Teaching Packet

People and the Environment

Part of Uncovering America

Grade Level

Subject

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On this Page:

  1. Overview
  2. Selected Works
  3. Activity: Poetry, Art, and Nature
  4. Activity: Community Artists/Scientists
  5. Additional Resources
A thick-trunked tree towers over us in an old-growth forest in this photograph, which is printed in shades of gray on cream white. From close to the ground, we look up at the central tree, which has thick but stubby branches extending like bristles on scrub brush from its central trunk. Just to the left is an upright but dead, broken trunk. Its hollow interior faces us. The canopy of the central tree is outlined against the blank sky, and other evergreens and thinner-trunked trees reach into the sky around the central tree.
Carleton E. Watkins, Grizzly Giant, Mariposa Grove, 1861, albumen print, Gift of Mary and David Robinson, 1995.35.24

Overview

In what ways have Americans impacted the environment?

What is our collective responsibility toward the earth and each other?

How do artists engage with these questions through works of art?

The US national park system exists in part because of artists. Photographer Carleton Watkins’s mammoth photographs and intimate stereographs of Yosemite, including Grizzly Giant, Mariposa Grove, convinced a senator to propose a new bill to the US Congress reserving lands for public use. In 1864, President Lincoln signed legislation that set aside Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove as a state park for California—the first time that the federal government had ever created public parklands. The world’s first national park, Yellowstone, was established in 1872, only a few months after artist Thomas Moran traveled to the area as part of an exploratory expedition. Moran’s breathtaking watercolor studies of the area, complemented by William Henry Jackson’s photographs, helped persuade Congress to designate Yellowstone as a park “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”

Grizzly Giant, Mariposa Grove and Moran’s Tower at Tower Falls, Yellowstone may evoke memories or associations if you’ve traveled to the national parks, as millions of US and international visitors do annually. Local or regional parks may surface in your mind, too. Looking closely at these works of art and learning about their significance might also spark questions:

  • Why did the artists choose to depict these particular natural elements and settings?
  • Why and how did these works of art successfully convince lawmakers to enact new laws?
  • How did viewers see and experience these works of art?
  • Why did these works of art become so widespread and popular?

The US landscape is a source of pride, national identity, and pleasure for many, in part because artists like Watkins and Moran helped shape and reinforce these understandings. Their works celebrate the expansive forests, rugged mountains, and great lakes and waterways of the country. But the land is also contested and controversial. By the 19th century, millions of indigenous people, including those in Yellowstone and Yosemite, had been killed by disease and warfare, or forcibly removed from their ancestral homes to make way for settlers. In California in particular, thousands of Native people were murdered in militia raids sanctioned by the US government, leading many scholars to identify what happened as genocide. Innovations such as the railroad and agricultural mechanization made life easier and more efficient, but they also turned nature into a commodity. Today, trees, water, and other resources continue to be extracted, bought, and sold to benefit a booming export industry and a growing populace.

When land is claimed or transformed, who is affected and how? What does the natural world mean to various individuals, communities, and cultures? Why and how might we protect and sustain limited natural resources while making them available to the public?

As populations around the world increase and humans continue to upset the earth’s climate, striking a sustainable balance between human activity and nature becomes increasingly vital and difficult.

Selected Works

  • We look across and down into a valley with a person sitting near a tall tree and a train puffing smoke beyond, all enclosed by a band of mountains in the distance in this horizontal landscape painting. Closest to us, several broken, jagged tree stumps are spaced across the painting’s width. A little distance away and to our left, the person wears a yellow, broad-brimmed hat, red vest, and gray pants. He reclines propped on his left elbow near a walking path beside a tall, slender tree with golden leaves. The green meadow stretching in front of him is dotted with tree stumps cut close to the ground. Beyond the meadow, puffs of white smoke trail behind a long steam locomotive that crosses a bridge spanning a tree-filled ravine, headed to our left. The ravine creates a diagonal line across the canvas, moving subtly away from us to our left. The train has climbed out of the valley, away from a cluster of brick-red buildings. The most prominent structure is a train roundhouse, a large building with a high, domed roof to the right of the tracks. Smoke rises from chimneys on long, warehouse-like buildings, and a steeple and smaller structures suggest a church and homes to our left. Hazy in the distance, a row of mountains lines the horizon, which comes about halfway up the composition. The sky above deepens from pale, shell pink over the mountains to watery, pale blue above. The artist signed the work in tiny letters in the lower left corner: “G. Inness.”
  • We hover over the bottle-green surface of a river as it rushes toward a horseshoe-shaped waterfall that curves away from us in this horizontal landscape painting. The water is white and frothy right in front of us, where the shelf of the riverbed changes levels near the edge of the falls. Across from us, the water is also white where it falls over the edge. A thin, broken rainbow glints in the mist near the upper left corner of the painting and continues its arc farther down, between the falls. The horizon line is just over halfway up the composition. Plum-purple clouds sweep into the composition at the upper corners against a lavender-colored sky. Tiny trees and a few buildings line the shoreline to the left and right in the deep distance.
  • A thick-trunked tree towers over us in an old-growth forest in this photograph, which is printed in shades of gray on cream white. From close to the ground, we look up at the central tree, which has thick but stubby branches extending like bristles on scrub brush from its central trunk. Just to the left is an upright but dead, broken trunk. Its hollow interior faces us. The canopy of the central tree is outlined against the blank sky, and other evergreens and thinner-trunked trees reach into the sky around the central tree.
  • A young man with a peachy, ruddy complexion lies on his stomach in a wooden rowboat on a river, reaching forward to grasp the horn of a stag almost completely submerged in the rippling water with one hand. On the opposite riverbank, gold, rust, and scarlet-red trees span the width of this horizontal painting. The boy’s arms straddle the stern of the boat so one holds the antler with his right hand, closer to us, while the other clutches a rope with a loop at the end. He turns his face, mouth agape and cheeks flushed, over his right shoulder to look to our left, at a dog swimming toward the boat. The dog has white and caramel-brown markings, with dark brown ears. The boy wears earth-brown clothing and the front of his wide-brimmed hat is pushed up to reveal dark eyes and sable-brown bangs and brows. The stag and dog are between us and the boat, and are surrounded by thick brushstrokes of parchment white to create ripples in the forest-green water. Only the open muzzle, part of the eye, and the tips of the stag’s antlers are above the water’s surface. To our right, a bare, fallen tree lies along the far riverbank parallel to the boat. The boat and water fill the lower half of the scene and the autumn trees fill the upper half. The artist has signed and dated the painting in the lower right, “Winslow Homer 1892.”
  • A six-story, narrow building stands alone in an otherwise unoccupied lot under the deck of a high bridge, with a river and cityscape in the background in this horizontal painting. Dozens of people, small in scale, are each painted with a few swipes of black and some with peach-colored faces. They gather at the foot of the building and around a fire to our left, near the lower left corner of the composition. The fire is painted with a dash of orange, a few touches of canary yellow, and a smudge of gray smoke. Several more people stand and sit against the building, which has a streetlamp near its entrance. The back end of the building angles away from us to our right, so we see the narrow, front entrance side to our left. Each of the six floors of the building has two windows with fire escape ladders on the narrow side we can see. Some strokes in red and white on the lower levels of the long, flat side of the building suggest signs or posters. The top story glows a warm sienna brown in sunlight, while the rest of the building and the scene below are in shadow. More people walk along a grayish-violet fence that encloses the lot beyond the building. The ground is painted thickly with slate gray, pale, sage green, and one smear of white to suggest snow. To our right and a short distance from us, a white horse pulls a carriage near the foot of the bridge. The ivory-white, concrete piling rises up and off the right edge of the canvas and supports the deck of the bridge above. Only a sliver of the brick-red underside of the bridge is visible, skimming the top edge of the painting in the upper right corner. Two twiggy, barren trees grow up beyond the muted purple fence, and the landscape beyond is bright in the sunlight. A terracotta-orange building rises along the left edge of the painting, with the area between it and the lot under the bridge filled with thickly painted patches of butter yellow, amethyst purple, and sage green. Beyond that, an ice-blue river flows across the composition. The shore beyond is lined with patches of beige and tan paint that could be buildings. A black tugboat puffs bright white smoke in the river. The sky above is frosty white. The artist signed the work with dark blue in the lower left corner of the painting, “Geo Bellows.”
  • This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”
  • From a low vantage point, we look up along rolling, verdant farm fields bathed in sunlight that fill most of this nearly square canvas. Rows of stylized, gold-green hay almost fill landscape painting. The horizon line is high, almost at the top of the painting, and the hill in front of us slopes from the horizon down to a point far below us, at the bottom edge of the canvas. Along the hill, roughly parallel rows of harvested hay are bundled into distinctive tube-like mounds, with paths between them. The field is interrupted only by a small, solitary young tree near the lower left corner. Two muted, terracotta-red barns or outbuildings with pitched, tan-colored roofs perch at the top of the hill. They stand outlined against a light, clear blue sky at the top center of the composition. The canopies of several rounded trees puff up beyond the buildings, on the far side of the hill. A fan-like weathervane with flat, blade-like paddles sits atop the smaller barn. The other, larger building has a higher pitched roof with a small, lantern-shaped cupola on top and a wide door on the right side where the roof slopes down in a lean-to type of structure. A piece of farm machinery is parked in the field at the top right. At the bottom center of the canvas, a brown ceramic jug with a handle and red stopper rests on the ground in between the rows of bundled hay. The artist signed and dated the work with red paint in the bottom left corner: “GRANT WOOD 1939.” There is also a red painted copyright symbol to the left of the name.
  • We look down into a darkened valley with a shimmering, curving river winding back to a screen of craggy, snow-topped mountains in the distance in this horizontal black and white photograph.

Activity: Poetry, Art, and Nature

Susan Middleton, Crown Point Press, Asa Muir-Harmony, Emily York, Ianne Kjorlie, Requiem, 2008, color photogravure on wove Somerset paper, Gift of Kathan Brown, 2011.119.63
Robert Smithson, Gianfranco Gorgoni, Untitled, 1970, gelatin silver print, Gift of Eileen and Michael Cohen, 2011.93.46

Poets and visual artists alike create work about the natural environment. Read through the poems listed below with your students. What are the poets’ points of view, and what sentiments are the poems expressing about nature? How do they evoke the reader’s senses? What emotions or thoughts do you have after reading the poems?

Compare the poems to the works of art collected in this module. Are there any poems that complement particular works of art? How are they similar, and how are they different?

Activity: Community Artists/Scientists

We look down into a darkened valley with a shimmering, curving river winding back to a screen of craggy, snow-topped mountains in the distance in this horizontal black and white photograph.
Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942, printed 1980, gelatin silver print, Gift of Virginia B. Adams, 1986.3.5

Community scientists (also known as citizen scientists) are people who conduct research and contribute data to science projects as amateurs or nonprofessionals. Anyone can participate in community science projects provided they follow guidelines established by hosting organizations, including National Geographic, NOAA, and NASA.

Using the model of community science, identify a science project that aligns with your students’ interests and learning goals. Conduct research that both contributes to science and can be used to make art that reveals or communicates something about the climate in which you live. Artworks can take any form and use any medium.

Creating art is one way to take action in response to the world’s changing climate. What are other concrete ways that you see people helping solve this challenge? How might you, individually or with others, contribute solutions or make change in your own school or community?

Additional Resources

Art and Ecology Lessons and Activities, National Gallery of Art

From Pursuit to Preservation: The History of Human Interaction with Whales, New Bedford Whaling Museum

Mapping Thoreau Country

National Zoo and Aquarium Month: Preserving America’s Wildlife, National Endowment for the Humanities

National Park Service

Environmental Protection Agency

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Global Climate Change, NASA

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Educational Resource:  People and the Environment

The US national park system exists in part because of artists.

A pale-skinned young woman with copper-orange hair, wearing a turquoise-blue robe, stands in a pastel-infused landscape in this stylized, vertical painting. The woman fills most of the left half of the composition. She faces our right in profile with her head bowed as she looks down at the silver and brown box she holds in her right hand, closer to us. Her body angles away from us so we see her back. Her hair is held back under a gold-colored headand, and her blue robe falls over a white skirt. Beyond her, rocky mountains in ice blue and pale lilac purple span the horizon, which comes about three-quarters of the way up the painting, beneath a pale, rose-pink sky. An area of mottled parchment-white to our right of the person could be a field. Along the bottom edge of the canvas, rounded and organic shapes in scarlet red, turquoise, lapis blue, golden and lemon yellow, and pumpkin orange could be abstracted earth or flowers at the woman’s feet.

Educational Resource:  Pandora's Box

Educational Resource:  Uncovering America: Activism and Protest

Artists in the United States are protected under the First Amendment, which guarantees freedoms of speech and press. This module features works created by artists with a range of perspectives and motivations.