Vanishing America contains entertaining as well as astute essays that revolve around author James Conaway's impressions of exceptional places he considers physical and spiritual barometers of the country's health. He believes the culture along with the country is being sacrificed to material concerns.
Vanishing America Overview
Vanishing America is a mixture of travelogue and personal narrative that depicts Conaway's journey between Washington, D.C. and Big Sur, California as he tries to understand what has become of the places, people, and traditions that were once so precious but now have been irreparably changed. It uses the voices of cowboys, real estate agents, activists, and many other to raise vital questions about the merits of sprawling development and the ever increasing use of resources in the name of "progress."
Vanishing America bemoans that America used to be a country where people wrested a living from small farms, pastured cattle on the open range, hunted whales and buffalo, made useful things in workshops and factories, and built cities that were unique in their local culture and politics. Conaway believes that America is becoming a coast-to-coast strip mall full of people consuming the same products, doing the same jobs that involve manipulation of abstract symbols.
Vanishing American Essays
The subjects covered include the Boise River in Idaho which is overused and polluted, Napa Valley in California that has been disfigured by gigantic wineries and McMansions, and national parks which are effected by too many tourists, toilets, buses, concessionaires and paved highways.
Conaway's concerns include Western communal lands that should be preserved by the Bureau of Land Management, including New Mexico's Bisti Badlands and Wyoming's Big Piney, that are being used for energy exploration and extraction grazing and all-terrain vehicles are being effected. The grounds of Washington, D.C.s National Cathedral have been despoiled by development needs with new buildings, accommodations for tour buses and a huge gymnasium. Instead of a place that was once dedicated to saving souls, it has been turned into an engine of tourism, development,and controversy.
He takes the reader from the high plateaus of the Arizona Strip to the streets of New Orleans, from Big Sur to the Dry Tortugas, from the wilderness of the West to the yacht clubs of Nantucket. Conaway interviewed people struggling to preserve ways of life that, while superfluous and quixotic in purely economic terms, define them as human beings. He talked to people fighting to preserve environments, both natural and cultural, that lend meaning to their lives.
Vanishing America Conclusions
Conaway detects something new in the rash of sameness and ugliness spreading across America. He bemoans that "the totalilty of the natural and built environments could be changed in a lifetime." He concedes the preservation and conservation movements are no match for the logic of capitalism. He thinks that there will only be small islands where nature is preserved and the impulse toward the gaudy and wasteful is restrained, that they will be restricted to the small groups that can afford them. Meanwhile, the rest of Americans will only see "the best reflections of what the country once stood for lie around us, abused, exploited, or ignored."
About the author
James Conaway is a prolific book author and magazine journalist. He has also written The Far Side of Eden: New Money, Old Land, and the Battle for Napa Valley.
Conaway, James. Vanishing America: In Pursuit of Our Elusive Landscapes. Berkeley,CA: Counterpoint Press, 2007.
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