Nature versus Technology

The recently popularized genre of revisionist history signifies a shift in the conceptualization of historical narratives, examining thematic structures of the past and present rather than a chronological grand narrative, retelling events through a selected viewpoint of, for example, technological development and theory. Reisner's book, one of the most popular of this kind, embodies this new approach in its thematic selection of events used to tell a new history of the West. The theme of nature versus technology is an obvious choice in writing from an environmentalist perspective.

In its very title, Cadillac Desert contains an ideological dualism that Reisner explores in his book: one symbolized by a car brand, as an all-American emblem of transportation and exploration, and the other equivalent to nature's most hostile habitat for humans - and the most difficult one to adapt to their use. The fact that the Great American...