@article{773399,
      recid = {773399},
      author = {Sachs, Aaron},
      title = {Arcadian America the death and life of an environmental  tradition / [electronic resource] :},
      publisher = {Yale University Press,},
      address = {New Haven :},
      pages = {xi, 484 p. :},
      year = {2013},
      abstract = {"Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the  national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that  quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century.  Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the  countryside into rapidly expanding cities, making nature  accessible to all and serving to remind visitors of the  natural cycles of life. In this unique interdisciplinary  blend of historical narrative, cultural criticism, and  poignant memoir, Aaron Sachs argues that American  cemeteries embody a forgotten landscape tradition that has  much to teach us in our current moment of environmental  crisis.Until the trauma of the Civil War, many Americans  sought to shape society into what they thought of as an  Arcadia--not an Eden where fruit simply fell off the tree,  but a public garden that depended on an ethic of communal  care, and whose sense of beauty and repose related directly  to an acknowledgement of mortality and limitation. Sachs  explores the notion of Arcadia in the works of  nineteenth-century nature writers, novelists, painters,  horticulturists, landscape architects, and city planners,  and holds up for comparison the twenty-first century's--and  his own--tendency toward denial of both death and  environmental limits. His far-reaching insights suggest new  possibilities for the environmental movement today and new  ways of understanding American history"--},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/773399},
}