Gregg Mitman

William Coleman Professor of History of Science Gregg Mitman

Although science may claim to be "objective," scientists cannot avoid the influence of their own values on their research. In The State of Nature, Gregg Mitman examines the relationship between issues in early twentieth-century American society and the sciences of evolution and ecology to reveal how explicit social and political concerns influenced the scientific agenda of biologists at the University of Chicago and throughout the United States during the first half of this century. Reacting against the view of nature "red in tooth and claw," ecologists and behavioral biologists such as Warder Clyde Allee, Alfred Emerson, and their colleagues developed research programs they hoped would validate and promote an image of human society as essentially cooperative rather than competitive. Mitman argues that Allee's religious training and pacifist convictions shaped his pioneering studies of animal communities in a way that could be generalized to denounce the view that war is in our genes.

Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950

The State of Nature

Americans have had a long-standing love affair with the wilderness. As cities grew and frontiers disappeared, film emerged to feed an insatiable curiosity about wildlife. The camera promised to bring us into contact with the animal world, undetected and unarmed. Yet the camera's penetration of this world has inevitably brought human artifice and technology into the picture as well. In the first major analysis of American nature films in the twentieth century, Gregg Mitman shows how our cultural values, scientific needs, and new technologies produced the images that have shaped our contemporary view of wildlife. Like the museum and the zoo, the nature film sought to recreate the experience of unspoiled nature while appealing to a popular audience, through a blend of scientific research and commercial promotion, education and entertainment, authenticity and artifice. Travelogue-expedition films, like Teddy Roosevelt's African safari, catered to upper- and middle-class patrons who were intrigued by the exotic and entertained by the thrill of big-game hunting and collecting. The proliferation of nature movies and television shows in the 1950s, such as Disney's True-Life Adventures and Marlin Perkins's Wild Kingdom, made nature familiar and accessible to America's baby-boom generation, fostering the environmental activism of the latter part of the twentieth century. Reel Nature reveals the shifting conventions of nature films and their enormous impact on our perceptions of, and politics about, the environment. Whether crafted to elicit thrills or to educate audiences about the real-life drama of threatened wildlife, nature films then and now reveal much about the yearnings of Americans to be both close to nature and yet distinctly apart.

William Coleman Professor of History of Science Gregg Mitman

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