subversive messages. Miller “convincingly argues that Russell’s images, through his openness to the sublime and picaresque, capture the ‘tragedy of Progress’ on the cusp of the Western frontier,” wrote Pacific Standard Online contributor James McWilliams.
This Radical Land is organized so that each chapter focuses on a different landscape and its relationship with capitalistic growth in american within a social, political, and economic context of progress. Throughout, Miller examines people and places often overlooked by other historians. “Miller’s book should be valued by scholars for its creative linking of radicalism and landscape,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Noting that “Miller’s complex narrative may tax some general readers,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor went on to write: “Nonetheless, he offers an eclectic education often marked by soaring prose.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2018, Amanda Winterroth, review of This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, p. 37.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of This Radical Land.
Publishers Weekly, January 15, 2018, review of This Radical Land, p. 50.
ONLINE
Daegan Miller website, https://www.daeganmiller.com (June 27, 2018).
Pacific Standard Online, https://psmag.com/ (April 13, 2018), James McWilliams, “New Thoughts about Environmental Thinking: Daegan Miller’s Debut Is One Radical Breath of Fresh Air.”
All stories have a beginning; mine has its roots somewhere in the farm fields and woods of my book-filled childhood home in rural upstate New York, where, in the fifth grade, I discovered Walden on the shelves of our local one-room library.
I eventually went on to train as an historian (I earned an MA and PhD in history from Cornell University and was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), but the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be is a writer.
I write about all sorts of things—from fatherhood and cancer to monkey wrenches and landscape photography—but ultimately my thoughts always return to the hold the past has on the present and the way that we shape the past to fit the world we want to inhabit. I’d like that world to be green, healthy, just, and free, for me as well as for you.
My work has appeared in a variety of venues, from literary magazines to academic journals, and I've contributed to the first international museum exhibit on the Anthropocene, hosted by Germany's Deutsches Museum. My first book, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, is coming out in March, 2018, from the University of Chicago Press. I've received funding from the A.W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities (twice), and Cornell University, and I’ve won awards from Cornell, the Southern American Studies Association, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, and the Forest History Society.
I live in Madison, Wisconsin, with my wife, two perfect, feral boys, one placid greyhound, and a roost-ruling cat.
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Print Marked Items
This Radical Land: A Natural History of
American Dissent
Amanda Winterroth
Booklist.
114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent. By Daegan Miller. Apr. 2018.336p. Univ. of
Chicago, $30 (9780226336145). 304.209.
In many historical narratives, landscape is little more than a setting; the "where" of an event can claim just a
mention or two. Miller's debut views landscape in a completely different way: as both a witness to and a
participant in American history, especially in stories of resistance. Each chapter explores a different
landscape in the nineteenth century and its entwinement with the new social, political, and economic
realities of "progress." These are big themes, but Miller manages to illustrate these concepts using people,
events, and locations that are traditionally overlooked. The result is a text that succeeds not only in arguing
its theories and presenting an elegant narrative but also in reminding us just how easily certain people and
places can be erased from our popular histories. Although the book is firmly rooted in research and theory,
Miller's style is less formal and more personal than a strictly academic text, making it appealing for a wider
audience. Fans of Derrick Jensen, Howard Zinn, and Rebecca Solnit will appreciate Miller's fascinating and
unexpected perspective on American history.--Amanda Winterroth
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Winterroth, Amanda. "This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018,
p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956803/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=03e89303. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956803
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Miller, Daegan: THIS RADICAL LAND
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Miller, Daegan THIS RADICAL LAND Univ. of Chicago (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 4, 1 ISBN: 978-0-
226-33614-5
A debut book that ranges across disciplines and decades to connect the natural environment--especially
long-lived trees--to a scathing critique of American-style capitalism.
Alternating abstract theory with impressive research, both bolstered by extensive sources listed in a near80-page
endnotes section, the author, who has taught at Cornell and the University of Wisconsin, builds his
case about understanding American history by examining destruction of the environment through essays
grounded in the 19th century. The essays focus on naturalist/writer Henry David Thoreau; photographer
A.J. Russell; slavery opponent James McCune Smith; anarchy advocate Burnette Haskell; and even
Communist theorist Karl Marx. Miller terms the living trees connecting the land to westward-moving
humans "witness trees." From their spreading branches, the trees witnessed what humans considered
"Progress." As Miller writes, "in this epic whose text was the landscape, the most prominent feature was the
continent's leafy verdure." Looking back, however, the author considers expansion and the many attendant
unacceptable compromises of social justice. At intervals, Miller abandons his negativity by hoping for a
better future marked by healthy trees, clean rivers, thriving family farms, humane technological advances,
and communities of residents bound together in mutual compassion. In some sections, the author moves
away from abstraction to ground the connected essays in specific trees, such as the great elm on the Boston
Common or the giant sequoia in California that has been dubbed General Sherman. The essay focusing on
Russell is especially poignant regarding trees--their presence and their absence--and how they link to ersatz
progress, and many of Russell's photographs illustrate the pages. Occasionally, Miller turns to the
autobiographical, and understanding his adolescence and adulthood aid in comprehending his severe
critique of American society in general and capitalism in particular. His real and imagined linkages to
Thoreau, for example, provide clues.
Following Miller's complex narrative may tax some general readers. Nonetheless, he offers an eclectic
education often marked by soaring prose.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Miller, Daegan: THIS RADICAL LAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461333/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=90d369ea.
Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461333
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This Radical Land: A Natural History of
American Dissent
Publishers Weekly.
265.3 (Jan. 15, 2018): p50.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent
Daegan Miller. Univ. of Chicago, $30 (336p) ISBN 978-0-226-33614-5
In this inventive debut, landscape historian Miller argues that since landscapes are human creations they all
have a history. His reading of 19th-century American landscapes uncovers "histories of dissent, of freedom,
of equality, and of justice" that are rooted in concerns over a rapidly industrializing country. Miller
organizes the book into four "acts," with an intermission of indeterminate value. The first act opens in
Massachusetts, where Henry David Thoreau investigates the best use of the Concord River: powering mills
or sustaining agriculture and green landscapes. The second and fourth acts are the most intriguing. In act
two, African-American settlers in the Adirondacks envision a Utopian agrarianism that challenges racial
views during a time when slavery debates are tearing the country apart. In act four, giant sequoias in
California inspire the creation of the socialist Kaweah Colony, which sought to sustain both human and
nonhuman life. Act three is the most esoteric and densely jargoned; here, Miller explores how photographer
A ,J. Russell refashioned Rocky Mountain landscape aesthetics to critique manifest destiny. Miller tries too
hard to craft elegant prose and the interspersed first-person narratives don't mesh with the rest of the
material. Still, Miller's book should be valued by scholars for its creative linking of radicalism and
landscape. Illus. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent." Publishers Weekly, 15 Jan. 2018, p. 50.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523888925/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7c229ac6. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523888925
NEW THOUGHTS ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL THINKING: DAEGAN MILLER'S DEBUT IS ONE RADICAL BREATH OF FRESH AIR
Through a series of essays, Miller reminds us what it's like to feel a sense of awe when confronted with nature's beauty.
JAMES MCWILLIAMSAPR 13, 2018
50
SHARES
Daegan Miller.
Daegan Miller.
(Photo: Talia Miller)
In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert notes that human activity—especially the burning of fossil fuels—has touched every last morsel of land on the planet. There's no longer such a thing as unadulterated nature. Every space, no matter how seemingly isolated from human contact, is threatened by anthropocentric ecological degradation.
Kolbert's premise reflects the unifying principle of environmental history: When thinking about the environment, we must not segregate humanity from the rest of nature, but should instead view humanity as an element of the natural world.
This frame of mind, true as it may be, has an unfortunate side effect. The relentless insistence, especially among academics, that untouched wilderness is a romantic myth discourages the mystical grandeur so many of us experience when encountering nature in its most impressive forms. It's not the Grand Canyon we're supposed to notice, but the hoard of tourists stomping through it; it's not the lavish blueness of Lake Tahoe that should capture our attention, but the corrosion polluting its clarity. It's as if, being dutifully informed environmentalists, we automatically have a doomsday responsibility to allow the inevitable logic of ecological degradation to prevail in every setting, no matter how beautiful it may be, thereby assuming the moral obligation to be gloomy.
Through interpretive brilliance and gorgeously crafted prose, Daegan Miller's This Radical Land: A Natural History of Dissent rescues this sense of environmental awe from excessive skepticism. Miller fully accepts the idea that an honest notion of nature will necessarily include human activity. However, by presenting "wilderness" as negotiated space that makes possible "the mutually sustaining relationship between human society and nature"—rather than merely a once pristine place we have since trashed—he follows his own feeling of wonderment in the face of natural beauty to a conclusion that profoundly reshapes accepted environmental thought. It's a move that, as Miller admits to me in an interview, goes against the grain of scholarly convention. It's also makes his book one of the most elegant and insightful examples of environmental writing I've seen in many, many years.
Miller's subjects are 19th-century visionaries who, when stopped in their tracks by a stunning landscape, see neither resources to be exploited nor a feral wilderness whose innocence should be preserved. Instead, these men and women conjure an "imaginatively inclusive wilderness" that offers a communal shelter from the self-isolation that is itself a result of capitalistic exploitation.
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The quiet force of natural beauty, even when its empty silence evokes historical atrocities we too often prefer to ignore, motivates Miller's subjects to cultivate ecological attitudes that, if not atoning for past sins, at least nurture communities that minimize the chances of such future atrocities. Utopians with socialist tendencies, these figures understand the human potential for justice and goodness to be something inseparable from nature. The juxtaposition of labor and nature as endemic to social relations, as Miller deftly shows, provides a much truer vision of ecological balance than you'd ever find in a masculine-obsessed brawler such as Theodore Roosevelt or even a less self-obsessed but equally windy environmentalist such as John Muir.
Miller writes, "we who now live in hot times have ... inherited a long, though often overlooked legacy of social justice and environmental sensitivity." His book—which consists of four interrelated essays—brings to light visions we have long ignored, and visions we cannot afford to ignore.
section-break
The opening essay in This Radical Land explores Henry David Thoreau's efforts to reclaim and re-invest in the Western lands that had long been treated as backdrops for consumption and exploitation. Thomas Jefferson's Northwest Ordinance of 1785 prepped the American West with uniform grids that abstracted the landscape's unique features into equal units that could be easily monetized. No matter what the local flora and fauna marking any specific patch of land, a square on the grid was a square on the grid. Miller explains that, in the heady aftermath of Jefferson's diligent work, "it didn't take long for the economic elite to grasp that Jefferson's grid could be folded into a funnel to efficiently siphon off the wealth of the entire continent." The siphoning echoed throughout the 19th century.
But Thoreau's dissenting "countermodern map" of the Concord River provided an alternative. Drawn while working as a surveyor for the state, it contested the Northwest Ordinance's insidious process of abstraction and commodification. Instead of blocks of neutralized land put up for sale, Thoreau's map offered, in Miller's phrasing, "a full, wild land living at once beyond and beneath the confined landscape of the town's grasping improvers." It was almost a "satirical anti-map" that was "alive with a riot of thousands of tiny notations," all of them aiming "to picture Concord as situated in a landscape teeming with life and human usage."
This Radical Land: A Natural History of Dissent.
This Radical Land: A Natural History of Dissent.
(Photo: The University of Chicago Press)
It was a map that, in identifying the Concord River as an entity living in place and time, and endowing it with precise features and patterns, presented it as an ecosystem within which humans might interact, work, play, and socialize without exploiting the land, or each other, for economic gain. With this map, Miller introduces the fertile notion that our ability to see and appreciate the unique life force of an environment—in this case Thoreau's Concord River—shapes how might live in it. Grids delineated into plots for sale don't allow such dreams.
Draw the right kind of map, and you might attract the right kind of people. Miller's second essay turns to the Adirondacks (the place where he grew up and started hiking as a teenager) and explores "the radical potential of agrarianism" through a settlement known as Timbuctoo, a North Elba, New York, intentional community consisting of 3000 African-American settlers who, in 1846, were granted 40 acres of land apiece by the wealthy white abolitionist Gerrit Smith. These cohesively organized settlers explored what it meant to live in the spirit of Thoreau's map.
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In our conversation, Miller calls them "African-American pioneers who lived in tightly knit arrangements," pursuing "an ecology of freedom" through labor in a natural environment. Indeed, one mission of this experiment was—as a utopian endeavor that integrated work, social relations, and nature—to address racism and the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny—that is, to fulfill the "potential for a radically better world." (John Brown, the fiery abolitionist who would later lead a failed raid on Harper's Ferry, lived in the commune for a spell of time.) This community, respectful of its resources, sought "places for husbandry, rather than a cut-and-get-out scene of pillage." As they worked the land they modeled an ethic of sustainability that, as Miller notes, remind us that "perhaps not all important wilderness thinking comes from the brotherhood of lily-white wilderness thinkers and their modern-day, mainstream-environmentalist heirs." (Spoiler alert, Miller is not a fan of contemporary environmentalism.)
As we discussed this section of his book, Miller asked, "who gets to make history? And what do we look for? Maybe we're not looking in the right places." Indeed, when was the last time anyone sought environmental wisdom from a group of black settlers? Too often so-called radical critiques of dominant ideologies come from "the ranks of privilege," well-meaning types who, with easy access to the media, level rhetorical cannons and head to the Vineyard for the weekend. Miller's overview of a commune of relatively unknown black farmers in upstate New York reveals how much more powerful dissent can be when coming from those who lean into the plow and do something truly radical: Live according to its stated imperatives. The fact that this experiment, as with so many others, eventually failed, is less important than the integrated environmental and social ethic—one rooted a anti-capitalistic political economy—it left for us discover and, one hopes, learn from. The upshot, as Miller sees it, was "a place of grace."
The final two essays are similarly thematically entwined. In his third essay, Miller provides a tour-de-force analysis of the photography of A.J. Russell, a photographer best know for his images of the Civil War and the building of the Union Pacific Railroad. Whereas conventional assessments of Russell's work conclude that his was a fairly anodyne take on major historical events (an objective chronicler and nothing more), Miller sees something altogether different.
He convincingly argues that Russell's images, through his openness to the sublime and picaresque, capture the "tragedy of Progress" on the cusp of the Western frontier. Noting that Russell was, as with Thoreau and the Timbuctoo settlers, moved by the ineffability of nature, as well being an artist "on the very cutting edge of artistic photographic aesthetics," Miller portrays him as a fierce critic of technologies—namely the railroad and mines—we've long assumed he passively endorsed. "A raw current of resistance," Miller says about Russell's work, aims to "unseat the simplistic notion that all land is destined solely for human use." In the end, Russell's photos "point to the role that technology and engineering and discipline played in the destruction of both human bodies and the land."
The reverse of that familiar equation is what most intrigues Miller: a collective ecological endeavor based on values that enhance human bodies and the land—those inextricably linked phenomena. It is thus apt that the book's last essay centers on another intentional community—the Kaweah Cooperative Colony—that settled Tulare County, California, in 1886 amid the region's sacred sequoias. The Kaweah's radicalism stemmed from their proposal for "an economic, social, and environmental system that could sustain human as well as nonhuman life." Again, not leaving the land alone, but responsibly inhabiting it.
The Kaweah were not only Marxists, they were Marxists who logged—not the hulking sequoias but the pine, spruce, and fir surrounding them. In so doing, these savvy utopians reiterate Miller's foundational claim that environmentalism is not about leaving the land alone and preserving it but rather "a method of interconnection" among humans and non-human residents living in it. Politically powerful railroad companies who wanted the land eventually foiled this "landscape of socialist cooperation," but before it died, it embodied an "ultraradical sustainability" that foreshadowed "the green tint of social ecology." Those sequoia groves "ultimately allowed the possibility for dreaming," writes Miller, a reverie that the Kaweah almost turned into reality. It's inspiring how much Miller convinces us to invest in that near miss.