COlEnE BROOKS
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In the early nineteenth century, man's impact upon the natural
world was thought to be so slight that Ralph Waldo Emerson could
term it "insignificant," amounting to nothing more than "a little chip–
ping, baking, pat{:hing, and washing." One hundred years later, the
philosopherJohn Dewey would characterize man's relation to nature
in terms befitting the twentieth century, in terms, that is, which
would prove unrecognizable to the benign custodians of the earlier
era. Emerson's "chipping" and "patching" would become, in Dewey's
words "cutting, marking off, dividing up, extending, piecing
together, joining, assembling and mixing, hoarding and dealing
out." Both Emerson and Dewey must be seen as men of their times,
of course, but they must also be viewed as Americans, represen–
tatives of a nation which, over time, forsook a humbler attitude
towards the world for the more exuberant interventionism of which
Dewey writes. The latter attitude colors all aspects of our national
life, and' iis' esserii:e is evoked in one concept :
the experiment.
'
The view' that the world is to be worked upon, shaped and
altered rather than simply contemplated in its quiescence might be
said to be the hallmark of the experimental mind.
It
might also be
taken to characterize attitudes that are often associated with art, as
in Jasper Johns's dictum: "Take an object; do something to it; do
something else to it." By these lights, the most influential American
artist-figure of past decades might arguably be Robert Moses, the
man who spent over fifty years doing "something" and then
"something else" to New York City and its environs . In what can be
called the greatest earthworks project of the era, Moses constructed
over twenty-seven billion dollars' worth of public works-parks,
parkways, bridges, expressways, and beaches. He recast the
physical contours and boundaries of New York City. He built thir–
teen expressways in the city alone, at a cost of ten million dollars per
mile. The scale of Moses's vision stood unsurpassed in its time; his
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, then the longest suspension bridge in
the world, required that allowance be made during its construction
for the curvature of the Earth, and his Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was
the longest underwater vehicular passageway in the Western
Hemisphere. Robert Caro, Moses's biographer, notes that Jones
Beach was "a barren, deserted, windswept sand spit when [Moses]
first happened upon it in 1921 while exploring the bay alone in a
small motorboat"; this unpromising spit became, in his hands, the
great beachfront that now draws millions. What is remarkable about.
