A COMPANION TO AMERICAN

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

Edited by

Douglas Cazaux Sackman

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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9781405156653_5_index.indd 6749781405156653_5_index.indd 674 1/30/2010 12:54:30 PM1/30/2010 12:54:30 PM

A Companion to American Environmental History

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BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO AMERICAN HISTORYThis series provides essential and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our present understanding of the American past. Edited by eminent historians, each volume tackles one of the major periods or themes of American history, with individual topics authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research on the questions and controversies that have sparked debate in their field of interest. The volumes are accessible for the non-specialist, while also engaging scholars seeking a reference to the historiography or future concerns.

PublishedA Companion to the American Revolution edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole

A Companion to 19th-Century America edited by William L. Barney

A Companion to the American South edited by John B. Boles

A Companion to American Indian History edited by Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury

A Companion to American Women’s History edited by Nancy Hewitt

A Companion to Post-1945 America edited by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig

A Companion to the Vietnam War edited by Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco

A Companion to Colonial America edited by Daniel Vickers

A Companion to 20th-Century America edited by Stephen J. Whitfield

A Companion to the American West edited by William Deverell

A Companion to American Foreign Relations edited by Robert Schulzinger

A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction, edited by Lacy K. Ford

A Companion to American Technology, edited by Carroll Pursell

A Companion to African-American History, edited by Alton Hornsby

A Companion to American Immigration, edited by Reed Ueda

A Companion to American Cultural History, edited by Karen Halttunen

A Companion to California History, edited by William Deverell and David Igler

A Companion to American Military History, edited by James Bradford

A Companion Los Angeles, edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise

A Companion to American Environmental History, edited by Douglas Sackman

In preparationA Companion to American Urban History, edited by David Quigley

A Companion to the History of American Science, edited by Mark Largent

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A COMPANION TO AMERICAN

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

Edited by

Douglas Cazaux Sackman

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

ffirs.indd iiiffirs.indd iii 2/1/2010 5:40:10 PM2/1/2010 5:40:10 PM

This edition fi rst published 2010© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientifi c, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to American environmental history / edited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman. p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to American history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-5665-3 (hardcover: alk. paper)1. Environmentalism–United States–History. 2. Environmental policy–United States– History.3. Green movement–United States–History. I. Sackman, Douglas Cazaux, 1968– GE195.C655 2010 333.720973–dc22

2009043696

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Set in 11/13pt Galliard by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, IndiaPrinted in Singapore

01 2010

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Contents

Notes on Contributors viiiIntroduction xiii

Part I The Elements of Environmental History 11 Paths Toward Home: Landmarks of the Field in

Environmental History 3 Louis S. Warren

2 Air 33 Nancy Langston

3 The Living Earth: History, Darwinian Evolution, and the Grasslands 51

Donald Worster

4 Fire 69 Stephen J. Pyne

5 Water 92 Rebecca Solnit

Part II Nature and the Construction of Society and Identity 976 Race and US Environmental History 99 Colin Fisher

7 Gender 116 Susan R. Schrepfer and Douglas Cazaux Sackman

8 Class 146 Chad Montrie

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vi CONTENTS

9 Body Counts: Tracking the Human Body Through Environmental History 163

Neil M. Maher

Part III The Nature of American Culture 18110 From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural

Turn in Environmental History 183 Richard White

11 American Indian Environmental Relations 191 David Rich Lewis

12 Cultures of Nature: To ca. 1810 214 Matthew Dennis

13 Cultures of Nature: Nineteenth Century 246 Aaron Sachs

14 Cultures of Nature: Twentieth Century 266 Finis Dunaway

15 From Wilderness Prophets to Tool Freaks: Post-World War II Environmentalism 285

Andrew Kirk

16 The Black Box in the Garden: Consumers and the Environment 304 Tom McCarthy

Part IV Contact Zones: Americans Conjoining the Natural World 325

17 Flora 327 Frieda Knobloch

18 Fauna: A Prospectus for Evolutionary History 345 Edmund Russell

19 Water Development: The Plot Thickens 375 Patty Limerick

20 Rich Crevices of Inquiry: Mining and Environmental History 394 Katherine G. Morrissey

21 Who Cares About Forests? How Forest History Matters 410 Ellen Stroud

22 Cultivating an Agro-Environmental History 425 Sara M. Gregg

23 Oceans: Fusing the History of Science and Technology with Environmental History 442

Helen M. Rozwadowski

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CONTENTS vii

24 Cities and Suburbs 462 Chris Sellers

25 Energy and Transportation 482 Brian Black

26 The Global Ecological Reach of the United States: Exporting Capital and Importing Commodities 505

Richard P. Tucker

27 Food 529 Douglas Cazaux Sackman

Part V Outside of the Grid: Place, Borders, and Scale 55128 Blinded by History: The Geographic Dimension

of Environment and Society 553 Richard Walker and Sarah Thomas

29 The Northeastern Pacifi c Basin: An Environmental Approach to Seascapes and Littoral Places 579

David Igler

30 Earthlings: Evolution and Place in Environmental History 595 Dan Flores

31 “Most Fruitful Results”: Transborder Approaches to Canadian-American Environmental History 615

Ted Binnema

32 Seeing Beyond Our Borders: US and Non-US Historiographies 635 Paul Sutter

Index 653

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Ted Binnema, a Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia, teaches several courses that encourage students to employ trans-border approaches to better understand the past. Much of his research has also employed transborder approaches to the history of the environment and of indigenous peoples. His publications include Common and Contested Ground (2001), and articles in Environmental History, Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, and Ca-nadian Historical Review.

Brian Black is Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona, where he also co-coordinates Penn State’s program in environmental studies. His research emphasis is on the landscape and environmental history of North America, particularly in relation to the application and use of energy and technology. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (2003) and the forth-coming Contesting Gettysburg: Preserv-ing a Cherished American Landscape. He is currently at work on a cultural history of petroleum in the US.

Matthew Dennis, Professor of History and Environmental Studies at the Uni-versity of Oregon, is the author of Cul-tivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in 17th-Century America (1993); Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An American Calendar (2002); Riot and Revelry in Early Amer-ica (2002; co-editor); Encyclopedia of Holidays and Celebrations, 3 vols. (2006; general editor); and most recently, Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (2010). He is currently writing a cultural and po-litical history of death, mortal remains, and public memory in America.

Finis Dunaway is Associate Professor of History at Trent University, where he teaches courses in modern United States history, visual culture, and environmen-tal studies. He is the author of Natural Visions: The Power of Images in Ameri-can Environmental Reform (2005) and of articles in American Quarterly, Envi-ronmental History, Raritan, and other journals. He is currently writing a book about visual culture and the environ-mental crisis.

Colin Fisher is an Associate Profes-sor of History at the University of San

Notes on Contributors

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix

Diego. He is currently fi nishing a book project on workers, immigrants, and Af-rican Americans in turn-of-the-century Chicago and their leisure-time encoun-ters with nature.

Dan Flores is a writer and professor who divides his time between places in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana and the Galisteo Valley outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. He holds the A. B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the Univer-sity of Montana, where he specializes in the environmental and cultural history of the West. He is the author of eight books, most recently Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West.

Sara M. Gregg is currently a postdoc-toral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, where she is work-ing on a new project on rural credit entitled Federal Aid to the Farmer. Her research is concerned with the in-tersections between agricultural pro-duction and the environment, and she has two books forthcoming: Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia, and a co-ed-ited volume on agrarian writing in US history, American Georgics.

David Igler is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Industrial Cow-boys: Miller & Lux and the Transforma-tion of the Far West, 1850–1920 (2001), and co-editor (with William Deverell) of A Companion to California History (2008) and co-editor (with Clark Da-vis) of The Human Tradition in Cali-fornia (2002). He is currently writing an environmental and cultural history of the eastern Pacifi c Basin.

Andrew Kirk is Professor of Environ-mental and Western History and Direc-tor of the Public History Program at

the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His most recent book is Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (2007).

Frieda Knobloch is an Associate Pro-fessor of American Studies at the Uni-versity of Wyoming. She is the author of The Culture of Wilderness: Agricul-ture as Colonization in the American West (1996) and Botanical Companions: A Memoir of Plants and Place (2005). Currently, she is working on a cultural and environmental history of Wyo-ming’s Red Desert environments.

Nancy Langston is a Professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wiscon-sin-Madison, with a joint appointment in the Nelson Institute for Environ-mental Studies and an affi liate appoint-ment in the Department of History. Her most recent book is Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (2010). Her current research ex-plores the intersections between climate change and forestry, focusing on North American boreal forests.

David Rich Lewis is Professor of His-tory at Utah State University and editor of the Western Historical Quarterly. He is the author of Neither Wolf Nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change (1994) and, most re-cently, he co-edited Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian (2007).

Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the board of the Center of the American West at the Univer-sity of Colorado, Boulder, where she is also a Professor of History. Limerick has dedicated her career to bridging the gap between academics and the general public and to demonstrating the ben-efi ts of applying historical perspective to contemporary dilemmas and confl icts.

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x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Limerick’s books include Desert Passages (1985), The Legacy of Conquest (1987), and Something in the Soil (2001).

Tom McCarthy is an Associate Profes-sor in the History Department at the US Naval Academy, where he teaches courses in US and world history. He is the author of Auto Mania: Cars, Con-sumers, and the Environment (2007).

Neil M. Maher is an Associate Profes-sor in the Federated History Depart-ment at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University at Newark, where he teaches environmen-tal history and political history. He has published articles in academic journals including the Western Historical Quar-terly, Environmental History, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and ed-ited a collection of essays by historians, scientists, and policy analysts titled New Jersey’s Environments: Past, Present, and Future (2006). He has recently pub-lished Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (2008), and is currently researching and writing a book on the environmen-tal history of the space race during the long 1960s.

Chad Montrie is an Associate Profes-sor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he teaches courses on American environmental history, the 1960s, American women’s history, and documentary fi lmmaking. His publications include Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States (2008) and To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (2003). Currently, he is writing a text for undergraduates, titled A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States.

Katherine G. Morrissey is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and a Faculty Affi liate with the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona. Her publications include Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire (1997), the co-edited Picturing Arizona: The Photographic Record of the 1930s (2005), and several articles on mining, environment, and cultural rep-resentations.

Stephen J. Pyne is a Professor at Ari-zona State University, a former 15-summer member of the North Rim Longshots, and the author of a score of books, mostly dealing with the history and management of fi re on Earth. His most recent book is Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Se-rious Nonfi ction (2009).

Helen M. Rozwadowski, Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, directs the Maritime Stud-ies Program at the University of Con-necticut’s Avery Point campus. Her prize-winning book, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (2005), explores the linked scientifi c and cultural growth of interest in the deep ocean in the mid-nineteenth century. She has written a history of twentieth-century marine science, The Sea Knows No Bound-aries (2002), and co-edited two volumes: The Machine in Neptune’s Garden: Per-spectives on Technology and the Marine En-vironment (2004) and Extremes: Ocean-ography’s Adventures at the Poles (2007). Her current research focuses on undersea exploration of the 1950s and 1960s.

Edmund Russell is an Associate Pro-fessor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society and the De-partment of History at the University of Virginia and the author of War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

Silent Spring (2001). His research has won awards in environmental history, history of technology, and history of science. Currently, he is working to de-velop evolutionary history as a research program for environmental historians and other scholars.

Aaron Sachs is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Cor-nell University and the author of The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (2006). His current work focuses on landscape, death, and public space in American cultural his-tory.

Douglas Cazaux Sackman is Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound. He is the author of Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America (2010) and Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (2005), which received the Mar-tin Ridge Award. His next book, Pa-cifi c Passages, will explore transpacifi c exchanges of culture and nature, focus-ing on the traffi c in otters, whales, and trees.

Susan R. Schrepfer is Professor of His-tory at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Fight to Save the Red-woods: A History of Environmental Re-form, 1917–1978 (1983) and Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and Ameri-can Environmentalism (2005). She also co-edited, with Philip Scranton, Indus-trializing Organisms: Introducing Evo-lutionary History (2003).

Chris Sellers is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University, where he teaches courses in environ-mental, urban, and public health his-tory, as well as the history of wealth and inequality. He is the author of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to

Environmental Health Science (1997), as well as several articles and edited volumes examining the intersections of environmental with other histori-cal fi elds. His essay here is based on a forthcoming work entitled Unsettling Ground: Suburban Nature and Envi-ronmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (2010).

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian and activist and author based in San Francis-co. She has concerned herself with the history of that city and with urbanism and civil society, with California, with the West, with Native American histo-ries and cosmologies, environmental politics, and visual representations. She is the author of twelve books, includ-ing Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape War of the American West (2000), As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), and Storming the Gates of Paradise: Land-scapes for Politics (2007). Among her awards are the Lannan Award for litera-ture and the Commonwealth Club of California gold medal. Her most recent book is A Paradise Built in Hell: The Ex-traordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009).

Ellen Stroud is an environmental his-torian whose work has appeared in the Radical History Review, Environmental History, and History and Theory. She holds the Johanna Alderfer Harris and William H. Harris MD Chair in Envi-ronmental Studies at Bryn Mawr Col-lege, where she is an Associate Professor of Environmental Problems and Policy in the Growth and Structure of Cities and Environmental Studies programs. Her writing focuses on counterintuitive connections between people and their environments, which has her currently completing a book on the connections

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xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

between cities and forests in the north-eastern United States, while also re-searching the environmental history of dead bodies.

Paul Sutter is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automo-biles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (2002), the co-editor, with Christopher Manganiello, of Environ-mental History and the American South: A Reader (2009), and the co-author, with Leon Neel and Albert G. Way, of The Art of Managing Longleaf (2010). His interest in transnational US envi-ronmental history is at the center of his current research project, an environ-mental and public health history of the construction of the Panama Canal.

Sarah Thomas received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. Her research focuses on the im-pact of post-World War II land devel-opment on rural communities and on the evolution of local and state land use policies.

Richard P. Tucker is Adjunct Professor of Environmental History in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan. He is the au-thor of Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (2007). His pres-ent areas of research include the global environmental impact of the American economy, and the environmental conse-quences of war and militarization.

Richard Walker has been a Professor of Geography at the University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley for over thirty years. Walker has written on a diverse range of topics in economic, urban, and en-vironmental geography, with scores of

published articles to his credit. He is co-author of The Capitalist Imperative (1989) and The New Social Economy (1992) and has written extensively on California, including The Conquest of Bread (2004) and The Country in the City (2007). Walker has served as Chair of Geography, the California Studies Association, and the California Studies Center at UC Berkeley, and has won Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow-ships.

Louis S. Warren is W. Turrentine Jack-son Professor of Western US History at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches environmental history, the history of the American West, and US history. He is author of The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (1997) and Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (2005). He is also editor of a popular classroom text, American Environmental History (Wi-ley-Blackwell, 2003), and co-editor of boom: a journal of California.

Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stan-ford University. He is the author of sev-eral books on environmental history: The Roots of Dependency (1988), Land Use, Environment and Social Change (1992), and The Organic Machine (1995).

Donald Worster currently holds the Hall Distinguished Professorship Chair in American History at the Univer-sity of Kansas. His principal areas of research and teaching include North American and world environmental his-tory and the history of the American West. Among his books are A Passion for Nature (2008), A River Running West (2001), Dust Bowl (1979), and Nature’s Economy (1994).

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Introduction

Douglas Cazaux Sackman

Look upon this canvas (see cover). You see an image of the American sublime – the Grand Canyon. Its steep, plunging walls open up a chasm into the earth into which sunlight glances down as far as it can go. Deep down below flows the water of the Colorado – one of the archetypal American rivers. Up above, standing at the edge of this vast precipice, you see the icon of American wildlife – the buffalo. This is American nature, it would seem. This is the place to come in search of American environmental history.

And environmental historians have come here, and to places like it. They have written about the buffalo – and have come back to revisit the surpris-ingly complex story of how they were pushed off, by the hundreds and thou-sands, to their deaths. They have written about the National Parks and sublime landscapes – and have come back to revisit the topic to assess what has been gained and who has lost. They have written about the river – show-ing how its waters were dammed for growth and power, or how dams planned near this canyon were stopped by environmentalists. Each time they go back to these sites, they seem to develop a different and often multifaceted picture of the relationship between nature and humanity. Neither nature nor history is static, fixed. Take a picture in the 1960s – as Roderick Nash did in his pio-neering book on the American view of wilderness (1967) – and take another in the 1990s – as William Cronon did when he reexamined the American idea of wilderness and found trouble therein (1995b) – and two very differ-ent images representing Americans’ relationship with the natural world develop. The earlier picture showed the free-flowing river against a backdrop of earlier industrial rampage as a hopeful sign of an unfolding ecological con-sciousness. The later one pointed to how we were nonetheless separated from the natural world when we idealized a certain view of wilderness, and how “we” did not actually include all of us after all. This canyon looks very different if you put the Havasupai into the picture as full participants in this

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xiv INTRODUCTION

landscape (Jacoby 2001). It looks very different as well when you look at the Colorado from the vantage point of Los Angeles or irrigated fields in California’s imperial valley (Worster 1985; Davis 1999; deBuys 1999).

Environment and history shift before our eyes in this canvas. Look down to the bottom, and you start to see something the artist has hidden in plain sight – people. Their presence violates the genre of wilderness imagery, and so we do not expect to see them. But now that we do, we have to wonder what they are up to. They appear to be miners and builders. They are work-ing – doing something in nature that is essential to human life, but which had escaped the serious attention of environmental historians until recently. The people are, as the artist Mark Tansey gives away in the title for this work, “Constructing the Grand Canyon.”

Of course, we remake nature – even seemingly pristine places. Tansey’s painting literalizes the “constructivist” perspective – the walls of the can-yon, on close inspection, turn out to be red-tinted collages of words cut from magazines. Through words, people (like Fred Harvey, John Wesley Powell, or Wallace Stegner) did indeed construct the Grand Canyon as grand (Rothman 1998; Pyne 1999). But the geological and hydrological forces, over millions of years, have a great deal to do with it as well. As Marx said of history, we may make nature, but not just as we please.

The so-called cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences built on a constructivist basis sparked one of the great academic debates of a decade ago. It hit environmental history late, but it set off a conflagration of con-troversy. The postmodernists were ridiculed from some quarters. The notion that reality is in some fundamental way constituted through human ideas and representations struck many environmentally oriented scholars as solipsistic, hubristic, and anthropocentric to a nauseating fault. Someone suggested he would like to see a postmodernist encounter a real bear. Meanwhile, a group of scholars went out and looked at, say, Smoky Bear and the cross-cultural politics of nature preservation. Their work enriched the field. Some saw a drift to the representational as dangerous, as if it was a firestorm that might come sweeping through destroying everything that was good and real in its path. Instead, it proved to act more like a seasonal fire, clearing out some thickets and inspiring some new growth.

The debate hooked into a central analytical tension that has characterized the field of environmental history. Some environmental historians have concentrated on the so-called material dimensions of history – ecology and political economy or modes of production. Others have looked primarily at changing ideas about the natural world. This book as a whole does not take a side on the issue of whether environmental history should hew to a more materialist path, or a more representational or cultural one; proponents and practitioners of both approaches are included. There is clearly a need for both kinds of histories, as well as for studies that show the interrelationship between the material and the ideological on all levels.

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INTRODUCTION xv

In some of the most illuminating studies, the environment is viewed not as a thing but as a set of relationships under ongoing construction; matters of perception, political economy, and the dynamics of living ecosystems are viewed together, using interdisciplinary approaches. Environmental histori-ans have argued that nature is a force to reckon with; many regard it as an actor. In the best studies, nature is not portrayed as a stone-faced slab and society is not reduced to a monolith. A dynamic nature, rather, is fitted into riddled human history, so that the place of the familiar social fault lines of class, gender, and race can be traced over time and through space.

When they look for human relationships with the natural, environmental historians no longer confine our vision to the “Big Outside” (or the legislative chambers where the future of those places was decided). Now, environmental historians take us to the streets of Philadelphia, to the 9th ward of New Orleans, to golden arches along route 66. Having traveled over hill and dale – and into canyons, down rivers, and up mountain tops – environmental historians have struck out into new territory to examine cityscapes and spatial segregation, the body, climate change, energy, consumption, genetically modified flora and fauna, the technological reinvention of nature itself. They have probed the cultural and political construction of the wilderness idea, laid bare its class, gender, and racial prejudices, and opened room for investigations of environ-mental justice in the past. They have jettisoned the impulse to tell past envi-ronmental history as a dramatic conflict pitting “man” against “nature,” with nature as the inevitable, tragic loser. Environmental historians now search for a more complicated narrative, one that probes the social and cultural differ-ences in the category of “man” and shows how they matter if we are to truly understand the role and place of nature in North American history. Environmental historians are as likely to look at human health as they are to look at efforts to preserve bison, redwood trees, or wild rivers; they are as likely to trace the connections among cockroaches, asthma, and an “urban ecology of inequality” in Harlem (Mitman 2007) as they are to trail a John Muir into the Sierra Nevada. An earlier generation of environmental historians often seemed to do just that, becoming camp followers of a sort, hoping to inspire themselves and others with the great cause of environmentalism by sanctifying a heroic few who found a way to rise above the industrial din of their day.

In the days of its emergence in the 1970s, the pioneers of environmental history, propelled by the spirit of environmentalism, sought a vista that would allow them to see into, and through, the smog of the contemporary metropolis. They wanted to reveal the lay of the land as it had changed over the nation’s industrializing history, uncovering the story of environmental declension as well as creating a pantheon of environmental heroes, from George Marsh, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir to Aldo Leopold, David Brower, and Rachel Carson. To be sure, from the beginning, American environmental historians have done much more than establish a canon of environmental heroes in the past. Early works showed the critical

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xvi INTRODUCTION

importance of nature and biological exchanges in shaping the modern world. The diverse interests of historians interested in the environment coa-lesced in 1976, with the initial call to form the American Society for Environmental History. Over the next three decades, environmental his-tory proved its worth by providing innovative perspectives on the history of the United States, its environs and its peoples. Over that time, the field evolved and diversified, and earned capital within the discipline of history and academia more generally.

By the beginning of the 1990s – marked by the roundtable forum on envi-ronmental history in the Journal of American History (Worster et al. 1990) and by the publication of William Cronon’s widely acclaimed Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) – environmental historians had managed to elevate the status of their field within the profession. Most other historians finally took serious notice of the field, though there remain many misconceptions about the field (most common among them, that it is fired by a myopically presentist environmentalism, that it is misanthropic and not interested in people or class, race, and gender, and that it limits its atten-tion to wilderness areas). But our field can now claim four Bancroft Prizes (for Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, Jack Temple Kirby’s Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South, and Thomas Andrews’ Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War – and the first Bancroft was given to Bernard DeVoto, a proto-environmental historian). An interdisciplinary field – often combining forces with the natural sciences, literary or eco-criticism, anthropology, science and technology studies, American studies, geography and other fields – environmental history is gaining interest across the academy and among the public. In addition to Americans’ continued fascination with wild places, there is a growing appetite for work exploring historical dimensions of food, climate change, urban environments, and sustainability or catastrophe.

In its organization, A Companion to American Environmental History seeks to showcase the vast array of works in our field and reflect as well as probe the ways we have pursued our work. Part One, “The Elements of Environmental History,” begins with Louis Warren’s essay on landmarks in the field, in which he wonderfully situates a place – one that many would like to imagine as existing outside of history and beyond the reach of humanity – in its historical, cultural, and ecological context. We then go to the elements themselves – or the roots, as Empedocles, the pre-Socratic philosopher and herbalist who is often credited with identifying the four elements of the Western tradition called them. In very different ways, Nancy Langston, Donald Worster, Stephen Pyne, and Rebecca Solnit explore Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. Our authors take their subjects seriously, and have tracked them not only on the continent of North America but to the ends of the earth (but they have stopped short of what Empedocles is said to have done in his pursuit of fire – plunging to his death in a volcano).

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In Part Two, “Nature and the Construction of Society and Identity,” Colin Fisher, Chad Montrie, Susan Schrepfer and I examine what environ-mental historians have said, and might yet say, about the ascendant catego-ries of analysis in the discipline of history – race, class, and gender. Environmental historians, contrary to stereotypes, have done important work showing what difference difference makes in understanding American relations with the natural world. Indeed, they have shown the reciprocity between making gendered, racial, or class identities and structuring access to, experiences of, and wealth derived from nature. Neil Maher then looks at the body – an important topic that has been explored by a number of different disciplines in recent years. Detractors of the various studies of the body often complain that there are no real bodies in this Foucault-inspired scholarship. Be that as it may, environmental historians, with their interest in materiality and nature as well as the cultural history of the body, have important insights into human beings as animals on this planet shaped by culture and nature.

Part Three, “The Nature of American Culture,” begins with Richard White’s essay situating environmental histories after the “cultural turn” – considering works that explore the boundaries between as well as the hybridi-zation of “nature” and “culture.” Matthew Dennis, Aaron Sachs, and Finis Dunaway contribute three original essays to form the core of this section: they explore Americans’ multifaceted relationships to and ideas about nature from the colonial era through the twentieth century. This chronologically organized set of essays is flanked by David Rich Lewis’s authoritative and probing discussion of American Indian environmental ideas and practices and Andrew Kirk’s reflection on the “ecotopian” countercultural strain in post-World War II environmentalism. Tom McCarthy concludes the section with a broad-ranging and penetrating essay on that essential human activity – which is at once cultural, economic, and ecological – consumption.

Part Four, “Contact Zones: Americans Conjoining the Natural World,” presents a series of essays examining the different ways we have, and may yet, explore particular places where Americans have interacted with the natural world, from flora (Frieda Knobloch), fauna (Edmund Russell), for-ests (Ellen Stroud), fields (Sara Gregg), and food (Douglas Sackman) to cities and suburbs (Chris Sellers), energy (Brian Black), mining (Katherine Morrissey), water (Patty Limerick), oceans (Helen Rozwadowski), and the overseas landscapes Americans have colonized to capture the wealth of nature (Richard Tucker). To some extent, this section tends to be more material in orientation to balance the cultural orientation of Part Three. Still, that easy distinction is broken down, or transcended, in many of the essays in both sections.

Part Five, “Outside of the Grid: Place, Borders, and Scale,” explores the fundamental conceptual building blocks of our field. How do we carve up our field – conceptually, spatially, chronologically? The usual ways that US

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history is bounded and periodized are often at odds with the way environ-mental historians have looked at the past. Sometimes, we have wanted to consider the long durée (of evolutionary or geologic time) rather than the usual half-decade or half-century focus of many monographs in US history. Sometimes, we have wished to look at regions or “bioregions” rather than states, as Dan Flores explores in his essay. Geographer Richard Walker and environmental historian Sarah Thomas show how the approaches of geog-raphy can continue to enrich and expand the analytical reach of environ-mental history. David Igler looks at the Northeastern Pacific as a water-connected region. His sharp essay helps us think about how we go about writing histories of places, whether they are littoral, oceanic, or, for that matter, land-locked. How are the places we study bounded (in our conceptions and out there in the real world)? When and to what effect are borders crossed? A volume on “American” environmental history is unset-tling to many environmental historians, because we often look beyond political boundaries in writing our histories. Environmental history can play a key role in intimating the ways in which people and goods now enjoy, and have endured, social lives that are at once local and warped into transna-tional and global pathways and exchanges. In other words, following the movements of plants and animals in global commodity chains and through the Columbian, Pacific, and other exchanges is one way that environmental historians can continue to contribute to the transnationalization of American history. Focusing on the overlapping or comparable environmental histo-ries of the United States and Canada, Ted Binnema maps a number of ways to do transborder history. Finally, Paul Sutter persuasively shows how US historians, whether or not they will trace the global or international con-nections in their topics, could see new horizons open up for their work by following the environmental histories written about nations and places beyond our borders.

As you will discover, each of the essays in this Companion takes on a dif-ferent form. I did not impose a rigid grid to follow. Instead, I wanted essays to result from journeys the authors wished to make, so that they could best reflect their energies and convey their gifts of knowledge and insight. I proposed topics for each of the authors, but these were only points of departure. Some authors, to be sure, departed more quickly from where I left them than others. The first essayist in the volume, for example, went wildly off course – and I’m glad he did. I asked him originally to make a list of “landmark” studies in the field of environmental history. He instead went to the land itself, and wrote an essay that embodied the best of envi-ronmental history writing, turning “landmarks” from a metaphor into an orienting practice of interpretation.

But I never found out just what would have been on Warren’s list. The essays collectively portray the vast work that has been done in our field in little over a generation. Like other scholars in other fields, we stand on the shoulders of giants. But the giants sometimes stand on the rest of our shoulders

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INTRODUCTION xix

as well when they reach for the next level. So any list of landmark works in American environmental history is bound to be woefully incomplete, regret-tably leaving out essential contributions. But I’ll go ahead and offer a list of two dozen important books anyway – 14 from what we might now consider the middle period of American environmental history, four from the period before “environmental history” existed as such (1977, when the American Society for Environmental History was founded) and six for the period after 2000 (which has not yet been subjected to the historians’ test of time): first, Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains (1931), Samuel P. Hays’ Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959), Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), and Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972); next, Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl (1979), Stephen Pyne’s Fire in America (1982), William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1983), Worster’s Rivers of Empire (1985), Arthur McEvoy’s The Fisherman’s Problem (1986), Carolyn Merchant’s Ecological Revolutions (1989), Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991), Robert Gottlieb’s Forcing the Spring (1993), Andrew Hurley’s Environmental Inequalities (1995), Richard White’s The Organic Machine (1995), Cronon’s edited volume Uncommon Ground (1995), Mart Stewart’s “What Nature Suffers to Groe” (1996), William deBuys’ Salt Dreams (1999), and Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear (1999); finally, Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature (2001), Edmund Russell’s War and Nature (2001), Ted Steinberg’s Down to Earth (2002), Paul Sutter’s Driven Wild (2002), Linda Nash’s Inescapable Ecologies (2006), and Gregg Mitman’s Breathing Space (2007). I invite you all to make up your own lists, either before or after you read these essays (or both). There is a stunning array of quality work in our field, and the essays in this volume will guide you to them.

In these essays written by both younger scholars and established leaders of the field (including several past presidents of the American Society for Environmental History), you will find handles and toeholds, but this is not a step-by-step guide to get you to a single peak. It does not chart every approach, nor does it document all of the climbs that have come before. Though this volume is robust in the range and scope of the essays, it is by no means exhaustive. Many topics, many places, remain unexplored. But many places are charted. Moreover, in each essay you are exposed to man-ners of exploration – multiple approaches to environmental history, if you will. You may be interested in a topic not touched on here directly. You may wish to adapt some of the approaches here – or, having seen what’s been done before, find your own way. Go off the trail. Light out for a new terri-tory. My hope is that this volume will equip you as a scholar or a reader with orientation skills, an understanding of the places we’ve come from and encouragement to follow your curiosity about what lies beyond the next bend. In the end, what we are bringing back are tales from the field, as William Cronon (1992) reminds us.

History is always an alchemy of research and imagination. It is facts and stories – intermixed. Environmental history is people and places, flora and

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xx INTRODUCTION

fauna, soils and waters, fire and steel, growth and decay, work and leisure, race making and haymaking – intermixed. Environmental history insists that the great green, blue, and brown setting of human experience – the planet – always be in the mix of history. Without the earth, human history is diminished – in fact, it is eroded and parched. If it does not critically engage with the ecological context of human experience, history in effect turns humans into mummies – dehydrated shells of their real selves sus-pended in an airless netherworld. Environmental historians, by contrast, hope to put us fully in our place – and thereby make the past come alive.

Vashon Island, Washington

REFERENCES

Andrews, Thomas. 2008. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.

Cronon, William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton.

Cronon, William. 1992. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (March): 1347–1376.

Cronon, William, ed. 1995a. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: W. W. Norton.

Cronon, William. 1995b. “The Trouble with Wilderness, Or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 69–90.

Crosby, Alfred. 1972. The Columbian Exchange: The Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Davis, Mike. 1999. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage.

deBuys, William. 1999. Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Gottlieb, Robert. 1993. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Hays, Samuel P. 1959. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hurley, Andrew. 1995. Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Jacoby, Karl. 2001. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kirby, Jack Temple. 2006. Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

McEvoy, Arthur F. 1986. The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and the Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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INTRODUCTION xxi

Merchant, Carolyn. 1989. Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Mitman, Gregg. 2007. Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Nash, Linda. 2006. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nash, Roderick. 1967. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Pyne, Stephen J. 1982. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pyne, Stephen J. 1999. How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History. New York: Penguin.

Rothman, Hal K. 1998. Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Russell, Edmund. 2001. War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Steinberg, Ted. 2002. Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History. New York: Oxford.

Stewart, Mart A. 1996. “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Sutter, Paul. 2002. Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Webb, Walter Prescott. 1931. The Great Plains. Boston: Ginn.White, Richard. 1995. The Organic Machine. New York: Hill and Wang.Worster, Donald. 1979. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York:

Oxford University Press.Worster, Donald. 1985. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the

American West. New York: Oxford University Press.Worster, Donald, Cronon, William, Crosby, Alfred, Merchant, Carolyn, Pyne,

Stephen, and White, Richard. 1990. “A Roundtable: Environmental History,” Journal of American History 76 (March): 111–146.

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Part I

THE ELEMENTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

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Chapter One

PATHS TOWARD HOME: LANDMARKS OF THE FIELD IN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

Louis S. Warren

This is nature – it must be.Getting here was not easy. You drove five hours out of the city, then

parked at Mammoth Ski Resort on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. There you unloaded your gear, and boarded the shuttle bus to the trailhead in Reds Meadow. On disembarking, you lifted your backpack and began a dusty hike through the foothills, until you came up a steep set of switch-backs to the outlet of Shadow Lake. Now, hiking along the lakeshore, you’ve come to your campsite. Here you pause.

You could hardly imagine a place more natural. The mountain slopes you ascend are part of the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area, which contains some 230,000 acres of the eastern Sierra Nevada. This rugged geography practi-cally reverberates with the grand personalities and events of environmental history. A haunt of John Muir, who exhorted Americans to take to the wil-derness as early as the 1870s, this mountain was first draped in the protective codes of conservation with a flurry of laws passed in 1890, when the federal government temporarily attached much of it to Yosemite National Park (which today abuts the Ansel Adams Wilderness just north of here). Three years later, the ground where you stand became part of the national system of “forest reserves” (now the national forests), and Theodore Roosevelt added more of the mountainside to that system in 1907 (Rose 2000: 77).1

In 1964, Congress compounded its protections by enshrining this very spot in a designated wilderness area. The Wilderness Act of that year declared this “an area where the earth and its community of life are untram-meled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” (Wilderness.net 2009; US Congress 1964). Originally called the Minarets Wilderness – after the jagged peaks that crown this section of the mountain range – authorities posthumously honored the nation’s leading wilderness photographer by renaming it the Ansel Adams Wilderness in 1984.

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4 LOUIS S. WARREN

The stunning beauty of this place is fitting tribute to Adams, whose images of unpopulated mountains and meadows are imprinted across eve-rything from calendars and posters to coffee cups and T-shirts. To a sig-nificant degree, Adams taught millions of Americans the meaning of wilderness as it became enshrined in the Wilderness Act, the place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

If you could look past the relatively few hikers and campers in view you might be tempted to see this as a mountain outside of history, a place indeed “untrammeled by man.” From the crashing cataract in the stream below your campsite beside Shadow Lake to the thick trunks of Jeffrey pine surrounding it and upward to the soaring mountain peaks, this “commu-nity of life” could indeed fool you into thinking you have stepped into an Adams photograph.

But for a place without history, there sure are a lot of rules here. To enter the trailhead from the road, you had to show your permit to a ranger. This is a popular destination, and for the permit itself you had to apply months in advance, and pay a fee.

Then you had to find a way in. Entrance is permitted only on official trails, and you entered on the one assigned to you by the National Park Service, which administers this wilderness. Now that you’re here, you’re on deadline. The permit requires you to enter the wilderness on a particular day, and leave within a set number of days to make room for the next permittee.

The permit spells out a host of other regulations you must obey: You cannot have fires if you camp at elevations above 10,000 feet. You cannot cache equipment, and you cannot take along any wheeled cart to carry any of it. You cannot camp within fifty feet of any stream or lake, and you have to carry all your garbage out. You cannot play touch football or participate in any other “competitive event.” You cannot bring a dog.

These administrative proscriptions have a history of their own, some of which is inscribed into the very earth. To discourage cross-country ram-bling – which erodes slopes and damages meadows – the Park Service main-tains trails (which you are required to use). In many places a steady column of hikers has worn them deep into the soil. On hard terrain, where path-ways might become less legible, temporary laborers have carved them into the earth with shovels and adzes. The switchbacks about a mile below were lined with stones, and graded with carefully placed steps. In one place above, they are even blasted into bedrock with dynamite and reinforced with concrete.

The trails and rules serve similar purposes. They exist because so many visitors resort to these peaks that they easily reproduce urban problems. Thus, if you collect water from that cascade below, you would be wise to endure the tedium of pumping it through a filter to avoid ingesting giardia intestinalis, a parasite that infests watersheds all over the rural US in part

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PATHS TOWARD HOME 5

because of the feces of backcountry hikers. (Containing giardia is one of the reasons for the ban on camping within fifty feet of a lake or stream.)

The rules also stipulate you must stow your food in a small, fiberglass barrel provided by Forest Service headquarters. This “bear can” is impervi-ous to assault by the black bears. Once the animals were rare, but in the last two decades the abundant refuse and ill-tended provisions of hikers have provided them with enough food to colonize this mountain, even to eleva-tions where they have little or no natural habitat.

So authorities manage hikers to preserve as much as possible of the “untrammeled” wilderness experience they – you – seek. The rules are a means of making this landscape look and feel the way you want, reflecting the fact that you are part of a powerful constituency that deploys votes and money to support the regulatory system that governs this slope. It is not too much to say that if recreationists like you were not here then the Ansel Adams Wilderness would not be here either. The condition of this moun-tain is partly an expression of the power of its visitors.

And this is a remarkable thing, because wherever you might be from, the vast majority of people who visit here actually live in distant cities and sub-urbs. How did the mountain end up in the hands of people who live so far away, in landscapes so different from this one? What compels so many of them to seek respite in this place? How is this landscape connected to the one they flee or, more specifically, how has the making of this place been connected to the making of that one? What are the implications of city-dweller dominance for near-by people, and for the natural systems of this mountain, and how did the government – “the state” in scholarly parlance – gain the power to direct your travels and your behavior across a landscape that symbolically represents anarchic American freedoms?

Environmental historians explore the changing connections between peo-ple and nature, a project that has been dominated by questioning, abrading, interrogating, and otherwise troubling the boundary between nature and culture. In recent years, they have expanded their field to include landscapes close to most homes, and the environmental history of suburb and city is now a major component of our work (Hurley 1995; Tarr 1996; Kelman 2003; Orsi 2004; Klingle 2008; Melosi 2008; Walker 2008a). This essay, which introduces some of the major insights and debates of environmental history, might just as easily have considered a city as a wilderness area.

But in the end, to confront the landscape of the Ansel Adams Wilderness is to risk a profound sense of bewilderment at how a superficially pristine and natural landscape in fact represents a weird and potent mix of country and city, nature and culture, a mélange whose history is complex, confus-ing, and for that reason all the more intriguing. Thinking as a historian on this journey means confronting questions of law and the state, race and class and gender, work and leisure, the confluence of the natural and the artificial, and the forces that draw them together. To find your way through

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6 LOUIS S. WARREN

this place and its history is to discover that the Ansel Adams Wilderness is less a world apart from the city than a peculiar, contingent expression of the city’s connections to the most remote rural landscapes. To understand what you see on the trail to Mt. Ritter and back is to travel not only through space but to consider key connections to environmental histories of coun-try, city, and the spaces between.

Your backpack weighs in around 60 pounds. Loaded with almost every-thing you need for your survival, it suggests a cultural connection to the mountains and your ecological separation from them. Onerous as it is, it is also a material, historical legacy of Victorian naturalists like John Muir, who first crossed the Sierra in 1869, descending toward the eastern lowlands via a canyon not far north of where you are standing at Shadow Lake. Like you, he was a seasonal visitor, a lowland dweller who sought respite from his daily cares in the sublime mountain peaks and canyons. And like you, he carried urban goods on his back, everything he required for his journey.

As he made his way down this eastern Sierra slope, he encountered a band of Indians from Mono Lake headed the other direction, “on their way to Yosemite for a load of acorns” (Muir 1911: 294).

In that passing, two ways of seeing the Sierra Nevada and of understand-ing its creatures also passed. Muir was hiking for fun. The Mono Paiutes were hiking for food.

Muir and the Monos differed, too, on what these mountains were. Muir saw them through a lens at once secular and religious. An intellectual heir to Romantics like William Wordsworth and William Blake, his nature was the home of a God who seemed, after the scientific and industrial advances of the eighteenth century, profoundly distant from everyday experience. Although Muir published scientific articles on the geologic origins of the Sierra, his mountain wilderness was also benign and holy, the creation of a decidedly merciful God who intended it to serve as “the People’s Playground.”

The Mono Paiutes also loved the mountains, and still do, but in ways profoundly different from Muir. To them as to many other Indians, the land was not part of a unitary “Nature” but the home of many powerful spirits who had to be appeased to retain luck in the hunt, in childbirth, in health. Good fortune flowed only to those who made the proper offerings and gifts to spirits like Kwi’ina, Golden Eagle, who created the Sierra Nevada when he flew so low his wings touched the soft mud of the young earth and raised it into mountain peaks (Beesley 2004; Lee 1998; Heizer and Elsasser 1980; Nelson 1983).

For Mono Paiutes, the mountains were not a mere playground, but home. They played here, to be sure, but unlike Muir and you, they also worked here, fashioning lodges, food, and tools from these forests. You can believe in a mythical land, untouched and “untrammeled” if you want, but if you know where to look there are traces of Indian occupation – Indian

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