John Wills

'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.

Digital Dinosaurs and Artificial Life: Exploring the Culture of Nature in Computer and Video Games

Over the last 30 years, the computer and videogame has emerged as a popular recreational pastime. While often associated with the artificial and alien, it is my contention that the modern videogame informs on the subject of “nature” and what we consider to be natural. This article delineates some of the “natures” posited in computer game design. It provides a valuable overview of gaming culture and might serve as an introduction to further research on specific game genres. It argues that virtual worlds are currently serving a dual purpose, of reinforcing traditional stereotypes of the natural world (as “red in tooth” and claw or as a material resource), while gradually moving towards radical, new forms of “virtual” nature to contend with. It suggests that the mimicking of biological systems in computer games expresses both our lingering cultural interest in the “great outdoors” and a need to give familiarity and substance to an electronic medium marked by its failure to fit within traditional notions of space and geography.

Abalone, rattlesnakes and kilowatt monsters: nature and the atom at Diablo Canyon, California

This article argues that a broad cultural fascination with what is deemed to be natural (and, conversely, artificial) has influenced how we relate to nuclear landscapes. In the case of Diablo Canyon, a headland on the California coast set aside for nuclear development in the 1960s, we find that prolonged debates over land use were at first complicated by conflicting ideas over the ‘naturalness’ of an area once used for cattle ranching, then obscured by questions over the unnatural, artificial attributes of atomic energy. Common perceptions of the coastline emerged not from physical interaction with the coastline, but instead from popular debate over the promise and perils of peaceful atomic energy. The article is useful for its exposition of nature as a cultural artefact and for situating nuclear developments within a broader context of shifting environmental sensibilities.