The conclusion sums up the historical legacy and implications of the landscape of genius. It begins with the landscape photographer and environmental activist Ansel Adams, who, like John Muir, became strongly associated with Yosemite and with the National Parks in general. Adams, through his photography and environmental advocacy, helped to translate the landscape of genius into the twentieth century, associating nature as wilderness with high culture and the fine arts. Those associations promoted both American nationalism and a specifically White, elite middle-class version of environmentalism. The conclusion then explores the wider implications of this “environmentalism of genius” for the environmental movement and popular conception of nature today. It argues for the dissociation of nature from genius as part of a larger reimagination of “nature,” in order to diversify the environmental movement and promote more socially just and ecologically effective approaches to environmental issues.

This chapter demonstrates how John Muir’s association with Yosemite defined its significance as a National Park and played a key role in the formation of modern environmentalism. Muir was deeply influenced by Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Burns and by the model of the landscape of genius in general. Muir represented nature in Yosemite as a form of high culture, analogous to the fine arts, in ways that defined the National Park as an institution and have exerted massive influence on modern discourses of nature. That high-cultural version of nature then shaped the American environmental movement, especially through the long political struggle from 1907–13 over the proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a reservoir for the city of San Francisco. In that struggle, Muir and his allies embraced many of the same forms of environmental rhetoric of the landscape of genius initiated by earlier attempts to preserve Wordsworth’s Lake District: a transatlantic connection that launched the American environmental movement and evolved into a hegemonic form of twentieth-century environmentalism.

“Art is in the eye of the beholder.” Yet, although still photographic images predated moving cinematic images, it took longer for photography to attain widespread artistic and creative appreciation. “Art for the sake of art” assumes that art has no practical purpose. Indeed, some have claimed that “everything useful is ugly.” Perhaps that’s why commercial photography initially overshadowed artistic or creative photography. Famed photographer Ansel Adams succeeded in both worlds: the commercial and artistic. What explains his success? How did he ever take up photography in the first place? How did Adams’ personal development coincide with the evolution of photography as an art form? How and why did Adams embrace environmentalism? And, how did his landscape photography advance the environmental movement in the United States? Answering these questions goes to the very essence of the creative arts and how art conveys meaning to those who behold it.