Those Were the Days

One of my favorite geographers, David Lowenthal, has written two great books that touch on the power of nostalgia: The Past is a foreign Country, and Possessed by the Past. In environmentalism, the notion of an idealized past has long manifested itself in various ways. For example an early strain of contemporary environmentalism--known as the Back to the Land movement in the early 1970s--was propelled, in part, by a healthy dose of nature romanticism. Ecology, too, has similarly been in thrall to a false ideal, argues Greg Breining: