ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Gertrude Stein’s writing rejects the environmentalist devotion to place, instead insisting on making sense of the environment as landscape. Against centering the environment around a singular, grounded, and unifying earth or a specific place with unique qualities that endure over time, Stein spreads out the landscape across the country so that it encompasses multiple dynamic relationships among natural entities. This act of de-placing is most striking in her brief description of Yosemite National Park, in which the national park is not presented as a singular sacred place but as an element of a landscape that must constantly be understood in terms of multiple relationships with other entities. In stark contrast to the place-based emphasis on walking that characterizes many popular narrative representations of national parks, Stein imagines an alternative environmentalism based on her de-placed experience of Yosemite from behind the windows of a car.
