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On Zions Mount – Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape

California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It s the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities. They imported the blue-green eucalypts whose tangy fragrance was thought to cure malaria. They built the lucrative "Orange Empire" on the sweet juice and thick skin of the Washington navel, an industrial fruit. They lined their streets with graceful palms to announce that they were not in the Midwest anymore. To the north the majestic coastal redwoods inspired awe and invited exploitation. A resource in the state, the durable heartwood of these timeless giants became infrastructure, transformed by the saw teeth of American enterprise. By 1900 timber firms owned the entire redwood forest; by 1950 they had clear-cut almost all of the old-growth trees.

In time California s new landscape proved to be no paradise: the eucalypts in the Berkeley hills exploded in fire; the orange groves near Riverside froze on cold nights; Los Angeles s palms harbored rats and dropped heavy fronds on the streets below. Disease, infestation, and development all spelled decline for these nonnative evergreens. In the north, however, a new forest of second-growth redwood took root, nurtured by protective laws and sustainable harvesting. Today there are more California redwoods than there were a century ago.

Rich in character and story, Trees in Paradise is a dazzling narrative that offers an insightful, new perspective on the history of the Golden State and the American West."

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no "Indian" legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it--once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. "On Zion's Mount" tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself "native" in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environment--how they create homelands.

Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American sense--an endemic spiritual geography. They called it "Zion." Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as "Lamanites," or spiritual kin. "On Zion's Mount" shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians--and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Timpanogos with "Indian" meaning.

This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed "Indian" place names and recited pseudo-Indian legends about those places--cultural acts that still affect the way we think about American Indians and American landscapes.

The epic story of the planet’s oldest trees and the making of the modern world

Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reveals in Elderflora , our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travelers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the industrial revolution.

Taking us from Lebanon to New Zealand to California, Farmer surveys the complex history of the world’s oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. In a changing climate, a long future is still possible, Farmer shows, but only if we give care to young things that might grow old.