1. The leading history of efforts at the federal level is Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890—1920 (New York: Atheneum, 1969). A recent brief assessment is offered in Curt Meine, Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004), 13-35, 42-63. The many sources that consider conservation efforts at local levels, which were often motivated by desires to protect ways of life tied to nature, include John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790—1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Richard W. Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980). Various perspectives on forest conservation are offered in Char Miller, ed., American Forests: Nature, Culture, and Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).
2. I do not mean to discount the serious, sustained efforts made by many scholars, inside and outside the academy, to engage with conservation ideas. My criticism here is aimed chiefly at conservation as a public cause and at the leaders of it. As for the academic writing, it is prone to looking inward over time, both because academic evaluation standards are inward looking and because conservation leaders pay so little attention to it. A recent, apparently little-noted effort by academics to present ideas to conservation professionals is Ben A. Minteer and Robert E. Manning, eds., Reconstructing Conservation: Finding Common Ground (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003).
3. References to leading historical works are included in the third entry in “Conservation’s Central Readings: A Bibliographic Essay” (which highlights as exemplar Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993]).
4. The chief organizations and their work are considered in Richard Brewer, Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America (Hanover: Dartmouth University Press, 2003).
5. The emphasis of the Progressive Movement on controlling rampant individualism is considered in Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870—1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003). Works on conservation during the period are cited in note 1 above.
1. Wendell Berry, “Conserving Communities,” in Another Turn of the Crank (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 1995), 17.
2. Ibid. Berry’s other commentaries on the global economy include “A Bad Big Idea” in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 45-51; “Farming and the Global Economy,” in Another Turn of the Crank, 1—7; and “The Whole Horse,” in Eric T. Freyfogle, ed., The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001), 63-79.
3. Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
4. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), vii.
5. Ibid., 224-25.
6. Leopold’s mature conservation thought, including his cultural criticism, is ably assessed in Julianne Lutz Newton, “The Commonweal of Life: Aldo Leopold and Land Health” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004; forthcoming from Island Press in 2006).
7. Leopold’s emerging ecological orientation is described in Susan L. Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of and Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974).
8. A key essay recording Leopold’s progress in providing an ecological grounding for his holistic thinking is “A Biotic View of Land” (1939), reprinted in Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, eds., “The River of the Mother of God” and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 266—73. The scientific background of the essay is explored in detail in Newton, “The Commonweal of Life,” 203-68.
9. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, viii.
10. Aldo Leopold, “The Conservation League” and “Ecology, Philosophy, and Conservation,” unpublished, undated manuscripts, Aldo Leopold Papers, series 10-6, box 16, University of Wisconsin Archives, Madison.
11. Aldo Leopold, “Threatened Species,” in The River of the Mother of God, 230-31 (originally published 1936).
12. Aldo Leopold, “The Conservation Ethic,” in The River of the Mother of God, 181, 187.
13. Aldo Leopold, “Land Pathology,” in The River of the Mother of God, 212-13 (originally published 1935).
14. Ibid.
15. One of Leopold’s clearest calls for conservationists to rally around the goal, and for ecologists to use their best guesses about what it meant for land to possess health, was published only half a century after his death. “The Land-Health Concept and Conservation,” in J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle, eds., For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings, by Aldo Leopold (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999), 218-26 (originally written 1946). Leopold’s writings on land health are carefully surveyed and assessed in Newton, “The Commonweal of Life,” 411-53. Valuable perspectives on Leopold’s thought are also presented in part 6 of J. Baird Callicott, Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
16. Aldo Leopold, “Conservation: In Whole or in Part,” in The River of the Mother of God, 311, 318 (originally written 1944).
17. “Land-Use and Democracy,” in The River of the Mother of God, 295, 300 (originally published 1942).
18. “Biotic Land-Use,” in For the Health of the Land, 198, 201.
19. Ibid., 205.
20. “Conservation,” unpublished manuscript, attached to manuscript letter, Horace S. Fries to Aldo Leopold, August 8, 1946, Leopold Papers, series 10-1, box 1.
21. Leopold’s use of the term stability and writings in which he used it in his shorthand description of healthy land (with particular reference to its ability to cycle nutrients efficiently) are considered in Newton, “The Commonweal of Life,” 445-48, 457.
22. Ibid., 446-50. As Newton explains, Leopold used the term integrity in two related, overlapping ways. It primarily meant the biotic parts needed for land to retain its ability to cycle nutrients efficiently. Secondarily and as a prudential matter, it included the full range of species present in a location before industrial humans came along. Leopold at times used this latter definition because no one really knew what species were needed to keep land “stable”; it was thus wise to keep as many of the parts as possible, even though some of them perhaps were not needed. Ibid., 449.
23. A Sand County Almanac, 224-25.
24. Ibid., 221.
25. Leopold explored the economics of private lands conservation, beginning with his important essays “The Conservation Ethic” (1933), “Conservation Economics” (1934), and “Land Pathology” (1935), all now reprinted in The River of the Mother of God. His many unpublished manuscripts touching on the subject include (from Leopold Papers, series 10-6, boxes 16-18) “Armaments for Conservation,” “Conservation and Politics,” “Motives for Conservation,” “Economics of the Wild,” “Ecology and Economics in Land Use,” and “Economics, Philosophy, and Land.”
26. “Land Pathology,” 215.
27. Ibid., 214.
28. “Conservation and Politics,” unpublished, undated manuscript, Leopold Papers, series 10-6, box 16.
29. Aldo Leopold, “Pioneers and Gullies,” in The River of the Mother of God, 106, 111 (originally published 1924).
30. A Sand County Almanac, 225.
31. Ibid., 210.
32. Aldo Leopold, “The State of the Profession,” in The River of the Mother of God, 276, 280 (originally published 1940).
33. The leading secondary works on Berry are Andrew J. Angyal, Wendell Berry (New York: Twayne, 1995) and Kimberly K. Smith, Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). Berry’s various literary persona or voices are thoughtfully considered in Janet Goodrich, The Unforeseen Self in the Works of Wendell Berry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001). Various comments on Berry’s writing and influence are collected in Paul Merchant, ed., Wendell Berry (Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1991). Berry’s most sustained meditation on the need to return to the Christian adage of loving one’s neighbor, despite the ongoing decline of rural lands and rural communities, appears in fictional form in his novel Jayber Crow (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 2000).
34. A biography of Berry has not yet appeared. Information about his life is included in many of his nonfiction writings as well as in Angyal, Wendell Berry.
35. Among the writings by Berry that draw on this experience is his essay “The Whole Horse.”
36. Wendell Berry, “The Wild,” in Collected Poems, 1957—1982 (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 19-20.
37. Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969), 118.
38. Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), ix.
39. Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 164; Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 14-15, 40; Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 149, 206-7.
40. Albert Howard, The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (New York: Devin-Adair, 1947), 11. Berry’s uses of the quotation include What Are People For? 149; Another Turn of the Crank, 89-90.
41. Wendell Berry, “Health Is Membership,” in Another Turn of the Crank, 86, 90.
42. Among the writings in which Berry explores the themes is “Conservation and Local Economy,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 3-18.
43. Ibid.; Berry, “Conserving Communities,” 8.
44. He develops the issue in many writings, including “Conserving Forest Communities,” in Another Turn of the Crank, 25-45.
45. Wendell Berry, “Private Property and the Common Wealth,” in Another Turn of the Crank, 46, 48.
46. For instance, “Conservation Is Good Work,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 27, 39-40 (“And, of course, in talking about the formation of local economies capable of using an earthly place without ruining it, we are talking about the reformation of people”).
47. For instance, “Private Property and the Common Wealth,” 47 (“My hope, I must say, subsists on an extremely meager diet—a reducer’s diet”); “The Whole Horse,” 75.
48. Leopold died in mid-stride in terms of his professional work, with many ongoing projects designed to expand his understandings and clarify his conservation thought. Newton, “The Commonweal of Life,” 254-67, 461-67.
49. Aldo Leopold, “The Ecological Conscience,” in The River of the Mother of God, 340-46.
50. A typical treatment is Barry C. Field, Environmental Economics: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Boston: Irwin McGraw-Hill, 1997), 69-77.
51. On the challenges to sound land use posed by fragmentation, see Eric T. Freyfogle, The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003), 157-78.
52. A good consideration is Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004), 157-219.
53. An important work addressing common-property management possibilities is Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
54. Two of the most careful studies are Deborah Lynn Guber, The Grassroots of a Green Revolution: Polling America on the Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003) and Willett Kempton, James S. Boster, and Jennifer A. Hartley, Environmental Values in American Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
55. A useful survey of shifting American thoughts about liberty is Michael G. Kammen, Spheres of Liberty: Changing Perceptions of Liberty in American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
56. A useful introduction is Anthony Arblaster, Democracy, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). America’s shifting ideas on the subject are considered in Robert H. Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
57. Useful surveys of ideas on property in the United States include Gregory Alexander, Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Theory, 1776—1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); William B. Scott, In Pursuit of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).
58. An example is Thomas W. Merrill, “Private Property and the Politics of Environmental Protection,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 28 (2004): 69-80 (contending that in terms of the causes of varying environmental conditions, the “only difference” between eastern and western Europe was the existence of private property in the West). Merrill neither notes the existence of private property in the East nor questions how closely the private property of western Europe resembles private property in the United States.
59. John Echeverria, “The Politics of Property Rights,” Oklahoma Law Review 50 (1997): 351-75.
60. Differing visions of private landownership are considered in Eric T. Freyfogle, Bounded People, Boundless Lands: Envisioning a New Land Ethic (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998), 91-113.
61. The ambiguities within the idea of equality are considered in Peter Westen, Speaking of Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
62. A similar criticism of environmentalism, highlighting its failure to respond to cultural challenges, is Samuel Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 223-24.
63. Aldo Leopold, “The Conservation Ethic,” 187.
64. There are important exceptions, some of which are noted in entry 12 of “Conservation’s Central Readings.”
65. As Richard Lazarus notes, the aggregate benefits of federal environmental programs appear to significantly exceed their costs. The difficulty arises (as Aldo Leopold had noted) because the benefits do not go to those who incur the costs (or, as it might more aptly be stated, because those who must halt their patterns of harming other people are not reimbursed by their victims for the costs of doing so). Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 24-28.
66. An introduction is offered in John Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
67. A perceptive exploration that reconciles environmentalism with liberalism—although only after refining the latter idea— is Mark Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law, and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 146-70.
68. Liberalism, of course, is diversely defined. Environmentalism does fit within recent definitions that focus on the use of government to promote social progress and contain the market. As for the classical definition, opponents of environmentalism are more likely to rate higher as liberals, a point thoughtfully developed in C. A. Bowers, Mindful Conservatism: Rethinking the Ideological and Educational Basis of an Ecologically Sustainable Future (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
69. Aldo Leopold, “The Farm Wildlife Program: A Self-Scrutiny,” unpublished, undated manuscript (circa 1937), Leopold Papers, series 10-6, box 16.
70. Freyfogle, Bounded People, Boundless Lands, 75-90.
71. Useful sources for this work include Lester Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Brian Czech, Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop Them All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); Eric A. Davidson, You Can’t Eat GNP: Economics as if Ecology Mattered (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000).
72. A standard libertarian perspective on ownership, portraying property rights in a way strongly slanted toward development and industrial land uses, is Richard A. Epstein, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
1. An earlier attempt to categorize varieties of environmental law scholarship is J. B. Ruhl, “The Case of the Specluncean Polluters: Six Themes of Environmental Law, Policy, and Ethics,” Environmental Law 27 (1997), 343-73. Ruhl’s categories are similar except that he does not include among his approaches an ecological orientation similar to the one I have termed advocates for the land community.
2. Although the emergence of environmental law has received scholarly attention, the scholarly aspect of it has not become an important subject of independent study. For many years the leading historian of environmental law and policy has been Samuel P. Hays, whose work has been sadly overlooked by legal scholars. His major works are Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955—1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Explorations in Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); and A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). A lawyer’s view of the subject—covering legal developments in useful detail but paying little attention to the environmental movement and cultural politics—is offered in Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Journalistic histories of the environmental movement have become numerous, though none quite compares with the work of Hays. Prominent works include Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Robert Gottleib, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993). A narrow, sensitive study is Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
3. Because the aim here is to isolate scholarly approaches or types, not to probe the scholarly work of any particular scholars, a difficulty arises in citing scholars as examples of the approaches. Scholars inevitably have their eccentricities and display different attitudes in different works. With these caveats in mind, it might be said that the following scholars typically illustrate the five types: libertarians (Richard Epstein and a suite of newer legal scholars, including Jonathan Adler and Gary Marchant), simple fixers (law and economics scholars, from Terry Anderson to Richard Revesz), dispute resolvers (Richard Stewart and Cass Sunstein, among many others), progressive reformers (Dan Farber, Dan Tarlock, Nick Robinson, and many others), and land community advocates (Oliver Houck and Joseph Sax).
4. These ideas, of course, are largely borrowed by legal scholars from writings in economics. Leading economic texts from an ecological perspective—which often cast doubt on even the theoretical possibility of correcting market failures—are mentioned in the final entry of recommended readings “Conservation’s Central Readings: A Bibliographic Essay.”
5. As should be clear, I do not mean to suggest that legal scholars routinely (or ever) discuss these moral and intellectual issues. My claim instead is that they base their work on embedded presumptions about them, and that these presumptions can and should be teased apart for separate consideration.
6. Citizen involvement is by no means an easy undertaking, of course, subject to takeover by economic interests that have the most at stake. Some of the dangers are considered in Holly Doremus, “Preserving Citizen Participation in the Era of Reinvention: The Endangered Species Act Example,” Ecology Law Quarterly 25 (1999): 707-17; Bradley C. Karkkainen, “Collaborative Ecosystem Governance: Scale, Compexity, and Dynamism,” Virginia Environmental Law Journal 21 (2002): 189-243; Rena I. Steinzor, “The Corruption of Civic Environmentalism,” Environmental Law Reporter 30 (2002): 10909-21.
7. Much libertarian writing studiously avoids the term community, presumably because of its favorable connotations. Richard A. Epstein, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) is illustrative linguistically in how it carefully describes problems as clashes between the individual and the “state”—the latter term vaguely resonant of fascism and carrying stronger negative connotations than “government.”
8. A much fuller explanation (and criticism) of this worldview is set forth in David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). The confusion about the underlying values, greatly exacerbated by confused rhetoric and the misuse of political labels, is considered in C. A. Bowers, Mindful Conservatism: Rethinking the Ideological and Educational Basis of an Ecologically Sustainable Future (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
9. These ideas, of course, appear most vividly in the writings of Aldo Leopold, which continue to surface in legal scholarly writing. Amy J. Wildermuth, “Eco-Pragmatism and Ecology: What’s Leopold Got to Do with It?” Minnesota Law Review 87 (2003): 1145-71.
10. The idea is promoted in Carolyn Raffensperger and Joel Tickner, eds., Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999).
11. This reasoning appears prominently in the work of Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, among many others. Eric T. Freyfogle, Bounded People, Boundless Lands: Envisioning a New Land Ethic (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998), 131-36.
12. This line of thought permeates serious conservation writing outside the law—far more than within legal writing. The recommended readings described in “Conservation’s Central Readings” are, by and large, variations and expansions on this point.
13. An exception is Rutherford H. Platt, “The Geographical Basis of Land Use Law,” in Gary L. Thompson, Fred M. Shelley and Chand Wije, eds., Geography, Environment, and American Law (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1997).
14. By “environmental movement” I mean here not just (or even principally) the work of public-interest conservation groups, important as they have been, but the larger shift in values and sensibilities that helped give such groups strength and that generated public support for limits on market operations. A survey is offered in Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire.
15. Richard J. Lazarus, “Environmental Scholarship and the Harvard Difference,” Harvard Environmental Law Review 21 (1999): 354-55.
1. I offer comments on the first two of these approaches in The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003), 157-201.
2. The opposition is surveyed in Samuel P. Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 109-21.
3. René Dubos, The Wooing of Earth: New Perspectives of Man’s Use of Nature (London: Athlone Press, 1980).
4. Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York: Dell, 1992). Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text.
5. Aldo Leopold, “The Farmer as a Conservationist,” in Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, “The River of the Mother of God” and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 255-65. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text.
6. The importance of the essay in Leopold’s thought is considered in Julianne Lutz Newton, “The Commonweal of Life: Aldo Leopold and Land Health” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004; forthcoming from Island Press in 2006), 399-405.
7. Left unnoted, of course, is the evident practicality of the arrangement as well as the possibility that the environmentalist-gardener has his own aesthetic standards.
8. Pollan cites law professor Christopher Stone’s argument in favor of legal standing for “trees” (by which Stone meant forests as communities, not individual plants) in a way that apparently recognizes the vast difference between legal standing and moral rights (203-4). So strong is Pollan’s anthropocentrism that even a single human—any human, it appears—clearly outweighs morally even “the last few grizzlies.” “We could end up wrecking liberalism,” he asserts, were we to recognize moral value in any nonhuman life (204).
9. Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955—1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
10. The early part of the story is told in Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).
11. Two of the most careful studies of public views are Deborah Lynn Guber, The Grassroots of a Green Revolution: Polling America on the Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), and Willett Kempton, James S. Boster, and Jennifer A. Hartley, Environmental Values in American Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
12. Pollan uses the example of gravity (objects falling down) to argue that “nature loves straight lines” (289).
13. Similarly, we have Pollan’s contention that “Thoreau, in fact, was the last important American writer on nature to have anything to say about gardening” (4).
14. For instance, “Power Steer,” New York Times Magazine, March 31, 2002, section 6, p. 44.
1. Many of the ideas and observations in this chapter are drawn from Julianne Lutz Newton and Eric T. Freyfogle, “Sustainability: A Dissent,” Conservation Biology 19 (2005): 23-32. I thank my coauthor for allowing me to draw freely on this piece and for many useful discussions on the topic.
2. For instance, John Cairns, Jr., “The Zen of Sustainable Use of the Planet: Steps on the Path to Enlightenment,” Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 20 (1998): 109-23; J. Baird Callicott and Karen Mumford, “Ecological Sustainability as a Conservation Concept,” Conservation Biology 11 (1997): 32-40 (criticizing the term as “hopelessly tainted”); Robert T. Lackey, “Seven Pillars of Ecosystem Management,” Landscape and Urban Planning 40 (1998): 21-30; Bryan G. Norton, “Sustainability, Human Welfare, and Ecosystem Health,” in Searching for Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Philosophy of Conservation Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 168-82 (“Nobody opposes it because nobody knows exactly what it entails”); Thomas M. Parris, “Toward a Sustainability Transition,” Environment 45 (2003): 12-22. The term sustainable development has been subjected to even harsher criticism. Bill Willers, “Sustainable Development: A New World Deception,” Conservation Biology 8 (1994): 1148 (“[S]ustainable development is one of the most insidious and manipulable ideas to appear in decades”); Donald Worster, “The Shaky Ground of Sustainable Development,” in The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 153 (“irredeemable for environmentalist use” and subject to “deep flaws”).
3. For instance, Christine Padoch and Robin R. Sears, “Conserving Concepts: In Praise of Sustainability,” Conservation Biology 19 (2005): 39-41.
4. David Ehrenfeld, “Sustainability: Living with the Imperfections,” Conservation Biology 19 (2005): 34-35 (“If the idea of sustainability is invoked, independently, by those whose interests are solely in human survival, by those whose landscape of concern features humans embedded in the biosphere, and by those whose cares are entirely for nonhuman nature, so much the better. Perhaps their shared fondness for the word sustainability will provide enough common ground so that they can begin to talk to one another”).
5. Worster, “The Shaky Ground of Sustainable Development,” 143-45.
6. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890—1920 (New York: Atheneum, 1969).
7. Wes Jackson, “Toward a Sustainable Agriculture,” Not Man Apart (November-December 1978): 4-6.
8. Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).
9. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977).
10. Worster, “The Shaky Ground of Sustainable Development,” 143.
11. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43.
12. For instance, Report of the National Commission on the Environment, Choosing a Sustainable Future (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993); Juliet Schor and Betsy Taylor, Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-first Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).
13. Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 11-60. A more recent critical assessment of contemporary agriculture is David Tilman et al., “Agricultural Sustainability and Intensive Production Practices,” Nature 418 (2002): 671-77.
14. Gregory McIsaac, “Sustainability and Sustainable Agriculture,” in Gregory McIsaac and William R. Edwards, eds., Sustainable Agriculture in the American Midwest: Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 27-28.
15. Richard P. Gale and Sheila M. Cordray, “Making Sense of Sustainability: Nine Answers to ‘What Should Be Sustained?’” Rural Sociology 59 (1994): 311-32.
16. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, 43.
17. Ibid.
18. The Brundtland Report does declare that “at a minimum, sustainable development must not endanger the natural systems that support life on Earth: the atmosphere, the waters, the soils, and the living beings.” Ibid., 45. The goal sounds worthy enough, but we are left to wonder how this idea fits together with the term’s core definition, particularly its stress on meeting the needs of the world’s poor, and whether it implies a duty among the rich to share with the poor. In its context the sentence appears gratuitous; it is not part of the definition of sustainable development but instead merely a side aspiration, a hope that, someday, somehow, our methods of promoting sustainable development will respect the natural fabric.
19. The philosophical literature on future generations is vast. A good entry point, geared to the idea of sustainability, is Bryan G. Norton, “Intergenerational Equity and Sustainability,” in Searching for Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Philosophy of Conservation Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 420-55. Norton—himself a leading advocate of an environmental ethic focused on future generations—offers a similar observation on the inattention given to this core element of sustainability: “While it seems clear that calls for sustainable activities and policies must rest on an obligation of current people to future generations, philosophers have contributed little to the ongoing policy debates regarding how to define and measure these key terms.” A good collection of perspectives on the issue is Ernest Partridge, ed., Responsibilities to Future Generations: Environmental Ethics (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981).
20. Wynn Calder and Richard M. Clugston, “Progress toward Sustainability in Higher Education,” Environmental Law Reporter 33 (2003): 10003-22. The President’s Council on Sustainable Development concluded its work in May 1999 with its report Towards a Sustainable America: Advancing Prosperity, Opportunity, and a Healthy Environment for the 21st Century (1999).
21. This is the core idea of the Brundtland Report, World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, 43-46. An obvious problem arises with respect to nonrenewable resources, which can be used only by consuming them. On this issue, the Brundtland Report proposes (as do other studies) that rates of consumption be tied to the pace of efforts to find substitutes. “In general the rate of depletion should take into account the criticality of that resource, the availability of technologies for minimizing depletion, and the likelihood of substitutes being available.. .. With minerals and fossil fuels, the rate of depletion and the emphasis on recycling and economy of use should be calibrated to ensure that the resource does not run out before acceptable substitutes are available.” Ibid., 46.
22. Worster, “The Shaky Ground of Sustainable Development,” 144. Worster’s essay develops a thesis similar to the one presented here: “Like most popular slogans, sustainable development wears thin after a while, revealing a lack of any new core idea. Although it seems to have gained a wide acceptance, it has done so by sacrificing real substance. Worse yet, the slogan may turn out to be irredeemable for environmentalist use because it may inescapably lead us back to using a narrow economic language, to relying on production as the standard of judgment, and to following the progressive materialist world-view in approaching and utilizing the earth, all of which was precisely what environmentalism once sought to overthrow.”
23. Among the interests resisting planned, multiple-use waterway management was the Army Corps of Engineers, which opposed the shift in part to protect its organizational independence and in part because it feared for the primacy of navigation among waterway uses. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 199-218.
24. Ibid., 1-4; Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1910).
25. The story of wildlife conservation is recounted in John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, 3rd ed. (Corvallis: Oregon State University, 2000); James B. Trefethen, An American Crusade for Wildlife (New York: Winchester Press, 1975); Gregory J. Dehler, “An American Crusader: William Temple Hornaday and Wildlife Protection in America, 1840-1940” (Ph.D. diss., Lehigh University, 2001).
26. P. A. Larkin, “An Epitaph for the Concept of Maximum Sustained Yield,” Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 106 (1977): 1, 3.
27. At the forefront of this recognition was Aldo Leopold, whose intellectual progress on the issue is ably recounted in Susan L. Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), 122-67.
28. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).
29. David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 112.
30. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 91-121.
31. Julianne Lutz Newton, “The Commonweal of Life: Aldo Leopold and Land Health” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004; forthcoming from Island Press in 2006), 183-99, 406-53.
32. Thomas Dunlap, Saving America’s Wildlife: Ecology and the American Mind, 1850—1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
33. Robert Croker, Pioneer Ecologist: The Life and Work of Victor Ernest Shelford, 1877—1968 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1991), 120-44.
34. Paul. S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).
35. Larry Anderson, Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 371-79.
36. Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 160.
37. Newton, “The Commonweal of Life,” 120-65, 203-68.
38. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 182-209.
39. Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 31-41, 134-40.
40. Worster, Dust Bowl, 210-26.
41. Ibid., 188-96.
42. Mark Luccarelli, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 56-83.
43. William Vogt, Road to Survival (New York: William Sloane, 1948).
44. Dunlap, Saving America’s Wildlife.
45. A thoughtful summary of differing perspectives is contained in J. Baird Callicott, Larry B. Crowder, and Karen Mumford, “Current Normative Concepts in Conservation,” Conservation Biology 13 (1999): 22-35.
46. The struggles to do so, and the ways in which scientific thought was intermingled with social and political thought, are explored in Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 340-443.
47. Gretchen C. Daily and Katherine Ellison, The New Economy of Nature (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002); Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2000).
48. Nicky Chambers, Craig Simmons, and Mathis Wackernagel, Sharing Nature’s Interest: Ecological Footprints as an Indicator of Sustainability (London: Earthscan, 2000); Mathis Wacker-nagel and William E. Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Philadelphia: New Society, 1996).
49. A useful overview of the vast literature is Peter S. Wenz, Environmental Ethics Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
50. A similar conclusion is reached in Worster, “The Shaky Ground of Sustainable Development,” 153-55.
51. A typical broad use of the term is Schor and Taylor, Sustainable Planet. The term sustainable development, of course, began its life with this kind of breadth. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, 43.
52. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 9-15.
53. Worster, Dust Bowl, 187-96; Lewis C. Gray, “The Problem of Agricultural Settlement and Resettlement in the United States,” Southwestern Political Science Quarterly 2 (1921): 125-51.
54. Sutter, Driven Wild, 54-99.
55. A study prepared by the Office of Management and Budget, “Draft Report to Congress on the Costs and Benefits of Federal Regulations,” 67 Fed. Reg. 15014, 15037 (March 28, 2002), table 11, estimated that as of September 2001, the total aggregated annual costs associated with all major federal environmental regulations had a range with a midpoint of $163 billion; the range for the total annual benefits had a midpoint of $950 billion.
56. David Mobert, “The Wal-Mart Effect,” In These Times, July 5, 2004.
57. Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1992). The larger contexts of industrial agriculture are considered in Terence J. Centner, Empty Pastures: Confined Animals and the Transformation of the Rural Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
1. A fourth approach, used by many social scientists and geographers, is to turn the issue of good land use into a question of process, allowing the people who live in a place to decide for themselves what is good. By definition, whatever the outcome of the proper process is then defined as good land use. The process could entail simply canvassing people individually to find out what they want; it could entail instead some mechanism by which people get together to act collectively. In neither case does the researcher pass judgment (or even have a basis for passing judgment) on the land-use preferences that emerge from the process.
2. Many of the ideas in this chapter first appeared in different form in Eric T. Freyfogle and Julianne Lutz Newton, “Putting Science in Its Place,” Conservation Biology 16 (2002): 863-73, and I thank my coauthor for allowing me to draw freely on it.
3. On the direct links between nature and human health, see Michael McCally, ed., Life Support: The Environment and Human Health (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Dade W. Moeller, Environmental Health, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
4. The market’s various shortcomings are considered in Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004), 157-219.
5. The field is surveyed in Bryan G. Norton, Toward Unity among Environmentalists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Peter S. Wenz, Environmental Ethics Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
6. A careful, detailed study—though now a bit dated—is Willett Kempton, James S. Boster, and Jennifer A. Hartley, Environmental Values in American Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 111, which shows 87 percent of the public agreeing that “all species have a right to evolve without human interference” (versus 82 percent support by Sierra Club members) and 90 percent of the public saying that “preventing species extinction should be our highest environmental priority” (versus 78 percent support by Sierra Club members).
7. This reasoning appears prominently in the writings of Wendell Berry, including his essay “Nature as Measure” in What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 204-10.
8. Carolyn Raffensperger and Joel Tickner, eds., Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999).
9. William P. Rodgers, Environmental Law, 2nd ed. (St. Paul: West, 1994), 800-970.
10. Dale D. Goble and Eric T. Freyfogle, Wildlife Law: Cases and Materials (New York: Foundation Press, 2002), 1220-51.
11. James T. O’Reilly, Food and Drug Administration, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995 and 2004 supplement), 11-32 to 11-39, 14-8 to 14-13.
12. At times the level of proof seems to be set so high that no evidence would satisfy it. See, for instance, Alex Avery and Dennis Avery, “Bring Back DDT, and Save Lives,” Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2000 (“[W]e have yet to find a single significant health threat from DDT use even after 40 years of exhaustive research”).
13. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
14. Thomas Dunlap, DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
15. David Pimentel, Laura Westra, and Reed F. Noss, eds., Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation, and Health (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000); Paul L. Angermeier and James R. Karr, “Biological Integrity versus Biological Diversity as Policy Directives,” BioScience 44 (1994): 690-97; Paul L. Angermeier, “The Natural Imperative for Biological Conservation,” Conservation Biology 14 (2000): 373-81; J. Baird Callicott, Larry B. Crowder, and Karen Mumford, “Current Normative Concepts in Conservation,” Conservation Biology 13 (1999): 22-35.
16. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890—1920 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 2-4.
17. Two essays by Baird Callicott explore the issue in the context of land ethics. J. Baird Callicott, “Hume’s Is/Ought Dichotomy and the Relation of Ecology to Leopold’s Land Ethic,” in In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 117-27; J. Baird Callicott, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” in Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 79-97.
18. Foreman’s ideas are set forth in Dave Foreman, Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004).
19. There are important exceptions. A fine inquiry is undertaken in David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 177-211. A useful summary of considerations appears in Reed F. Noss and Allen Y. Cooperrider, Saving Nature’s Legacy: Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994), 17-23.
20. William R. Jordan III, The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Various perspectives are gathered in A. Dwight Baldwin, Judith De Luce, and Carl Pletsch, eds., Beyond Preservation: Restoring and Inventing Landscapes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
21. Jordan, The Sunflower Forest, 195-204.
22. William Jordan contends that restoration as he defines it can have distinct ecological content. It entails “bringing the whole system back to a former condition whatever that might happen to be—not just those features we find beautiful, interesting, or useful but also those that we consider uninteresting, useless, ugly, repulsive, or even dangerous.” Ibid., 22. It is up to the restorationist, however, to select the “former condition” that will be the goal, and as Jordan notes, this may or may not be a natural condition that is ecologically healthy. Jordan cites as example the restoration of a Nazi concentration camp, a project that involved taking out trees and other plants “in order to return a field of cinders to its former, ecologically sterile condition.” As the example illustrates, “restoration is not the same thing as making a landscape ‘better’ or ‘improving’ it.” The key element of restoration for Jordan is the attempt “to compensate for novel or ‘outside’ influences” on a given place so as to return it to some chosen historical condition. If the chosen state is one without humans, then all human influences must be removed, though, as Jordan notes, given that “everything interacts with and influences everything else, preservation of an ecosystem is ultimately impossible.” Ibid., 23. Restoration as thus defined stands apart “from other restorative forms of land management such as rehabilitation (the restoration of function, or certain selected functions), or reclamation (rehabilitation, usually from a profoundly disturbed condition resulting from an activity such as mining or construction), or even healing (the restoration of health).” Ibid., 22-23.
23. I do not mean to say that particular restoration projects are always or even usually poorly explained in terms of their benefits to the functioning of human-occupied lands. The defect lies at the top level, in the language of restoration itself, which can share many of the defects of sustainability. Just as sustainability fails to tell us what is being sustained, restoration doesn’t indicate what is being restored and why. Particularly as defined by Jordan, the idea and rhetoric of restoration do not give us answers, and it is up to the individual restorationist to choose. The answers are particularly unclear when a restorationist like Jordan feels free to select among any prior historical condition.
1. Samuel P. Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 227 (“The World of contemporary environmental affairs is badly in need of individuals who would reflect on the whole and institutions that could provide the resources for them to do so.. .. Few have time or interest enough to become well informed or to pursue careful understanding of what is one of the most important developments in society and politics in both America and the entire world”).
2. Others have made the same observation: for instance, Richard Andrews, Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 370 (“What is missing from American environmental policy is a coherent vision of common environmental good that is sufficiently compelling to generate sustained public support for government action to achieve it”).
3. Robert Costanza, Bryan G. Norton, and Benjamin D. Haskell, Ecosystem Health: New Goals for Environmental Management (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992).
4. Donald Worster, “The Ecology of Order and Chaos,” in The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 162-70 (noting the declining emphasis on ecosystem in leading ecology texts, including one that does not mention it). Shifts in thought about ecosystems are summarized in Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 234-42.
5. J. Baird Callicott, “Aldo Leopold’s Concept of Ecosystem Health,” in Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 333-45. Dictionaries commonly include among the definitions of the term “vigor or vitality.”
6. Leopold’s ideas about land health and the examples he drew on are considered in Julianne Lutz Newton, “The Commonweal of Life: Aldo Leopold and Land Health” (Ph.D. diss. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004; forthcoming from Island Press in 2006), 411-53.
7. David Pimentel, Laura Westra, and Reed F. Noss, eds., Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation, and Health (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000); Paul L. Angermeier and James R. Karr, “Biological Integrity versus Biological Diversity as Policy Directives,” BioScience 44 (1994): 690-97; J. Baird Callicott, Larry B. Crowder, and Karen Mumford, “Current Normative Concepts in Conservation,” Conservation Biology 13 (1999): 22-35.
8. According to one detailed compilation, undertaken in 1995 based on various sources appearing in the early 1990s, combined state and federal land ownership in the United States accounted for 39.8 percent of all land. The compilation attempted to exclude water areas, leases, and easements and treated Indian tribal lands as private. The states varied in percentages of federal and state land ownership from less than 2 percent (Rhode Island and Kansas) to 95.8 percent (Alaska). National Wilderness Institute, “State by State Government Land Ownership,” http://www.nwi.org/Maps/Land-Chart.html (visited March 28, 2005).
9. I offer comments on the subject in The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003), 241-48.
10. Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004), 198-200.
11. Joseph Sax, “Why America Has a Property Rights Movement,” University of Illinois Law Review (2005): 513-20.
12. Freyfogle, The Land We Share, 230-38.
13. Ibid., 78-81; William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 19-50.
14. Freyfogle, The Land We Share, 167-78; William E. Odum, “Environmental Degradation and the Tyranny of Small Decisions,” BioScience 32 (1982): 728-29; Alfred E. Kahn, “The Tyranny of Small Decisions: Market Failures, Imperfections, and the Limits of Economics,” Kyklos 19 (1966): 23-47.
15. Gary K. Meffe et al., eds., Ecosystems Management: Adaptive, Community-Based Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002); Richard Haeuber, “Setting the Environmental Policy Agenda: The Case of Ecosystem Management,” Natural Resources Journal 36 (1996): 1-27; R. Edward Grumbine, “What Is Ecosystem Management?” Conservation Biology 8 (1994): 27-36.
16. David Western and R. Michael Wright, Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-Based Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994); Eve Endicott, ed., Land Conservation through Public/Private Partnerships (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993); DeWitt John, Civic Environmentalism: Alternatives to Regulation in States and Communities (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1994).
17. David W. Orr, The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004), 61-62.
18. Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).
19. For instance, Gregg Easterbrook, A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism (New York: Viking, 1985), 317-33.
20. For instance, Thomas W. Merrill, “Private Property and the Politics of Environmental Protection,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 28 (2004): 69-80 (“Just as private property generates more wealth, additional wealth generates more environmental protections”). For Merrill, politically active homeowners, defending the values of their private property, can play a role in bringing about environmental improvement, but environmental groups apparently do not nor do citizens who are guided by motives other than protecting the market values of their private property.
21. Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1998).
22. In contrast to the presumptions of conservation opponents and free market advocates are the findings of historians such as Samuel Hays. Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955—1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Explorations in Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); A History of Environmental Politics since 1945. Journalistic histories of the environmental movement, though less reliable, also recount a far different story of environmental change and how it takes place. Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Robert Gottleib, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993). Figuring in the accounts of historians—and missing from the accounts of free market advocates—is the story of the concerted environmental opposition. Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945, 109-21 (“By the 1990s it had become clear that the anti-environmental movement was a permanent feature of the landscape of public affairs”), 119.
23. A careful study of citizen engagement is Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
24. Useful sources include Theodore Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disasters in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).
25. My ideas in this and the next several paragraphs have been much informed by Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). I have also been aided by the writings of David Ehrenfeld and David Orr discussed in entries 4 and 8, respectively, in “Conservation’s Central Readings: A Bibliographic Essay.”
26. Ibid., 70-80.
27. Ibid., 107.
28. Ibid., 111-18.