Full citation: Price, Jennifer. “A Brief Natural History of the Plastic Pink Flamingo.” Chap. 3 in Flight Maps: Adventures With Nature In Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 2000. (Adaptation for The American Scholar) http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/6448 Rights: © Jennifer Price. All rights reserved. Made available on the Environment & Society Portal for nonprofit educational purposes only. The Plastic Pink Flamingo A NaturalHistory JENNIFER PRICE yearsago, I visitedthe Union Productsfactory, the birthplace of the plasticpink flamingo. It nestlesamong a flockof plastics factoriesin Leominster,Massachusetts, on Route 117 westof Bos- ton. I have come to believe,and would like to persuadeyou, that the blow-moldingdepartment in thebasement, where they still melt polyeth- ylenecrystals with pink dye and extrudethe hot pink plasticinto fla- mingo-shapedmolds, can be just as usefula place to search for the deepestmeanings of natureas the mostremote wilds of the Rockies, whereI havealso looked. Since then, to plumb my nature-lovinginstincts and the fierce attachmentsto natureharbored by manymembers of mygeneration, I have been tracingthe flamingo'shistory through the annals of land- scape architecture,south Florida, middle-class inventions, Las Vegas, fiftiesstyles, sixties rebellions, organic gardening, John Waters mov- ies, Elvis,wilderness areas, Andy Warhol prints, the CultureWars, and myfellow baby boomers' thirty-yearmarch to economic dominance. At some point,I began to listencarefully to the storiespeople told me. Mygraduate-school adviser heard a NationalPublic Radio report on a kidnappedpair of flamingosthat sent back postcardsfrom the EiffelTower. Friends had stolen the birdsoff lawns on drunkenlate- "■^ JenniferPrice, a freelancewriter in Los Angeles, recentlycompleted a doctoratein historyat Yale University.This essayis adapted fromFlight Maps: Adventures with Nature in ModernAmerica, which is being publishedthis May by Basic Books. 73 This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR night outings in college. A New Yorkereditor had a famous collection. My roommate's travelingpartner had taken a flamingonamed Eudora backpacking, mountain-biking,and cross-countryskiing through the White Mountains, the Arctic,and the Sierras before forgettingit one summerin a cabin at Donner Pass. And so, by degrees, I became cathected to the plastic bird that the naturewriter Terry Tempest Williams has branded "our unnaturallink to the naturalworld." plastic flamingowas invented at Union Products in 1957 by a young designernamed Don Featherstone,but its provenance- the prehistoryof lawn ornamentation- can be traced back many centuries. I'll begin in mid-eighteenth-centuryEngland. At that time,a revolution- ary English school of landscape architectscreated a "natural"lawn aes- theticthat would rivalthe "artificial"seventeenth-century gardens of Ver- sailles as a paradigm and cast a great shadow forwardonto American landscapes, American lawns,and the do's and don't's of Americanyard art.Led bythe greatlandscape architectLancelot "Capability"Brown, the new designers turned the estates of English aristocratsinto rolling ex- panses of meadows,trees, lakes, and streams.At Versailles, the royalarchi- tects had lined the perfectparterres with quantitiesof dragons, satyrs, swans,wolves, nymphs, and Greek gods. But as Brown and his minions blottedout geometryfrom the Englishcountryside - a near-completefeat by the mid-1800s - theygave lawn ornamentsa tenuous welcome. Their bastions of nature featuredrustic hermitages and a modest handful of stagand dog statues.They much preferredto deploy real animals,such as sheep, cattle,and - best of all- nativedeer. And yet,to turnan estateinto naturerequired greatefforts of human intervention.The architectsbuilt hills and dug lakes. They planted trees by the tens of thousands,chopped down grovesfulof others,added dead trees back in for effect,and cropped vast acreages of new grass. They made rivers bend. They made sunlight dapple. In some cases, they evictedlongtime tenant farmers and razed theirvillages. They set out, as Brown's famous protégé Humphrey Repton enthusiasticallyput it, to "conceal everyinterference of art,however expensive." It is trickyto say whetherthe "nature" theyleft behind contained less artificethan the perfectavenues and precisiontopiary of Versailles, or whetherit required less human labor and capital to maintain. The architectscreated not nature itself,but an idea, a definitionof nature as a place that is free of humansand human artifice. A seedbed of urbanization,industrialization, and modern marketcapi- talism,eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-centuryEngland also saw the privatizationand enclosure of once-common agriculturallands. Many people began to definenature as a realm thatwas as yetun transformed - 74 This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ThePlastic Pink Flamingo not the partsof the naturalworld that humans use or change,but the partsthat they do notuse. Naturewas not urbanand had no industrial factories.It wasa place withouteconomic activities. It was a refugefrom social upheaval.As a Place Out There,it was fastcoming to represent everythingthat life in early-modernEngland was not. Above all, people in the throesof becomingmodern appealed to natureas a timelesssource of authority.In the late 1700s and early1800s, Hume and Burkepro- pounded "natural"theories of moral philosophyand politics.Adam Smithdescribed the new market-based economy as a "natural"set of laws. Gainsboroughpainted a "natural"aesthetic. Wordsworth sought aesthetic and spiritualtruths in nature.Even etiquette manuals lauded thevalue of "naturalness"in mannersand posture.And CapabilityBrown made the landscapean idea youcould walk around in. In fact,what could claimthe authority of nature more effectively than ownershipof a vastexpanse of it?Only wealthy squires could enjoythe benefitsof thisdefinition - landed aristocrats who could takeprime agri- culturalacreage out ofproduction and urbanmerchants who could pur- chase countryretreats. The urban poor and workingclasses couldn't affordto travelout of the cities. And rural peasants could hardly afford to treatthe landscape as a non-farming-or-huntingzone. A Brown-designed estatemade as definitea statementof social poweras Versailles,only it did it bydeclaring that wealth and statuswere natural Of course,no one in England,during that era ofexplosive economic growth, was using and changingnature more thanthe wealthyelites. And muchof the future historyof thisidea would unfoldas a battleamong the more monied socialclasses over exactly who would get to claimthe authority of nature, and forwhat purposes. plasticpink flamingo was stilltwo centuries away. Meanwhile, in thelate 1700s,French landowners were hiring English architects to converttheir exquisite gardens into Nature. Across the Atlantic, Ameri- can landownerssuch as ThomasJefferson took to the Englishaesthetic likebirds to thesky. Americans, after all, have always embraced a visionof natureboth as countermodernand as a source of social and political authority- from Jefferson's pastoral ideal, whichwed ruralroots to re- publicanindependence and virtue,to Thoreau'sfaith in wildernessas an antidoteto overcivilization.From the Puritans' "city on a hill"to mythsof theAmerican West to theremarkably literal Mount Rushmore, Americans have made naturemeaningful as a powerfulsource of authorityfor na- tionalidentity. The Englishschool found its great American apostle in AndrewJack- son Downing,a nurserymanin upstateNew York. In the 1840s,he made meadowsroll, streams meander, and treesclump irregularly on country estatesthroughout the Hudson Valley, where the Hudson River school of 75 This content downloaded from 128.97.27.21 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 06:47:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR landscape painters committed similar visions to canvas. And he ap- proached the quest* η of lawn ornamentscircumspectly. "Vases," "rustic baskets,"and "other harmonious accessories": Downing deployed these only near the manor. A bit fartheraway, he planted "rockwork"and wooden "moss houses." However,on the fartherreaches of one's lands, human artificehad to vanish entirely.A vase way out there,he admon- ished, "[does] violence to our reason or taste."At his own residence in Newburgh,Downing instructedhis all-too-visiblegrounds staff to use "in- visiblehands" to mow the lawnsat night. His real passion, however,was to downsize the English principlesfor smallerestates. In the democraticUnited States,a growingmiddle class owned property,too, and Downing was froma middle-classbackground himself.How should Americanswith less land- he recommendedat least fiftyacres but consented to workwith ten or twenty- "rendertheir places tastefuland agreeable?" "We answer,"he said, "fryattempting only the simple and natural;and the unfailingway to secure this, is by employingas leading featuresonly trees and grass."Downing preached restraintand naturalnessabove all else. He generallyreferred to them as "taste.""An humblecottage with sculptured vases," for example, "would be in bad taste." What is "taste"?You can have taste in clothes, wine, furniture,art, decor- almostanything you purchase. The concept emerged witha ven- geance in the early1800s, as spreadingwealth and new mass-production technologiesequipped the growingnumbers of