Fort Worth, TX, October 30, 2007—William J. Cronon, internationally acclaimed environmental historian and scholar of the American West, will present a lecture entitled Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Politics in America: How the Different Ways We Imagine Nature Affect Our Votes and Actions at the Amon Carter Museum on Saturday, November 10 at 11 a.m.

Cronon will explore how Americans have conceived of their national landscape and how these competing conceptions affect today’s political debates. This lecture is presented in conjunction with the special exhibition Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke.

Cronon is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that institution’s most distinguished chaired professorship. He has spent his career seeking to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas about nature shape our relationships with the world. He has won numerous awards, including prizes for his teaching from Yale University, where he began his career, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he moved in 1992 after spending a decade at Yale. His groundbreaking ecological study Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians. His book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West won both the Heartland Prize and the Bancroft Prize for the best work of American History published in 1991. He also co-edited Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (1992) and edited the influential book Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1995). He is currently completing a book entitled Saving Nature in Time: The Past and the Future of Environmentalism, based on the Wiles Lectures he delivered at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in May 2001.

A Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, MacArthur Fellow, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cronon is president of the American Society for Environmental History. An active environmentalist, he has served on the Governing Council of the Wilderness Society since 1995 and on the National Board of the Trust for Public Land since 2003.

Admission to this lecture is free. However, reservations are required, and seating is limited. Please call 817.989.5057 to register; confirmation will be sent.

This program, part of an ongoing series of lectures on American art, culture, and society by distinguished individuals, is made possible by a generous gift from the late Anne Burnett Tandy.