The coda demonstrates the ongoing significance of the landscape of genius for contemporary environmentalism by interpreting how Thoreau’s association with Walden Pond has been invoked in response to climate change. It uses extensive research into the psychology, sociology, and politics of climate change in order to assess what effects those invocations are likely to have and to suggest how scholars and activists can engage with Thoreau most impactfully in relation to the issue. More broadly, the coda also theorizes a new relational approach to the environmental humanities, which draws on recent developments in posthumanism, actor–network theory, systems theory, Anthropocene scholarship, and other environmental theory to explore how systems of culture intersect with and impact various other systems: social, political, economic, ecological, geochemical, etc. This method has many similarities to Traditional Ecological Knowledge. It conceptualizes knowledge as fundamentally relational and performative and redefines the humanities as a form of self-reflexive ethical agency, through which we can comprehend and (re)balance our various relations.

The conclusion sums up the historical legacy and implications of the landscape of genius. It begins with the landscape photographer and environmental activist Ansel Adams, who, like John Muir, became strongly associated with Yosemite and with the National Parks in general. Adams, through his photography and environmental advocacy, helped to translate the landscape of genius into the twentieth century, associating nature as wilderness with high culture and the fine arts. Those associations promoted both American nationalism and a specifically White, elite middle-class version of environmentalism. The conclusion then explores the wider implications of this “environmentalism of genius” for the environmental movement and popular conception of nature today. It argues for the dissociation of nature from genius as part of a larger reimagination of “nature,” in order to diversify the environmental movement and promote more socially just and ecologically effective approaches to environmental issues.

The American artist N. C. Wyeth’s 1942 painting (see frontispiece), Walden Pond Revisited, presents Henry David Thoreau in what this book calls his landscape of genius. Thoreau faces us directly in the center of the composition with his gaze slightly averted, creating an intense, one-to-one relationship with the viewer, analogous to the relationship between author and solitary reader. Thoreau’s central presence defines the landscape behind him, including the various emblems of his authorship – his boat, his beanfield, and above all his pondside house. Bands of light radiate through the landscape, signifying its spiritual energies and associating Thoreau with his house and pond, the surrounding nature, and the heavens. The entire Walden landscape is defined by the painting in these ways as a shrine around Thoreau’s authorial genius.

This chapter demonstrates how John Muir’s association with Yosemite defined its significance as a National Park and played a key role in the formation of modern environmentalism. Muir was deeply influenced by Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Burns and by the model of the landscape of genius in general. Muir represented nature in Yosemite as a form of high culture, analogous to the fine arts, in ways that defined the National Park as an institution and have exerted massive influence on modern discourses of nature. That high-cultural version of nature then shaped the American environmental movement, especially through the long political struggle from 1907–13 over the proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a reservoir for the city of San Francisco. In that struggle, Muir and his allies embraced many of the same forms of environmental rhetoric of the landscape of genius initiated by earlier attempts to preserve Wordsworth’s Lake District: a transatlantic connection that launched the American environmental movement and evolved into a hegemonic form of twentieth-century environmentalism.

This chapter explores the significance of class and gender for the landscape of genius. While laboring-class and women authors were often celebrated for their genius, that genius was almost always defined and delimited by their specific social identities rather than becoming associated with nature or the nation in general. As a result, landscapes of genius rarely formed around such authors. The English laboring-class poet, John Clare, thus failed to generate a literary landscape despite his strong identification with nature and local place. Robert Burns’s use of Scots dialect and wider identification with Scottish nature and identity, by contrast, established him as a central figure for Scottish nationalism and produced the “Land of Burns” as an early prototype of the landscape of genius. The chapter concludes by exploring the intersection of class and gender. It engages with the English laboring-class women poet, Ann Yearsley, whose proud self-assertion of independent genius precluded her identification with nature; and the genteel American women writer, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who presented herself in Rural Hours (1850) in a social and domestic relation to nature that deliberately dissociated her from any claims to genius or a landscape of genius.

This chapter explores the overall significance of genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it became associated with authorship, the fine arts, and nature in ways that helped produce a new form of cultural nationalism. The Romantic idea of genius supported new versions of both autonomous individualism and national identity, as readers identified through the genius of representative “great men” with the nation. Genius in this way simultaneously individuated and connected, playing a key role in the formation of national high cultures and canons as well as the overall creation of a liberal democratic social order. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, genius also became increasingly associated with wild and sublime nature, naturalizing these newly emerging forms of social identity and laying the groundwork for the landscape of genius.

This chapter explores the significance of race for the landscape of genius in relation to the overall racial construction of nature in American society. It focuses on Frederick Douglass’s attempt to establish his own landscape of genius at his estate at Cedar Hill in Ancostia, overlooking Washington DC. Douglass was famous for his genius as an orator and as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. This chapter also demonstrates his deep immersion in nineteenth-century discourses of literary landscape and nature. By seeking to naturalize his genius in the Cedar Hill landscape, Douglass affirmed not only his full cultural citizenship in the nation but also, as a representative figure, the cultural rights and status of all African Americans. Cedar Hill was memorialized after Douglass’s death and eventually became a National Historic Site, but its racial associations disqualified it as “nature” in the dominant White environmental imagination, obscuring this important aspect of Douglass’s identity.

This chapter defines the landscape of genius: literary landscapes in which the genius of the author became associated specifically with nature. It focuses on William Wordsworth’s association with the English Lake District and Henry David Thoreau’s association with Walden Pond as paradigmatic landscapes of genius in the British and American environmental traditions, respectively. Wordsworth’s connection with Lake District nature was widely celebrated in nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States and strongly influenced Thoreau’s identification with Walden. The chapter traces the historical development of those two landscapes of genius and the wider impact of their authorial associations. It explores how the Lake District and Walden Pond emerged as iconic sites for the development of an environmental movement, which sought to preserve such landscapes and their high-cultural associations from modern economic and technological development, as well as from the incursions of the urban working class and popular culture.