The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History

Environmental history incorporates into history the characteristics of particular environments and the methods people have used to exploit or conserve forests, waters, soils, and animals. In Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Alfred W. Crosby spells out his theory of the “portmanteau biota”: the cooperative, if unconscious assistance that livestock, crops, and microbes provided Europeans as they explored and conquered native populations around the world. Following Crosby’s foundational work, Jared Diamond published Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998) to expound on the idea that the advance of civilizations was shaped primarily by the plenitude or paucity of domesticable animals and plants that happened to evolve on particular continents. The east-west orientation of Eurasia was superior to the north-south orientation of the Americas in the transmission of domesticates, technologies, and political systems.

Another important work that sets the stage for the transformation of the physical environment is Stephen Pyne’s Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). In this work, Pyne treats fire as a cultural phenomenon. The impact and consequences of fires depend not only upon environmental factors but also upon the cultural system in which the fire takes place. How people judge a fire, their understanding of its dynamics, and their ability to control it all depend on the values and knowledge of the community. Yi-Fu Tuan is a geographer whose work also makes an important contribution to the study of how humans perceive and understand their environments. His Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974) and other related studies look at cultural and regional comparisons, as well as reflections of human environmental values in art, philosophy, and religion.

The ways in which American Indians have related to the land ecologically has been the subject of several books. Calvin Martin in Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) argues that Indians believed in animal spirits, taboos, and rituals that allowed for ordained killing of animals, who gave their permission to be killed in return for respectful treatment of their remains. Introduced diseases, Martin argues, undermined the power of the tribal shaman, leading to the spiritual breakdown of the community. The Micmac, Ojibwa, and other northeastern hunting cultures apostatized, betraying the animal spirits and breaking traditional taboos, thereby allowing the animals to be harvested for the fur trade. Clothed-in-Fur and Other Tales: An Introduction to an Ojibwa World View, edited by J. Baird Callicott and Thomas W. Overholt, (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), reveals relationships between Indians and the land that preserved nature and its bounty. J. Donald Hughes in American Indian Ecology (El Paso: Texas Western University Press, 1983) likewise presents a highly positive view of American Indians as practicing ecologically viable methods of hunting, fishing, gathering, and horticulture within spiritual patterns that allowed for respect for the land and its nonhuman inhabitants.

The size of the aboriginal population has been extensively treated and disputed. Rejecting earlier estimates of a million people at the dawn of European settlement of North America, Henry F. Dobyns in 1966 used epidemic data to recalculate the aboriginal population at 10 to 12 million, and then revised it upward to 18 million in his 1983 book Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, in cooperation with the Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian, 1983). In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: Norton, 1999), Shepard Krech III reassesses the demographic evidence and methods used by Dobyns and others, settling on a pre-contact population of between 4 and 7 million. He also reevaluates the stereotype that all Indians lived in ecological harmony and balance with the land, arguing instead that a diversity of cultural adaptations and practices prevailed, which varied in the extent to which Indians left the environment in a usable state for future generations.

The important and highly influential concept of wilderness was introduced to environmental history by Roderick Nash in 1967 and elaborated in subsequent editions, in 1973 and 1982. His classic book Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967) examines the United States’ changing intellectual sentiment toward nature and wilderness from the colonial period to the 1950s, detailing the nation’s evolving interest in wilderness experiences and outdoor recreation. One of the first places in which wilderness was encountered and transformed was New England. In his influential book Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), William Cronon argues that the arrival of Europeans in colonial New England heralded a dramatic shift in the use of forests and other natural resources. At the heart of the conflict between Indians and Europeans lay their different attitudes toward land use, and the success of capitalism is inseparable from the elimination of the New England Indians. Cronon’s work was followed in 1989 by Carolyn Merchant’s Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), which explicates a theory of revolutions in land use, arguing that essential shifts twice transformed gender relations, economic production, and modes of consciousness in New England history—once with the arrival of the colonists in the seventeenth century, and once with the Market Revolution of the early nineteenth century.

By comparison with forest history and wilderness preservation, the environmental history of the South has received little attention from environmental historians, but some excellent histories have appeared in the field. Originally published in 1926, the classic work on the Tobacco South is Avery O. Craven’s Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860 (reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith Publishers), which examines soil depletion as a product of frontier conditions. Timothy Silver sets out an exemplary multicultural environmental history of the early South that includes the ways that Indians, blacks, and whites all used the land and forests in A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Mart A. Stewart’s environmental history of the deep South focuses on rice cultivation and labor processes in “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

In This Land, This South: An Environmental History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983), Albert E. Cowdrey argues that row crop monocultures of cotton and corn set up the conditions for soil erosion, pest outbreaks, and parasites. Carville Earle disputes the role of ordinary, smalltime farmers in creating soil erosion in “The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner: Macrohistory, Agricultural Innovation, and Environmental Change,” an essay that appeared in The Ends of the Earth, edited by Donald Worster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Pete Daniel, in Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), looks at the sharecropping system that became widespread after the Civil War, consolidating power in the hands of bankers, merchants, and loan companies and perpetuating soil degradation. Cooperative extension agents aided farmers in dealing with problems of soil erosion and pest outbreaks.

Another foundational concept for the formation of the American environment is that of the pastoral landscape and the idea of the land as a garden. Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) shows how Americans have historically imagined their nation in two very different ways: as a rural paradise and as an industrialized, mechanized nation. He examines the historical roots of these images and traces their impact on the course of the nation’s history. Equally important in the area of artistic responses to the environment is Barbara Novak’s Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Novak focuses on the governing idea of nature in American painting, while tracing its roots to European schools of art and the American artist’s vision of the country as a movement between ideas such as nature and civilization, dark and light, rural and cultivated. William Cronon’s innovative essay “Telling Tales on Canvas,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), interprets American paintings as narrative moments that reveal the past, present, and future directions of the environment as influenced by human action.

John Stilgoe’s Common Landscape of America, 1580–1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) likewise deals with landscape formation. He examines the European roots of the early settlements in America and then moves on to discuss the layering of regional and national icons and the imposition of turnpikes, fences, and the surveyor’s grid on the American rural landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The market economy that transformed nature into economic resources is explicated by Charles Sellers in his influential book The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Sellers looks at the impact of the concurrent transportation and market revolutions in reinforcing a competitive, get-ahead spirit consistent with the capitalist transformation of land and life that resulted in intensive economic development.

Setting the stage for the interpretation of the westward movement is the foundational essay by Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” written in 1893 and published in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Washington, D.C., 1894). Turner argues that the environment stripped the settler of his European cultural garb and reformed his character as an American, born of free land and the democratic ideal. After a century, Turner’s argument is still significant for the emphasis it places on the western environment in shaping American history and for the influence it has had on generations of scholars of the American West.

One of the persistent accounts of Great Plains environmental history has been the demise of the bison at the hands of the U.S. military and buffalo hunters, who came close to exterminating the millions of buffalo that once roamed the plains and on which Indian livelihood depended. But ecological factors set the stage for that rapid decline, according to Dan Flores in “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850” (Journal of American History 78 [September 1991]: 465–485). Horses introduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries competed with bison, and the climate changed to arid, warmer conditions unfavorable to the grasses that supported bison reproduction. Andrew Isenberg’s Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) likewise uses ecological history to recast the bison narrative, arguing that Indians participated in the bison trade in exchange for guns, blankets, kettles, and liquor, and that there was no conspiracy between hide hunters and the military to decimate the bison.

Walter Prescott Webb’s foundational work The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn, 1931) portrays the transformation of the arid, treeless, level Great Plains through technological innovations, including barbed wire, the six-shooter, the windmill, and the John Deere plow, showing how they allowed American settlers to dominate the Great Plains environment in an unprecedented fashion. Several works by Donald Worster, on the other hand, analyze changes in the Western environment as negatively affected by technology and the capitalist transformation of nature. In Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), Worster overturns the myth of the pioneer conquering the Great Plains by demonstrating how the homesteader confidence in providence, hard work, and capitalism ultimately led to environmental catastrophe, in the form of the Dust Bowl. His book Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) looks at the efforts of the federal government, engineers, and capitalists to harness the arid West’s rivers in order to convert the barren landscape into a farmer’s paradise. Drawing on the writings of Karl Wittfogel concerning past hydraulic societies, Worster demonstrates the increased ecological and social costs of efforts to exploit human labor and the natural environment under the capitalist mode of production.

Richard White in The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995) seeks to bridge the gap between nature and culture through a history of human labor and the energy provided to humans by the environment. Rather than emphasizing recreational or philosophical relationships between man and nature, White uses the dams and salmon fisheries of the Columbia River to refocus environmental history on the role of labor and the working person’s relationship with the natural world. Like White, Arthur McEvoy looks at fisheries on the West Coast, but instead emphasizes the role of law, the social structures of various groups of indigenous and immigrant peoples, and differing forms of environmental cognition. His influential book The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) covers the evolution of fishing in California from the period of Native American settlement to the post–World War II period, showing how the environment and society have evolved dynamically, and that the modern environmental threat to the health of the fisheries lies in the social conditions of fishing and problems of regulating the industry.

In Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), William Cronon tells the history of Chicago’s dramatic growth in the late nineteenth century by examining the development of the markets for meat, lumber, and grain. Theodore Steinberg’s Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) focuses on the problem of river development in the increasingly industrialized countryside of northern New England. Issues of urban environmental and workplace health are explicated by Christopher Sellers in Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Martin V. Melosi has written extensively on the urban environment. His Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880–1980 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980) details the country’s growing need to dispose of waste and the technological problems faced and overcome. His edited volume Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870–1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980) gathers together foundational articles on air, water, noise, and garbage pollution and attempts to initiate reform. Melosi’s Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (New York: Knopf, 1985) looks at issues of energy in an industrializing nation, while The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) links problems of maintaining clean water supplies with discharging domestic wastes and industrial effluents. Another major contribution to understanding urban environmental problems has been made by Joel A. Tarr in The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1996), a collection of his essays on city wastes and their environmental consequences.

Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: the Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) is an important work on the suburban environment. Jackson charts the evolution of transportation systems in relation to the socioeconomic composition of communities. Adam Rome’s The Bulldozer in the Countryside (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) looks at suburban sprawl and the rise of environmentalism.

In his classic book on the roots of the conservation movement, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), Samuel P. Hays argues that the roots of natural resource management during the Progressive Era lay in the period’s devotion to efficiency, and in the role played by a rising cadre of experts who researched and promoted scientific methods of managing the country’s forests, water, and rangelands. An overview of the recent environmental movement’s development in the United States is offered by Donald Fleming in “Roots of the New Conservation Movement,” which appeared in Perspectives in American History 6 (1972). Fleming focuses on major writers of the recent movement, including Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold, as well as René Dubos, Barry Commoner, and Paul Ehrlich. Samuel Trask Dana and Sally K. Fairfax’s Forest and Range Policy, Its Development in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980) is a comprehensive treatment of the changing policies and laws pertaining to forest and range conservation, and includes a highly useful time line of significant dates in forest and environmental history.

The history of the concurrent preservation movement is elaborated by Stephen Fox in The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and his Legacy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981). Fox traces the history of environmental activism in the United States with the underlying assumption that today’s movement draws its inspiration from John Muir’s philosophy of preservation. Paul Brooks’s Speaking for Nature: How Literary Naturalists from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson Have Shaped America (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1980) traces the history of a tradition of American writers whose descriptions of nature have helped fellow citizens to appreciate their homeland. In Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), Vera Norwood examines American women’s contributions to the study and preservation of nature from the early 1800s to the present. She argues that women have sought to validate their role in society and home through their work in nature.

The history of the creation of America’s national parks, many out of what were considered lands too worthless for resource development, is recounted in Alfred Runte’s National Parks: The American Experience, 3d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). In How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History (New York: Viking Press, 1998), Steven Pyne provides an arresting analysis of the social construction of nature in the Grand Canyon, from worthless impediment to Spanish explorations, to the discovery of the canyon as a place of geological grandeur, to the iconographic indemnification of the canyon as wilderness. The preservation movement also included the saving of the giant charismatic redwood forests. Susan Schrepfer’s The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) focuses on California’s coastal redwoods and the struggle to save them from the ax and sawmill.

Francis Paul Prucha’s The Indians in American Society: From the Revolutionary War to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) is a valuable overview of two centuries of U.S. policy toward Indians, making the case for tribal sovereignty. John Ehle’s Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation (New York: Doubleday, 1988) details the heartbreaking removal of the Cherokees from their ancestral lands and their journey to reservations in Oklahoma. In American Indian Water Rights and the Limits of Law (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), Lloyd Burton argues that, from the 1908 Winters decision that gave Indians rights of first appropriation to water on their reservations up through the 1960s, the courts have upheld Indian water rights, while Congress and the executive have ignored or subverted them. Mark David Spence in Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) looks at the ways Indians were removed from their tribal territories that became Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite National Parks, as those lands came to symbolize sublime, pristine wilderness in which humans are visitors who do not remain. In American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek look at conflicts between Indians and Park administrations over hunting and gathering rights and over the maintenance of cultural traditions, while in Indian Country, God’s Country: Native Americans and the National Parks (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000), Philip Burnham details the effects of tourism on Indians in and around the parks.

Aldo Leopold was one of the nation’s foremost twentieth-century conservationists. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949) combines reflections on his efforts to restore an abandoned, eroded farm in Wisconsin with the articulation of a land ethic. Having spent his life practicing and teaching wildlife management, Leopold gradually began to see the benefits of allowing nature to manage itself. Susan Flader’s Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude Toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974) tells the story of Leopold’s work in game management and his conversion to an ecological way of thinking.

An ecological perspective developed also through plant and animal ecology. Ronald C. Tobey’s Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) traces the evolution of institutionalized ecology in the midwest universities of the United States, focusing on the careers of C. E. Bessey, Frederic Clements, and, in Great Britain, A.G. Tansley. Donald Worster’s influential Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), first released in 1977 with an updated edition in 1994, takes the perspective of individuals who studied nature between the eighteenth century and the present, examines the influence of social issues on their work, and traces the history of the development of ecology as a science. The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory by ecologist Robert P. McIntosh (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) focuses on internal developments within the field of ecology itself.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin) awakened a generation of environmentalists to the dangers of pesticide use and the fallacy of believing blindly in science and technology. Her book has remained a classic as much as for its inspired use of language as for its message. Linda J. Lear’s prize-winning biography, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Holt, 1997), relates Carson’s early life, her work in marine biology, and her struggles to alert the world to the problems of pesticide accumulation in the food chain.

Samuel P. Hays’s sequel to his history of the early conservation movement deals with environmental values in the post–World War II period. In Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Hays speculates that changes in the values of the American public after World War II account for the rise in environmentalism during the 1960s and 1970s. In A History of Environmental Politics Since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), he details the rise of environmental politics, economics, science, and technology. John Opie’s Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Ft. Worth, Texas.: Harcourt Brace, 1998), a comprehensive overview of the development of environmental history in the United States, is especially noteworthy for its up-to-date history of the contemporary environmental movement. Robert Gottlieb’s work defines new directions for environmental history. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993) combines the field’s traditional focus on wilderness preservation with a new interest in the work of labor activists who have sought to improve the urban environment.