‘Welcome to the Atomic Park’: American Nuclear Landscapes and the ‘Unnaturally Natural’

Landscapes is the second in our new series of environmental history readers, suitable for students and researchers. Comprising essays selected from our journals, Environment and History and Environmental Values, each inexpensive paperback volume addresses an important theme in environmental history, combining underlying theory and specific case-studies. Landscapes explores the conceptualisation of environments as landscape, philosophically and historically. Excursions in landscape aesthetics contextualise case studies of landscapes perceived, constructed and responded to, from the plantations of South Africa to the Australian outback, the medieval Ardennes to nuclear-age America. Literary and artistic versions of landscape are studied alongside those driven by policy and pragmatism, probing the intersections of the transcendent and the ideological.