Emerson to Earth-

Contemplating the lofty passages of Emerson while considering the environment- Brian Keeler

Above- A landscape of Spring- by the author. Spring and renewal are part of this essay. This oil painting depicts a vineyard near Hammondsport, NY

Relation to the universe- A context with cultural independence

A confluence of occurrences around Earth Day 2026 seemed to all align with aspects of landscape, spirituality, the 250th anniversary of the USA, the moon mission, and the environment- as they all dovetailed to make an odd mix with compelling and competing messages. The environmental aspect is the continued evidence of ecosystem collapse that is truly astounding and insistent with news of breakdowns and imminent disasters filling the news daily. More on that later

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The Artemis II astronauts circling the moon with images coming back again (after a decades long hiatus) of the Earth were evocative of the earlier impact- rendering us infinitesimal in the cosmos. After rounding the dark side of the moon the recent images came back and recalled those of the Apollo mission in 1969, (and subsequent missions) and all the attendant optimism and the macro view it offered to us in the midst of still more global political dysfunction.   This time the refrain of the Pink Floyd song, Dark Side of the Moon, of the same era seemed prescient and a fitting soundtrack to our times.

The initial spark for this contemplation of the land as a landscape painter with an interest in the environment came from the work of the American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882. The appeal of equating nature and landscape in particular with deity brings a spritual aspect to art. In fact, it suggests a divination or at least a path toward having landscapes that serve as an allegory for a spiritual and transcendent vision. What's not to like with Emerson's mission to forge a truly American vision for artists of the 19th century and for our own times?  Well, there is an underbelly of discord to Emerson's take on America that will strike most of us as extremely wrong headed.

A book given to me recently, purchased at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA, supplied fertile ground for this contemplation with an engaging title of, Emerson's Nature and the Artist;Idea as Landscape, Landscape as Idea by Tyler Green. The entree Green offers us readers and artists (through Emerson) is a way to regard the landscape with a wider vision. Emerson viewed the landscape as a spirtual space and even a poetic realm between urbanity and wilderness.

Here is the rub. It has to do with ironies and even racism- an Anglo-centric vision of America. Odd, as it is, Emerson's mission to encourage our budding nation and its artists to throw off the shackles of European and ancient art began when he was in Italy.  Apparently Florence of the 1830's was teaming with American artists seeking the muse from the Renaissance and the ancient Romans and Greeks. In fact, Emerson's primary encounter on the trip to Italy in 1833 was with the American sculptor Horatio Greenough.  Greenough was working on a huge marble statue of George Washington portrayed as a classical orator, rendered as if in the Roman Forum making a pronouncement with hand raised and bare-chested and cloak on arm and over his lower half.  The work could inspire reverence with the classical allusion or perhaps a cringe at the misplaced allegiance.  Still, we are well advised to recall just how deeply steeped in the classics our nation builders were.

Above- a recent landscape by the author of the Susquehanna River near Wyalusing, PA. The Emersonian ideas of the landscape being an analogy to ideas rather than merely scenery is at play here. This 36" x 40" oil is titled, "Spring Equinox Evening- Susquehanna."

Empathy to the Land

Emerson's book, Nature, published anonymously when he was thirty-three in 1836 became the most influential and widely read text of the era. It was surpassed later in the century by Uncle Tom's Cabin. It formed a national credo and inspiration to many. It is summed up thusly by Tyler Green. "Why should not we have an original relation to the universe?" He explains that our age is retrospective. "It builds the sepulchres of the fathers."

There's another aspect of Emerson's agenda that rubs against our grain today; it coincides with current policies coming out of DC.  The White House penchant is to meddle in American museums, like the Smithsonian museums, by suggesting the art needs to have an American agenda.  Not only that, the purge indicated is to whitewash our history of anything suggesting a dark side- like slavery, for instance.  So it is indeed an odd coupling of Emerson's agenda with that coming out of the Oval Office, with their skewed and distorted mission for Art.  Then again, that megalomaniac in DC wants to emulate Paris and the Roman Forum with an Arch even grander than those imperial edifices to military glory, but without the glory. All this adulation of classics is while VP J.D.Vance and crew have disdain and open contempt in their anti-woke cultural war for all things European. The irony and disconnect is remarkable.

Emerson wrote at the beginning of his book, Nature:

"There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws of worship."

An intersting interpretation of landscape by Emerson is that it needs to contain the imprint of man. The cultivated land, with fields, farms and roads seems to be the crux of his sensibility. The painting that first illustrates this concept is perhaps the Thomas Coles landacape of 1836 depicting the Connecticut River- known as "View from Mount Holyoke."

Here's a passage from Green's book:

First and foremost, there is Emerson's keystone definition of landscape. Remember that Emerson offered landscape- former wilderness "improved" into farms, fields, woodlots by Anglo-Amercans - as the frame with which Americans might contemplate nature.

Above- Thomas Cole's 1836 painting of the Connecticut River is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Barely visible in this painting is a small self portrait of Emerson in the lower right, near the flag extending up into the river. There is a small study at the Met of this subject next to the larger one.

My issue with Emerson's mission is that it seems overly simplistic and that it advocates a divorce of sorts from valuable cultural heritages. Yes, art that is derivative and beholden to the past could be stifling and inauthentic.  And we appreciate art that is truly of our time or reflective of our sense of place and representative of our context.

Just how indebted so many of the American Artists of the early and mid-19th Century were to Emerson is fascinating.  And as with the title of Tyler Green's book "Idea as Landscape, Landscape as Idea" it is truly revealing to understand how what seems to be a straight forward landscape, say by Thomas Cole or Albert Bierstadt, can serve as allegory for our burgeoning republican form of government. Or a landscape with a peaked mountain in the distance resembling a triangle would suggest the stability and endurance of a pyramid in Egypt. There is a nocturne painting by Frederick Church of a sky with the stars and horizontal stripes of red clouds simulating Old Glory as an overt image of a landscape painting suggesting a concept beyond merely pictorial.

Emerson's insistence that America build a new vision based on secularism but with an element of the nation's republicanism can smack of a propagandistic tone. Note that he was the son of a preacher and he himself gained notoriety for resigning from a plum pulpit at Boston's Second Church. So it shouldn't surprise us that his aesthetic comes off as preachy.   The irony (and the discord) comes in through his belief that this cultural agenda he was advocating did not include American Indians or any other ethnicity.   He saw this cultural and spiritual mission restricted to only English descendants in America. On the one hand he's pushing for a native vision but only through a narrow part of European and British blood here in the New World.

To underscore this disconnect between Emerson's mission and his inspirations was the art and books in his home.  He had a print based on Raphael's School of Athens which is a fresco in the Vatican.  This painting is the epitome of the classics.  And his library contained a book of the life of Michelangelo.  So for all his professed nativism he had a well informed respect for the arts of Europe gleaned from travel and study.  The parallels to the conservative Roman statesman Cato the Elder are interesting, as this ancient Roman railed against all the influx of Greek art and thinking into Rome. And like Emerson, he too had a deep knowledge of all things foreign.

Still many have found great worth and wisdom in Emerson's transcendent and pantheistic approaches to life and to art.  Emerson suggested that art is "nature passed through the alembic of man." This suggests that man is the distiller of nature.  We get the poetic and even alchemical transformation that is possible. For us mere mortals we are often just attempting an honest work of aesthetic success.  The vision of a higher purpose and goal is still appealing. We look at these accomplished works of the Hudson River School artists now with a new understanding as they incorporated Emerson's ideas. 

So these aspects of an American vision and equating earthly light and landscape with a transcendent mission provides for wonderful considerations.  And with the earth and proto-environment efforts of Thomas Cole and Emerson we are confronted with our environmental collapse as mentioned earlier.

The news is indeed bleak and profoundly disconcerting.  The news is replete with scientific reports of disasters from many species on the brink of extinction due mostly to manmade interferences and catastrophic effects of over-industrialization fostered by greed.   Just today on the front page of our daily newspaper the Ithaca Journal there was a report of migrating fishes near the brink of extermonation worldwide, giant catfish in the Mekong River being eliminated by dams and over- fishing.

And what to make of the 250th annivesary of our nation dovetailing with these other elements of art, nature and politics? Well, this too is onerous. In a word, our national principles and rule of law have been subverted and profaned in the most extreme vile ways by our current president. Tyrants and monarchy were dispelled in 1776 to foster our nation only to have a scofflaw autocrat subvert our nobel experiments in self-rule in the 21st century.

What would Emerson think?  What would John Muir do in the face of the dystopian world?

In the April 23 issue of the New York Review of Books there was a feature article by Caroline Fraser titled The Throwaway Planet where she reviews three books on the subject.  The facts are grim and astounding.  The cruise ship industry comes off as just one of the culprits.  Those humongous floating luxury liners have a finite existence and then they need to be scrapped and dismantled;  China used to do it but stopped as they realized the environmental effect were just too bad.  The recyling of used electronics is grim and horrible for those working in such toxic hell holes. 

Data centers are also in the news locally and nationally - and not without environmental impact as part of the stories.  This insidious foisting of even more technology is part of the problem. It engenders even more dependence on fossil fuels and data centers are even encouraging a resurgence in nuclear energy.   We defeated an LNG plant near my hometown in Pennsylvania only to have the location thereafter considered for a data center. It is heartening, however, to see locals in Bradford County, PA rise up against this influx as they are here in Tompkins County, NY. 

Then there is the trashing and gutting of the Environmental Protetiion Agency, coincidentally founded in 1970- the same year as the first Earth Day. In the April 30. 2026 issue of the New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert has an article about the disastrous fate of the EPA under the Trump adminsitration. Here's a quote.

In an era of legislative gridlock, a robust E.P.A., it could be argued, is more essential than ever. But, as becomes more evident just about every day, the government we need is not necessarily the one we get. Lee Zeldin, the former Long Island congressman who has headed the E.P.A. since the start of the second Trump Administration, has devoted his energy to gutting the agency he runs. With naked partisanship, he has cut its staff by a quarter, eliminated its scientific- research division, and rolled back a slew of regulations aimed at protecting the public from dangerous chemicals and heavy metals. Under his leadership, the E.P.A. has not just abandoned efforts to curb climate change—it has tried to insure that no future agency head will be able to address the problem.

Above- an allegorical work by the author addresses the global choices to be made. This oil from circa 1990 is titled, "One Earth to Live on, Many Worlds to Choose From."

Where does this leave us on Earth Day 2026?  It is a mixed bag at best.  Emerson's transcendence is still with us and offers a vision of the spiritual in art and life.  And we see effective infrastructures somewhat meeting our needs.  I am impressed out how our local recyling center takes care of our detritus.  Still, the overwhelming of the Earth's capacity is foreboding. 

Fortunately for artists, we can still invoke and contemplate the beauty of Emerson's transdendent and hopeful vision. In fact, one of the takeaways of Green's book is Emerson's hope for renewal. For Emerson, landscape became a metaphor for renewal, especially after the American Civil War. Today I painted outdoors in downtown Ithaca with the spring light and burgeoning green of new buds and flowers. There is hope of renewal in the silent spring of nature, the evanescence of light, the beauty of stately Victorian architecture and in the community of neigborhoods.

Above- The author painting a plein air oil study of a view along Six Mile Creek in Ithaca, NY.

To view videos of this oil being created on location, go to this link https://youtu.be/fbynIKVk7ZM?si=tWGkkbPsB52hzRdx

Or this link showing the painting in the early stage.

https://youtu.be/jnKm4Rh7LXY?si=g_eOxgQAqhiFrCYV