Overview
"I had never planned to become a Thoreau of the mall," says Jennifer Price. Yet that is exactly what she has done in this brilliant debut book. American nature writing is a robust genre embraced by everyone from Thoreau to John McPhee and Michael Pollan. Drawing on this august tradition, Jennifer Price breaks out of the mold and does something wholly original with Flight Maps.
Rather than lighting out for the wild places, Price examines the ways in which we have brought nature home to our retail outlets, our front yards, our restaurants, our television sets. What place does nature occupy in our hearts and minds? Price sifts through landscapes and artifacts as diverse as eighteenth-century cookbooks, mall-architecture manuals, dinner menus, lawn ornaments, the Mall of America, and John Waters movies.
Flight Maps charts the ways in which Americans have historically made-and missed-connections with nature. The book addresses today's generation of affluent baby boomers, with their urban and suburban civilization and its discontents. Price ruminates on everything from the extreme popularity of The Nature Company and television shows like Northern Exposure to the plastic pink flamingo, simultaneously the totem of artifice and kitsch and a potent symbol of our powerful and problematic vision of nature.
By turns witty and whimsical, Flight Maps is a sophisticated meditative archaeology of Americans' desire to make nature meaningful in their lives.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Our ReviewFlight Maps
For this unusual foray into nature writing, Jennifer Price doesn't go off into the mountains. She goes where the vast majority of American have their most consistent experiences of Nature -- in their front yards, in the malls, and in front of their television screens. Price is interested in finding out what Nature with a capital "N" means to Americans, and those are the places that reflect our hopes and desires surrounding Nature while also illuminating our philosophical and economic relationships with Nature. We have become attached to the notion of Nature as a realm Out There, apart from our hectic modern lives. Our social systems are in rapid flux, with only tenuous moorings. Nature seems to offer a timeless anchor. It is the ultimate reality to which we can appeal. As Price makes clear throughout the book, Nature is not actually Out There, but all around us and in everything we create -- no matter how "artificial," all objects must derive in some fashion from natural resources.
To get to the source of current attitudes, Price begins at an earlier era in American history, right at the transition point when the mythos of Nature was first being formulated. She takes as her case study the extinction of the passenger pigeon, but instead of searching for the causes of this extinction, she tries to understand how the people of that time experienced their relationship to the pigeons. Pioneers saw the huge flocks, numbering in the hundreds, but as the birds' numbers dwindled, their main consumers -- diners at Delmonico's, one of the first elegant New York restaurants, which featured wild game regularly; and trap shooters who imported the wild birds for tournaments -- never saw passenger pigeons in their native habitat. This disconnect increased as people began using wild nature imported from areas farther and farther away. A fashion for whole birds and bird parts on women's hats caused a crisis that resulted in the first Audubon societies, as people became aware that their actions were causing perhaps irreparable damage to wild nature. A developed view of wild nature as a separate and elevated realm (for example, appeals to the motherhood of egrets being violated when the birds were shot on their nests) set the tone for subsequent attitudes.
The elevation of Nature continued apace in contrast to the artificial creations of humanity. The pink flamingo plastic lawn ornament with its "unnatural" eye-popping colors stands in here for a whole class of objects that became singled out. But there is "nature" in a pink flamingo -- namely the materials that went into it. It became a symbol of unreal, inauthentic mass culture, as opposed to the real, authentic Nature Out There. The desire to surround oneself with the authenticity of Nature while living in an industrialized, consumer society led to stores like the Nature Company, where people could commune with Nature in a mall and take a little home with them. Nature as timeless authority was coopted to hawk an incredible variety of products -- most notably cars -- and to serve as an icon on television shows. Overall, Flight Maps has the effect of bringing to the fore more or less subconscious assumptions about Nature to which we have all been exposed. Since Price's intention is to illuminate attitudes, she does not offer a program for reintegrating nature, both the wild and transformed, into our awareness, but I could not help but be reminded of The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which details exactly how much nature is going into the things that we buy, whether or not we think of them as Nature.
--Laura Wood, Science & Nature Editor
Adam Begley
Making us ponder plastic flamingos is probably the best thing Ms. Price does for us in Flight Maps, which is admirably jargon-free even though the author has a Ph.D in history from Yale University. Ms. Price avoids the lumpy language of the lecture hall, but she retains the egghead's simultaneous reverence for and suspicion of meaning: 'To make nature exceptionally meaningful—and to use our everyday encounters to navigate the world and define who we are—is simply to be human.' After a dozen encounters with variations on that same sentence, you know for sure that repeating an idea is not the same as refining it.— New York Observer
American Way
As awkwardly rooted in the nation's social consciousness as it is in a suburban front yard, the plastic pink flamingo represents the American ability to make nature seem, well, unnatural. These whimsically intellectual essays investigate modern America's complex relationship with nature, from the extinction of the passenger pigeon to the profusion of those pink flamingos.Andrew O'Hehir
An intriguingly quirky blend of academic discourse and personal, common-sense reasoning, Flight Maps has moments of brilliance and an agreeable humility that is lacking from most writing about culture and nature. But the manuscript began life as Jennifer Price's Ph.D. dissertation in history at Yale, and its roots are showing. On the one hand, Price professes to follow a single question through the five disparate essays that make up the volume: "What does nature mean to me?" On the other, she feels duty-bound to thread all her excellent scholarship and all her wry observation of contemporary American life into one central thesis. Like many other contemporary scholars of environmentalism, Price argues that the American notion of nature as a pure and separate Last Best Place only serves to conceal the complex web of connections that binds together the realms we call wilderness and civilization.
Flight Maps begins with historical studies of the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the campaign against the use of birds and their plumage on women's hats, two turn-of-the-century events that altered American thinking about nature permanently and gave birth to the conservation movement. Price argues convincingly that the pigeon's demise resulted not from individual cruelty or rapacity but from the demands of an exploding consumption-based economy, and that the bird-hat crusade was really an intragender debate over the social role of women. But the details of her research are of limited interest to non-historians, and she has a distressing tendency to sweep away vast and complicated areas of discussion with simplistic, open-ended formulations: "What makes women women and men men?…Think of Teddy Roosevelt's 'strenuous life,' Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and men's hunting clubs…And think of ecofeminism, Bly's Iron John, the Marlboro Man and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman -- all very popular and powerful stories about women, men and nature."
Not even Price's stylistic tics, which sometimes create the impression that she's not sure whether her readers are graduate students or sixth-graders, can ruin her book's marvelous centerpiece, "A Brief Natural History of the Plastic Pink Flamingo." Among other things, this is a treatise on the evolution of taste since the 18th century and on the connection between the aristocratic English garden, with its pretentious evocation of nature, and the tiny front lawns of trailer parks, littered with cement gnomes and fluorescent simulacra of wildlife. It's also a graceful exploration of the multiple associations and meanings that have attached themselves to the pink flamingo since it first appeared in the 1957 Sears, Roebuck catalog at $2.76 a pair. Initially viewed by bourgeois society as the epitome of mass-culture kitsch, the ersatz bird emerged as a symbol of camp-bohemian rebellion a mere 15 years later in John Waters' legendary film Pink Flamingos. That meaning was just as rapidly subverted in turn, and the flamingo morphed into a stylistic signifier of '80s and '90s yuppie culture, "like blue jeans in boardrooms and Jeeps in Upper West Side garages," as Price writes.
She concludes with an overly obvious critique of the rise of the Nature Company and similar mall-based "nature stores" and a breezily enjoyable, refreshingly honest discussion of the uses of natural imagery in TV dramas, commercials and nature documentaries. Neither of these pieces, however, is up to the standard of the flamingo essay, and like Flight Maps as a whole, both are plagued by Price's irritating pattern of introducing issues with strings of rhetorical questions -- "Why watch TV to look for the meanings of nature?" "Can a Volvo, even an All-Wheel-Drive, save my soul?" (At one point in the flamingo chapter she asks five questions in a row.) With her breadth of scholarship and her open-minded curiosity about the world, Jennifer Price is well positioned to write an outstanding book about Americans and nature. But for all its undeniable appeal, this messy, scattershot collection isn't it.
— Salon
Flaunt
"When Women Were Women, Men Were Men, and Birds Were Hats"; "A Brief Natural History of the Plastic Pink Flamingo"; "Looking for Nature at the Mall"--The chapter headings in Jennifer Price's priceless meditation on our problematic relationship with Mother Nature...are so delectable you'll be tempted to get ahead of yourself just to see what's around the corner....Flight Maps is a book to read slowly and savor.LA Times Book Review
Whatever level of sophistication you favor, 'Flight Maps' will provoke and excite you.. . .Humor, self-scrutiny and a passion for ideas light up [its] pages. [Price's] intellectual democracy has its own charm, and her processes are not only appealing but infectious. Humor, self-scrutiny, and passion for ideas light up her pages. 'Flight Maps' more often charts our cultural flight from nature, in the service of historical or economic imperatives, than it does imaginative engagement with the actual migratory flocks and noisy rookeries of wild America. But it finally lives up to the promise of its subtitle, making us mental travelers, even if the safari ends before a wall of mirrors.Minneapolis Star Tribune
Fans of traditional nature writing beware: Jennifer Price's enlightening, entertaining and sometimes irritating book may force you to rethink your fundamental beliefs about nature, your role in its 'commodification' and your easy assumption of environmental virtue.NY Times Book Review
Witty and whimsical, Flight Maps is a sophisticated meditative archaeology of Americans' desire to make nature meaningful in their lives.Utne Reader
How can you not like a nature book with a chapter on plastic pink flamingos? And an essay on the metaphors in Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks? This well-researched and -- dare I say? -- funny book is a delight for scholars, nature lovers, and neophytes alike.Library Journal
Essayist Price inspects the ways in which Americans have attempted to bring nature home. To gain a perspective on the 20th century's urban consumer mentality, Price delves into the sagas of passenger pigeon extinction and 19th-century women's millinery fashion and its usage of birds and feathers. Both detail people's economic connections to nature. Price's search for real meanings in the natural world continues with a brief history of the plastic pink flamingo, a lawn ornament despised and revered since its creation in 1957; a "field guide" to nature stores in America's malls; and a look at the greening of television in the 1990s. It seems that affluent Americans seek to buy and consume nature as opposed to experiencing it. But, Price asks, what is "real" nature anyway? An original and clever musing on Americans' attitudes toward nature; recommended for larger public and academic libraries.--Patricia Ann Owens, Wabash Valley Coll., Mt. Carmel, IL Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Booknews
The author analyzes the American cultural relationship with nature, largely mediated through consumerism. The extinction of the passenger pigeon, the stuffing of birds to adorn women's hats, and the rise and fall of the pink plastic flamingo are seen as milestones in an evolving ambivalence toward nature as aesthetic wonder and as resource to be pillaged. Price has degrees from Princeton and Yale (PhD. history). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Karal Ann Marling
Price's willingness to engage with natural phenomena anywhere she finds them is a refreshing change. Instead of excoriating us for despoiling the earth with all that cruising and shopping, she helps us see the enduring connections between the out there and ourselves, in here.— The New York Times Book Review