Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Environmental Leader and Innovator | Page 4

Better than Yosemite?
Mount Auburn from the Perspective of Environmental History
By Aaron Sachs
M
ost often we think of cemeteries as important
cultural institutions where we preserve memories
of our loved ones, where we show our com-
mitment not to forget. Places like Mount Auburn capture
a sense of dedication and seriousness, suggesting that there
are still some checks against American superficiality.
But Mount Auburn is also deeply significant as an
environmental institution. Of course, for certain kinds of
people—horticulturists, landscape architects, and birders,
for instance— Mount Auburn has always had an obvious
appeal. But most Americans, broadly speaking, are actually
not Landscape enthusiasts; what we tend to like is Wilderness.
When we enter the environmental mode, we think of
mountains, cliffs, waterfalls, and Sierra Club calendars. Our
visual imagination probably takes us out West, to the Grand
Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. We think of America’s
Best Idea, as Ken Burns called it in his recent PBS docu-
mentary about our national parks. If you care about the
environment, you care about preserving its wildest aspects—
and you don’t necessarily spend much time thinking about
the natural world as it exists in cities, or as it has been
shaped by designers.
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For 150 years, since Congress granted Yosemite Valley
to California as a new kind of park, “for public use, resort,
and recreation,” the national parks have been our iconic
environments, the kinds of places we are meant to value—
and consequently they have had a huge impact on the way
we conceive of environmental politics. They are without
question stunningly beautiful places, but they are also places
of denial—places far removed from our daily lives and
patterns of consumption and pollution. They are places we
visit, temporarily, on vacation, places outside history and
even culture, timeless places that supposedly have never
changed and should never change. In a way, they tell us that
everything will be okay—that we can keep living the way
we’ve been living. Just make sure to guard the gems.
But environmental thought and environmental politics
were very different three decades before the Civil War, when
Mount Auburn was founded. This older landscape tradition
may have been eclipsed in our culture by the wilderness
tradition, but I think it represents values that could be ex-
tremely useful to us today in rethinking our environmental
problems. Antebellum landscapes emphasized not seperateness
and sublime uplift, breathtaking beauty and timelessness—
but rather values like commonality; limitation; adaptation;
integration; and our inevitable anchoring in history, in