Every tree fixed with a purpose: Contesting value in Olmsted's parks

Eric S. Godoy

Environmental Values, 2024, vol. 33, issue 5, 511-528

Abstract: Olmsted was an influential landscape architect whose works include many parks, recreation grounds and more. Inspired by Romantic and transcendentalist thinkers, he developed ‘pastoral transcendentalism’, a style of designing parks that mimicked natural spaces to reproduce their values within cities. Although environmental justice scholars have pointed out how these designs limit access to parks, I argue that environmental philosophers have not adequately discussed Olmsted, particularly his axiology of nature. Reflecting on it reveals how environmental injustice consists not only of restricting access to nature to protect its essential value – for Olmsted, scenery that could induce a contemplative mindset – but in delimiting nature's value without consideration of how people actually appreciate it.

Keywords: Frederick Law Olmsted; urban parks; transcendentalism; wilderness debate; environmental justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09632719231220425 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envval:v:33:y:2024:i:5:p:511-528

DOI: 10.1177/09632719231220425

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environmental Values
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().