Event
Jennifer Lynn Peterson
State-Sponsored Nature: Film and the Civilian Conservation Corps
In the 1930s, the United States government expanded its filmmaking efforts to promote its work developing the national and state parks. Drawing from my archival research on U.S. government films produced in the interwar years, this presentation will focus on a set of 1930s films about the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) that played an important and largely overlooked role in defining and promoting a modern concept of nature for the mass public. One of the most popular of Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives, the CCC was a work relief program for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18-25. Launched in March 1933 and in operation until 1942, the CCC trained 3 million working-class men in forestry, soil conservation, trail-building, and park facilities construction. The government documented and promoted the CCC’s work in films made by the Department of the Interior’s motion picture unit; these films are little-known today, but were seen by millions in their day. With titles such as Pilgrim Forests, Land of the Giants, and A Forest Playground, these films played a role in democratizing environmentalism by bringing images of nature to the general public, most of whom did not know about environmental conservation, and had not visited a national or state park. The concept of nature promoted by these films joined the early conservation ideal of the “efficient use of nature” with the growing economic forces of recreation and tourism in the national and state parks. At the same time, these films articulated what I call a “state ideology of nature” that used early conservation ideology to justify and promote its settler colonial and extractive practices. While well-known New Deal films such as Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and Joris Ivens’s Power and the Land (1940) are important for the history of the environment on film, these more mundane government films are also worthy of close attention. These CCC films provide a fascinating look at how the state promoted itself as a benevolent steward of the land in the years before the environmental movement went mainstream.
Jennifer Lynn Peterson is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke UP, 2013). Her work has been published in JCMS, Feminist Media Histories, Camera Obscura, Moving Image, and numerous edited volumes. She is Professor and Chair of the Media Studies program at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. Her book-in-progress, “Cinema’s Ecological Past: Film History, Nature, and Endangerment Before 1960,” is under contract with Columbia University Press.
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