The year before I began graduate school, I spent a summer as a Forest Service ranger in the Weminuche Wilderness, a half-million acres straddling the Continental Divide in southwestern Colorado. I hiked dozens of miles each week, checking backcountry conditions and making visitor contacts. Other rangers enforced Forest Service regulations by issuing citations. Still others sat at desks in Creede, Durango, or Pagosa Springs, overseeing the administrative work of wilderness management according to guidelines set by foresters in Golden, Colorado or Washington, D.C. Even my brief and limited view of the Weminuche made clear how much human effort went into keeping this piece of the country wild.
The trail crews best demonstrated this incongruity. Winter in the mountains of Colorado brought blowdown: wind-felled trees that often obstructed hiking trails. In the spring and throughout the summer, trail crews cut through the dead trees to clear a path. In the forest at large the crews used all-terrain vehicles and chainsaws. As soon as they reached a wilderness boundary, they abandoned their motorized equipment, saddled horses and mules, and continued up the trail with handsaws and axes. Cutting through a downed tree with a handsaw is strenuous work; what might take minutes with a chainsaw can take over an hour without one. The Forest Service’s commitment to using livestock and hand tools inside wilderness was both noble and odd. Thanks largely to a very human political process, the forest on one side of an administrative boundary was subject to roaring chainsaws and motor exhaust and on the other side free from both.
That summer I read William Cronon’s “The Trouble With Wilderness,” an essay that had sparked an ongoing debate among academics and environmentalists. “The Trouble With Wilderness” describes the paradox that I encountered high in the Rockies: wilderness is both defined by human absence and also “quite profoundly a human creation,” a creation shaped by administrative policies that are themselves the product of deeply rooted assumptions.1 Even when wilderness is thousands of miles away and almost never visited—in fact, especially then—it remains culturally and socially situated. The lone hiker escaping into a nature devoid of human influence is beguiled, stirred by a set of preconceptions packed in along with water and sunscreen.
Like many readers, I found the essay as disconcerting as it was compelling. Even more nettlesome than the idea of wilderness as artifice was the claim that just as human influence streams into wilderness, so artifice trickles out. Wilderness, Cronon writes, “serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest.” The idea of wilderness sits within and informs a larger idea called “nature,” which in turn frames the political movement called environmentalism. That movement’s critiques often assume that people have wandered away from nature-as-it-should-be. As “the ultimate landscape of authenticity,” wilderness offers a baseline against which to measure how far the human world has strayed. If wilderness is a false beacon, then the environmental movement as a whole may be misled.2
In graduate school I learned that Cronon’s wilderness essay was an incisive and provocative statement of a larger trend within the field of environmental history. That trend involved questioning basic categories and was part of what the environmental historian Richard White in 2004 called “the cultural turn.” One of the most significant consequences of this turn, according to White, was an emphasis on “hybrid landscapes rather than the wild, rural, and urban landscapes that were once treated as pure types.” Environmental historians smudged whatever clear lines they once thought existed between city and country, and between human landscapes and natural ones. They recognized that urban places never lacked in nature, and that apparently wild spaces were in fact profoundly shaped by human activity. Natural and human worlds did not stand apart on either side of city limits.3
This smudging erased more than an imagined boundary between boulevards and fields. Cronon’s own Nature’s Metropolis, in demonstrating the inextricable connections between a city and its hinterland, commingled geography with philosophy as easily as it did Chicago with the plains beyond. Cronon described his “deepest intellectual agenda” as not simply to remove lines on a mental map but “to suggest that the boundary between human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural, is profoundly problematic.” Part of the cultural turn in environmental history was a willingness to question the category of “nature” itself.4
The cultural turn had deep implications for environmental history as well as for environmentalism. The implications for environmental history were overwhelmingly salutary. First and foremost, the cultural turn led to a welcome reconsideration of timeworn narratives. An untethering of the field from its most familiar renderings of “nature” produced innovative scholarship that corrected myopic views. Long-cherished subjects, like the conservation movement, received a newly critical treatment. Historians began to describe how conservationists’ fixation on an unpeopled nature allowed them to disregard the established practices—and sometimes even the existence—of already marginalized groups, privileging recreation and sightseeing over subsistence hunting or Native American treaty rights. The decentering of wilderness as an idea, meanwhile, reflected the decentering of wilderness as a place. Historians found in cities and suburbs stories about how people related to the natural world, and even about the origins of the environmental movement. Since the cultural turn, environmental historians have better resisted narrow assumptions about how people understood and used natural resources, and have avoided too-easy morality tales about the innocence of nature and the danger of human influence.5
In the era of climate change and accelerating human impacts on the planet, it is worth revisiting the cultural turn and its place in environmental history. Paul Sutter began to do so several years ago. “Hybridity has challenged declensionist narratives and pushed American environmental historians into new terrain,” Sutter wrote, “but those scholars have found this world, without Eden or sin—without a pure nature or universal human transgression against it—a disorienting place.” Acknowledging the many insights that arose from the cultural turn, Sutter nevertheless suggested that as much as hybridity fueled environmental history’s conversations and debates, its limits grew more apparent in a time of intensifying human influence over nonhuman nature. “Environmental historians,” Sutter wrote, “have not done a great job of reengaging metanarratives of environmental decline after the hybrid turn.”6
It is easy to understand why not. Metanarratives of decline are less compelling when the idea of “nature” is less stable. Scholars have argued forcefully that a too-fixed definition of nature—and maybe even more importantly of the word “natural”—leads to exclusionary systems and practices, and to essentialisms that can be used to marginalize people as much as to explain the nonhuman. The concept “nature” has served to calcify and delimit as much as to enlighten, and so its meaning has to remain fluid and subject to reinterpretation.7
What does this mean for environmentalism, a movement that is in many ways predicated on a nature that exists, at least in part, beyond human conceptions of it? As a graduate student I tried to think about that question by examining a group of environmentalists who proclaimed, more than any others, that nature held meaning and value regardless of what people thought, and who insisted that a felled tree made a sound and subtly altered a forest whether or not people heard the crash or understood its ecological implications. These radical environmentalists wanted above all to challenge human preeminence. They argued that people were no more important than any other living things on the planet or than the ecosystems those things inhabited. They claimed, ultimately, that human beings and human society held no greater moral value than did nonhuman species and ecological systems, a philosophy called “ecocentrism.”
Ecocentrism was a leveling philosophy in that it claimed a moral equality for all of the planet’s inhabitants, but it grew out of a sharp distinction between people and nonhuman nature. Radical environmentalists were not beatific egalitarians. They were angry. They believed, fundamentally, that as modern human society gradually destroyed wild nature it veered toward catastrophe, and that its self-destruction would take much of the planet with it. That belief assumed an oppositional relationship between the human and the natural. To reject ecocentrism, radical environmentalists argued, was to embrace anthropocentrism—human-centeredness. Beyond those two positions lay only equivocation.8
It is easy to dismiss such extreme ideas. They lead in many troubling directions. Chief among them is the way in which the idea of an autonomous nature reinforces one of environmentalism’s most problematic impulses: the tendency to group all people into a single, homogenous category called “human,” a tendency Cronon has criticized as “an oversimplified holism.”9 Environmental holism risks ignoring social and cultural difference and suggesting that all people are equally culpable in modern civilization’s effects on the natural world despite unequal distribution of resources and vast inequities of economic and political power. Environmentalists have often criticized “humanity” in the singular without recognizing the unending diversity to which that term refers.
But as easy as it is to dismiss radicals’ ideas, it is less easy to define an environmentalism without them, or at least without some semblance of them. A world without Eden or sin, Sutter worried, could produce “a haze of moral relativism” in which the basic claim that humans might harm nonhuman nature becomes more and more tenuous.10 In the recent past environmentalism’s critics have produced such a haze, one that has grown more opaque in the era of climate change. As a presidential candidate in 1980, Ronald Reagan downplayed concerns about air quality by claiming that nearly all nitrogen oxide pollution came from plants, and he discounted fears about oil drilling off of the West Coast by comparing spills to naturally occurring oil seepage.11 Years later similar arguments proved just as useful. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the libertarian writer Llewellyn Rockwell said, “Oil is natural, it’s organic, and it’s biodegradable.” Ozone holes, Rockwell claimed, “open and close naturally.” A Mobil Oil ad from 1995 described the nonhuman world as “resilient and capable of rejuvenation,” insisting that “nature itself has produced far more devastating changes than any caused by man…and the environment has survived.”12 The literary scholar Rob Nixon notes a similarly cavalier attitude among politicians and managers who tried to minimize fallout over the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010. The blowout was “a natural phenomenon,” BP’s defenders argued, comparable to regularly occurring oil seeps in the Gulf and just as easily cleaned up by ocean filtration. The endpoint of this logic is the claim that climate change should cause little concern, because changing climates are natural and the planet has survived countless instances. As early as 1990, Rockwell suggested that global warming could “lengthen growing seasons, make the earth more liveable, and forestall a future ice age”—by now familiar talking points for climate change apologists. “The recent turn within environmental studies toward celebrating the creative resilience of ecosystems,” Nixon writes, “can be readily hijacked by politicians, lobbyists, and corporations who oppose regulatory controls and strive to minimize pollution liability.”13
The challenge for environmental historians, and for environmentalists, is to insist that humans should carefully consider their impact on nature even as terms like “humans,” “impact,” and “nature” lose much of their ballast. “Hybridity may be a source of hope,” Sutter wrote, “but at this moment of unprecedented human influence over the global environment—what many call the Anthropocene—environmental historians must better contend with and communicate the cultural, material, and moral complexity implicated in the term.”14 The notion of a geological age of humans, “the Anthropocene,” captures a tension between urgency and complexity. “Anthropocene” is primarily descriptive but can easily tip in one of several prescriptive directions. In one of those directions is acute anxiety over the ways that people are more and more rapidly refashioning the planet. In another direction is the celebration of an earth made over by human design, or a complacent insistence that there remain no meaningful differences between people and nonhuman nature and so less reason to worry about one’s effects on the other.
Radical environmentalists believed very strongly that a planet dominated by humans should be a source of anxiety rather than complacency or celebration, and that environmentalism without anxiety and even anger is less meaningful. Their ideas deserve more of a hearing today. In the Anthropocene, when the human and the natural are more and more of a piece, environmentalism can become a narrower and more technical matter of simply measuring risk and reward. That narrow version of environmentalism loses what Jedediah Purdy calls “the prophetic strain of environmental politics, which has always been a part of its power, and is more important than ever today.”15 In the Anthropocene, environmentalism must be a view from somewhere.
An environmental point of view is not necessarily an ecocentric one that draws distinctions between people and nature. There are many reasons why it shouldn’t be. But an environmental point of view must wrestle with the vital questions that ecocentrism raises. The more I learned about radical environmentalists the more I understood them as serious thinkers, engaged in conversations that held great relevance for the broad environmental movement and for the way that anyone might think about climate change and the Anthropocene. Their ideas were sometimes deeply wrongheaded, but their conversations were often thoughtful and even urgent. And their false turns came from confronting issues that were and are complicated, distressing, and maybe even irreconcilable.
Critics of radical environmentalism confronted the same issues, and the same irreconcilability. It is easy to forget, after the influence of “The Trouble With Wilderness,” just how carefully that essay made its points. Although many writers who have used Cronon’s arguments have done so single-mindedly, Cronon himself remained painfully aware of what might be lost along with romantic views of wilderness. He admitted a “deep ambivalence” about what wilderness meant for environmentalism, and was uneasy not only about the binaries that wilderness advocacy could encourage but also about diminishing the power of an autonomous nature to act as “an indispensable corrective to human arrogance.” However much people shaped wilderness, they did not finally control it. Always beyond complete human understanding, wilderness provided an unmistakable encounter with “something irreducibly nonhuman, something profoundly Other than yourself.” And that encounter could unsettle as many assumptions as it might reinforce. Whether a false beacon or not, the idea of wilderness continued to point toward what Cronon called a “critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time.”16
The Weminuche Wilderness and “The Trouble With Wilderness” unsettled and reinforced many of my own assumptions. Since hiking the one and reading the other, I have kept asking questions about what wilderness means for environmentalism and what environmentalism might mean in the twenty-first century. This book is an attempt to answer them.
The subject of this book has made me think about human beings as a species; the writing of it has made me deeply appreciative of people as individuals. No one has inspired this project more than Bill Cronon. As much as Bill’s scholarship shaped my thought and my writing, his mentorship has been even more meaningful. Through countless conversations and through his own example, he helped me understand what sort of thinker I wanted to be.
Many other faculty members at the University of Wisconsin taught me what historians do. Particularly important were the members of my dissertation committee: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Lou Roberts, Bill Reese, and Gregg Mitman. At Amherst College, Kevin Sweeney and David Blight made being a historian look exciting long before I actually decided to do it.
At Wisconsin, I joined what I am sure is one of the best and certainly one of the most fun communities of graduate students in the country. I suspected this before I even arrived because I had already met Jim Feldman. I knew it beyond doubt after I met Marc Hertzman, and spent the better part of the next decade becoming his close friend. I met many more people in Madison who became intellectual companions and good friends, including Cydney Alexis, Lauren Bresnahan, Emily Brown, Scott Burkhardt, Liese Dart, Elizabeth Feldman, Laura Haertel, Marian Halls, Jenn Holland, Tim Lenoch, Marilen Loyola, Dan Magaziner, Adam Malka, Adam Mandelman, Jen Martin, Brittany McCormick, Nic Mink, Alissa Moore, Ryan Quintana, Tom Robertson, Kendra Smith-Howard, Courtney Stein, Zoe Van Orsdol, Tara Waldron, Erica Wojcik, Tom Yoshikami, and Anna Zeide. At Northwestern I have gotten to know a warm and supportive group of colleagues with whom it is a pleasure to work. During my first few years, Ken Alder served as department chair and Mike Sherry acted as a mentor. Both were and are full of generous wisdom. Paul Ramirez in particular has become a great friend.
A Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship proved crucial in completing my dissertation, and I am grateful to the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for its generous support. I spent several semesters as an adjunct instructor during and after graduate school, and I worked with smart and friendly colleagues at both the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. In a very difficult job market that leaves far too many stellar applicants adrift, I was lucky enough to find harbor in a postdoctoral fellowship with the Huntington Library-University of Southern California Institute on California and the West (ICW). Before arriving in Southern California I was likely one of the last people in the world not to have met ICW director Bill Deverell. Now I consider myself fortunate to count him as a friend. I had the chance to return to Southern California, and to put the finishing touches on this book, during a fellowship year at the Huntington Library. The Huntington runs a remarkable fellowship program that attracts an extraordinary group of scholars, and I was extremely lucky to have been a part of both.
While researching radical environmentalism, I had the chance to work with several excellent library staffs. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin served as a second home in graduate school, and the librarians in special collections, in the periodicals department, and in the microform room shared their expertise time and time again. The Denver Public Library is one of the great public libraries in the United States, and its special collections staff patiently helped me navigate its excellent conservation collection. I also relied on the friendly professionalism of librarians at Northwestern University, the University of California-Davis, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Southern California. Most of all, however, I worked with the staff of the Bancroft Library at the University of California-Berkeley. I spent hundreds of hours at the Bancroft and find it hard to imagine a nicer library or a more competent, knowledgeable, and welcoming group of librarians.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to four Earth First! founders. I spent several hours on the phone with Howie Wolke and Bart Koehler, both of whom talked to me at length despite the fact that Bart was busy with family matters and Howie hates long phone calls. I visited Mike Roselle in West Virginia and talked to him for the better part of an afternoon. Mike was generous with his time and with his opinions, and I learned a great deal from our conversation. Most of all I owe thanks to Dave Foreman. I spoke with Dave on several occasions at his home in Albuquerque, and he let me look through many boxes of documents stacked in his garage. A historian at heart, Dave told me stories about Earth First!’s early years and encouraged me to look through the papers he’d kept, never once questioning what I intended to do with any of it. I have tried to approach Earth First! critically, but I hope that the group’s founders recognize the admiration I hold for their spirit and dedication.
Andie Tucher and the Society for American Historians guided my dissertation to Columbia University Press, and Philip Leventhal received it there. Working with Columbia has been a pleasure, thanks largely to Bridget Flannery-McCoy and her team. I did not really understand what editors do—and how essential their work is—before working with Bridget. Receiving her extensive comments on drafts was at first daunting and at last revelatory. She did far more work than I could reasonably expect, and the final product is much, much better for all of her suggestions and insights as well as her uncanny sense of argumentative structure. Several other people did me the great favor of reviewing drafts. The editors and readers of the Journal for the Study of Radicalism helped me work through some initial ideas. (Some material originally appeared as “The Politics of Ecology: Environmentalism and Liberalism in the 1960s” JSR 2 (Fall 2008) and is reprinted here with permission of Michigan State University Press). Mark Stoll read an early version. Derek Hoff and Michelle Chihara offered trenchant feedback on individual chapters. Steve Hahn graciously took time out of a leave year to read several chapters. Tom Robertson provided thoughtful comments on the manuscript as a whole that guided crucial revisions. Alex Moisa spent a summer helping me with research. And anonymous readers for Columbia University Press provided important feedback. Whatever you might like about this book is thanks in part to these careful readers; anything you don’t like is my responsibility alone.
I lived with an assortment of people during the many years I spent researching and writing. In Madison I lived for two years with Scott Burkhardt and for two years with Tom Yoshikami (including a brief overlap with Ryan Quintana), years that deepened already dear friendships. I spent my last year in Madison on East Johnson with Jonny Hunter, Sarah Christopherson, Matt Robertson, Jamie Duffin, and Mia Cava, all of whom I was happy to run into in the kitchen. In Berkeley I spent a year with two old friends: Nick Collins and Micah Porter. In Los Angeles I lived with Tim Lenoch and then with Ray Chao, and spent hours on the phone talking politics with Adam Malka. Daniel Immerwahr generously provided room and board for three crucial days of apartment hunting. There were others who hosted me for days or weeks, including Max Nanao, Ben Bloch, and Zana Ikels. I spent my last year of writing in Pasadena with Jessica Biddlestone, who more than anyone else endured the hardships of living alongside an all-consuming project. I hope that, much more, she lived with all of my love and affection and continues to do so.
Finally, I lived on and off with my family. I spent time with my sister Miya, who looks out for me even from far away; with my brother Leighton and sister-in-law Carolina, who made living in Los Angeles a real joy; and with July, the sweetest if not the most energetic dog in the world. And I spent many weeks with my parents, who have given me much more than I can ever repay and to whom this is dedicated.