HIST 4170 / 5170 - U.S. Environmental History - Cutter

African American intellectual thought has long provided a touchstone for national politics and civil rights, but, as Kimberly Smith reveals, it also has much to say about our relationship to nature. In this first single-authored book to link African American and environmental studies, Smith uncovers a rich tradition stretching from the abolition movement through the Harlem Renaissance, demonstrating that black Americans have been far from indifferent to environmental concerns. Beginning with environmental critiques of slave agriculture in the early nineteenth century and evolving through critical engagements with scientific racism, artistic primitivism, pragmatism, and twentieth-century urban reform, Smith highlights the continuity of twentieth-century black politics with earlier efforts by slaves and freedmen to possess the land. She examines the works of such canonical figures as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke, all of whom wrote forcefully about how slavery and racial oppression affected black Americans' relationship to the environment Smith's analysis focuses on the importance of freedom in humans' relationship with nature. According to black theorists, the denial of freedom can distort one's relationship to the natural world, impairing stewardship and alienating one from the land. Her pathbreaking study offers the first linkage of the early conservation movement to black history, the first detailed description of black agrarianism, and the first analysis of scientific racism as an environmental theory. It also offers a new way to conceptualize black politics by bringing into view its environmental dimension, as well as a normative environmental theory grounded in pragmatism and aimed at identifying the social conditions for environmental virtue. Smith's work offers a new approach to established writers and thinkers and shows that they justly deserve a place in the canon of American environmental thought. African American Environmental Thought enriches our understanding of black politics and environmental history, and of environmental theory in general. Because slavery and racism have shaped the meaning of the American landscape, this body of thought offers us fresh conceptual resources by which we can make better sense of our world.

By studying the many ways diverse peoples have changed, shaped, and conserved the natural world over time, environmental historians provide insight into humanity's unique relationship with nature and, more importantly, are better able to understand the origins of our current environmental crisis. Beginning with the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with our twenty-first century concerns over our global ecological crisis, American Environmental History addresses contentious issues such as the preservation of the wilderness, the expulsion of native peoples from national parks, and population growth, and considers the formative forces of gender, race, and class. Entries address a range of topics, from the impact of rice cultivation, slavery, and the growth of the automobile suburb to the effects of the Russian sea otter trade, Columbia River salmon fisheries, the environmental justice movement, and globalization.

This collected volume of original essays proposes to address the state of scholarship on the political, cultural, and intellectual history of Americans responses to wilderness from first contact to the present. While not bringing a synthetic narrative to wilderness, the volume will gather competing interpretations of wilderness in historical context.

From pre-Columbian times to the environmental justice movements of the present, women and men frequently responded to the environment and environmental issues in profoundly different ways. Although both environmental history and women's history are flourishing fields, explorations of the synergy produced by the interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender are just beginning. Offering more than biographies of great women in environmental history, Beyond Nature's Housekeepers examines the intersections that shaped women's unique environmental concerns and activism and that framed the way the larger culture responded. Women featured include Native Americans, colonists, enslaved field workers, pioneers, homemakers, municipal housekeepers, immigrants, hunters, nature writers, soil conservationists, scientists, migrant laborers, nuclear protestors, and environmental justice activists. As women, they fared, thought, and acted in ways complicated by social, political, and economic norms, as well as issues of sexuality and childbearing. Nancy C. Unger reveals how women have played a unique role, for better and sometimes for worse, in the shaping of the American environment.

Fossil fuels don't simply impact our ability to commute to and from work. They condition our sensory lives, our erotic experiences, and our aesthetics; they structure what we assume to be normal and healthy; and they prop up a distinctly modern bargain with nature that allows populations and economies to grow wildly beyond the older and more clearly understood limits of the organic economy. Carbon Nation ranges across film and literary studies, ecology, politics, journalism, and art history to chart the course by which prehistoric carbon calories entered into the American economy and body. It reveals how fossil fuels remade our ways of being, knowing, and sensing in the world while examining how different classes, races, sexes, and conditions learned to embrace and navigate the material manifestations and cultural potential of these new prehistoric carbons. The ecological roots of modern America are introduced in the first half of the book where the author shows how fossil fuels revolutionized the nation's material wealth and carrying capacity. The book then demonstrates how this eager embrace of fossil fuels went hand in hand with both a deliberate and an unconscious suppression of that dependency across social, spatial, symbolic, and psychic domains. In the works of Eugene O'Neill, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, and Stephen Crane, the author reveals how Americans' material dependencies on prehistoric carbon were systematically buried within modernist narratives of progress, consumption, and unbridled growth; while in films like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and George Stevens's Giant he uncovers cinematic expressions of our own deep-seated anxieties about living in a dizzying new world wrought by fossil fuels. Any discussion of fossil fuels must go beyond energy policy and technology. In Carbon Nation, Bob Johnson reminds us that what we take to be natural in the modern world is, in fact, historical, and that our history and culture arise from this relatively recent embrace of the coal mine, the stoke hole, and the oil derrick.

How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates of the burgeoning field of environmental history. Humanity´s relationship with the natural world is one of the oldest and newest topics in human history. The issue emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the early 1970s and has been growing steadily ever since. The discipline´s territory and sources are rich and varied and include climactic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists, as well as federal and state economic and resource development and conservation policy.

Conservation was the first nationwide political movement in American history to grapple with environmental problems like waste, pollution, resource exhaustion, and sustainability. At its height, the conservation movement was a critical aspect of the broader reforms undertaken in the Progressive Era (1890-1910), as the rapidly industrializing nation struggled to protect human health, natural beauty, and "national efficiency." This highly effective Progressive Era movement was distinct from earlier conservation efforts and later environmentalist reforms. Conservation in the Progressive Era places conservation in historical context, using the words of participants in and opponents to the movement. Together, the documents collected here reveal the various and sometimes conflicting uses of the term "conservation" and the contested nature of the reforms it described. This collection includes classic texts by such well-known figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir, as well as texts from lesser-known but equally important voices that are often overlooked in environmental studies: those of rural communities, women, and the working class. These lively selections provoke unexpected questions and ideas about many of the significant environmental issues facing us today.

Although suburb-building created major environmental problems, Christopher Sellers demonstrates that the environmental movement originated within suburbs--not just in response to unchecked urban sprawl. Drawn to the countryside as early as the late nineteenth century, new suburbanites turned to taming the wildness of their surroundings. They cultivated a fondness for the natural world around them, and in the decades that followed, they became sensitized to potential threats. Sellers shows how the philosophy, science, and emotions that catalyzed the environmental movement sprang directly from suburbanites' lives and their ideas about nature, as well as the unique ecology of the neighborhoods in which they dwelt. Sellers focuses on the spreading edges of New York and Los Angeles over the middle of the twentieth century to create an intimate portrait of what it was like to live amid suburban nature. As suburbanites learned about their land, became aware of pollution, and saw the forests shrinking around them, the vulnerability of both their bodies and their homes became apparent. Worries crossed lines of class and race and necessitated new ways of thinking and acting, Sellers argues, concluding that suburb-dwellers, through the knowledge and politics they forged, deserve much of the credit for inventing modern environmentalism.

No single event played a greater role in the birth of modern environmentalism than the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and its assault on insecticides. The documents collected by Thomas Dunlap trace shifting attitudes toward DDT and pesticides in general through a variety of sources: excerpts from scientific studies and government reports, advertisements from industry journals, articles from popular magazines, and the famous �Fable for Tomorrow� from Silent Spring. Beginning with attitudes toward nature at the turn of the twentieth century, the book moves through the use and early regulation of pesticides; the introduction and early success of DDT; the discovery of its environmental effects; and the uproar over Silent Spring. It ends with recent debates about DDT as a potential solution to malaria in Africa.

Recurring cycles: a brief history of air pollution and control efforts in Britain and the United States before 1945 -- Trouble in paradise: the discovery of smog -- Smog town vs. the motor city: taming the automobile -- Folklore: the public confronts smog -- Reinventing the wheel: air pollution control policy in New York City, 1945-70 -- A fight to the finish: the publics crusade against air pollution -- Jersey: the interstate dilemma -- The fickle finger of phosphate: industrial air pollution in rural central Florida -- Conference, conciliation, and persuasion: public anger, official inaction -- The perils of federalism: the intrastate dilemma -- The three-thousand-mile-long sewer: air pollution as a national problem.

A tour de force of writing and analysis, Down to Earth offers a sweeping history of our nation, one that for the first time places the environment at the very center of our story.Writing with marvelous clarity, historian Ted Steinberg sweeps across the centuries, re-envisioning the story of America as he recounts how the environment has played a key role in virtually every social, economic, and political development. Ranging from the colonists' attempts to impose orderon the land to the modern efforts to sell the wilderness as a consumer good, packaged in national parks and Alaskan cruises, Steinberg reminds readers that many critical episodes in our history were, in fact, environmental events: the California Gold Rush, for example, or the great migration ofAfrican Americans to the North in the early twentieth century (in part the consequence of an insect infestation). Equally important, Steinberg highlights the ways in which we have envisioned nature, attempting to reshape and control it--from Thomas Jefferson's surveying plan that divided thenational landscape into a grid, to the transformation of animals, crops, and even water into commodities (New Englanders started trading water rights by the early nineteenth century). From the Pilgrims to Disney World, Steinberg's narrative abounds with fascinating details and often disturbinginsights into our interaction with the natural world.Few books truly change the way we see the past. Down to Earth is one of them: a vivid narrative that reveals the environment to be a powerful force in our history--a force that must be examined if we are truly to understand ourselves.

Environmental Conflict in Alaska presents a detailed yet readable account of the salient environmental controversies of Alaska's statehood period. As "the last frontier", Alaska lured unusually fervent devotees of the exploitation ethic who sought to make quick profits or recreate the pioneer experience in a land of minimal regulations. The state also attracted passionate environmentalists -- enthralled by Alaska's natural beauty -- who found increasing support from a public anxious about pollution and resource depletion. At statehood, Alaska awaited apportionment among state, federal, and Native claimants. A unique mix of conditions, Ross maintains, precipitated high-stakes, often dramatic battles over whales, wolves, and other wildlife as well as the lands and waters where they roamed. The conflicts helped shape the national environmental agenda and generated a vibrant environmental community in Alaska. They doomed some destructive projects, mitigated others, and gave birth to more open, interdisciplinary, and international models of natural resource management. Ross maintains that over the years, the conflicts strengthened principles of government and corporate accountability, public participation in management decisions, and sustainable use of natural resources. At the millennium, this leaves Alaska a chance to retain much of the pristine quality regarded by so many as its primary value. Sure to be the standard account for years to come, Environmental Conflict in Alaska documents one state's fateful trials surrounding its own irreplaceable portion of our nation's great natural heritage.

Environmental thought has a rich and extensive history. Philosopher Robin Attfield guides readers through the key developments and debates that have defined the field from ancient times to the present. Attfield investigates ancient, medieval and early modern environmental contributions; Darwin and his successors; the debate in America involving Thoreau, Marsh, Muir and Pinchot; the foundation of the science of ecology in the Western world; and twentieth century trailblazers like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. Central themes of key environmentalist works of the 1970s and 1980s are discussed, along with the major debates in environmental philosophy, including Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. Attfield then turns to the current environmental emergency, encompassing the crises of climate change, air pollution and biodiversity loss, exploring contemporary intellectual responses to it. Each chapter concludes with a list of recommended readings, selected to invite readers to explore the book's topics in greater depth. Environmental Thought: A Short History will become a pivotal text in its field, of interest to students and scholars of history, philosophy, ethics, geography, religion, biology and environmental studies.

The emergence of Greenpeace in the late 1960s from a loose-knit group of anti-nuclear and anti-whaling activists fundamentally changed the nature of environmentalism - its purpose, philosophy, and tactics - around the world. And yet there has been no comprehensive objective history ofGreenpeace's origins - until now.Make It a Green Peace! draws upon meeting minutes, internal correspondence, manifestos, philosophical writings, and interviews with former members to offer the first full account of the origins of what has become the most recognizable environmental non-governmental organization in the world.Situating Greenpeace within the peace movement and counterculture of the 1960s, Frank Zelko provides a much deeper treatment of the group's groundbreaking brand of radical, media-savvy, direct-action environmentalism than has been previously attempted. Zelko traces the complex intellectual andcultural roots of Greenpeace to the various protest movements of the 1950s and 1960s, highlighting the influence of QuakerismNarrating the key campaigns and arguments among the group's early members, Make It a Green Peace! vividly captures all the drama, pathos, and occasional moments of absurd comic relief of Greenpeace's tumultuous first decade.

1. Introduction: Environment and Governance -- 2. Who Owns the Environment? Historical Context and Colonial Precedents -- 3. The Constitutional Framework -- 4. Land and Transport: Commercial Development as Environmental Policy -- 5. Industrialization, Resource Differentiation, and Public Resource Management -- 6. Public Health and Urban Sanitation -- 7. The Progressive Era -- 8. Conservative “Normalcy” and New Deal Conservation -- 9. Superpower and Supermarket -- 10. The Rise of Modern Environmentalism -- 11. Toward a National Environmental Policy -- 12. The EPA: Nationalizing Pollution Control -- 13. Public Lands and Wildlife Conservation -- 14. Agricultural and Urban Environmental Management -- 15. Energy Policy and Climate Change -- 16. Environmental Policy in a Global Economy -- 17. The Trump Agenda -- 18. Man aging the Environment, Managing Ourselves -- Chronology

A detailed analysis of the policy effects of conservatives' decades-long effort to dismantle the federal regulatory framework for environmental protection. Since the 1970s, conservative activists have invoked free markets and distrust of the federal government as part of a concerted effort to roll back environmental regulations. They have promoted a powerful antiregulatory storyline to counter environmentalists' scenario of a fragile earth in need of protection, mobilized grassroots opposition, and mounted creative legal challenges to environmental laws. But what has been the impact of all this activity on policy? In this book, Judith Layzer offers a detailed and systematic analysis of conservatives' prolonged campaign to dismantle the federal regulatory framework for environmental protection. Examining conservatives' influence from the Nixon era to the Obama administration, Layzer describes a set of increasingly sophisticated tactics--including the depiction of environmentalists as extremist elitists, a growing reliance on right-wing think tanks and media outlets, the cultivation of sympathetic litigators and judges, and the use of environmentally friendly language to describe potentially harmful activities. She argues that although conservatives have failed to repeal or revamp any of the nation's environmental statutes, they have influenced the implementation of those laws in ways that increase the risks we face, prevented or delayed action on newly recognized problems, and altered the way Americans think about environmental problems and their solutions. Layzer's analysis sheds light not only on the politics of environmental protection but also, more generally, on the interaction between ideas and institutions in the development of policy.

Engineers and scientists have made great progress in advancing the understanding of the principles underlying environmental quality and public health. However, all too often, society and the scientific community do not realize the connections between environmental occurrences. In their haste to remedy a situation, they overlook lessons that could be learned to prevent future disasters. Paying attention to the past instructs us about the future. "Paradigms Lost" combines the historical case perspective with credible and sound scientific explanations of key environmental disasters and problems. The author sorts through natural disasters and human mistakes from Love Canal, New York to Bhopal, India to provide larger lessons that can be applied by scientists, engineers and public safety officials. The analysis of these events includes viable alternatives for future generations. * Includes alternative approaches to environmental issues from preventative measures to contingency plans * Richly annotated with sidebars, discussion boxes and generous examples from Exxon Valdez and Love Canal to Agent Orange and Bhopal * A usable tool for all professionals from lawyers to chemical engineers

1. Conservation Parks; 2. Pammel's Way; 3. Reshaping Park and Conservation Goals in the 1920s; 4. Toward a Resource Agency: The Twenty-five-Year Conservation Plan; 5. Seeking Balance; 6. The Center Does Not Hold; 7. The Lightning Rod Decades; Epilogue; Appendix: State Lands in Parks and Preserves, 1918-1996

In the dramatic narratives that comprise The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. Revisiting historical icons so familiar that schoolchildren learn to take them for granted, he makes surprising connections that enable readers to see old stories in a new light. Among the historical moments revisited here, a revolutionary nation arises from its environment and struggles to reconcile the diversity of its people with the claim that nature is the source of liberty. Abraham Lincoln, an unlettered citizen from the countryside, steers the Union through a moment of extreme peril, guided by his clear-eyed vision of nature's capacity for improvement. In Topeka, Kansas, transformations of land and life prompt a lawsuit that culminates in the momentous civil rights case of Brown v. Board of Education. By focusing on materials and processes intrinsic to all things and by highlighting the nature of the United States, Fiege recovers the forgotten and overlooked ground on which so much history has unfolded. In these pages, the nation's birth and development, pain and sorrow, ideals and enduring promise come to life as never before, making a once-familiar past seem new. The Republic of Nature points to a startlingly different version of history that calls on readers to reconnect with fundamental forces that shaped the American experience. For more information, visit the author's website: http://republicofnature.com/

To Harvest, To Hunt is a rich collection of writings that reveals how diverse peoples have valued and used natural resources throughout the history of the American West. Drawing on family letters, oral traditions, historical records, and personal experience, the book's contributors offer readers new perspectives on the land they live on, the harvests they consume, and the natural resources they manage. Editor Judy Li weaves a tapestry of cultures and voices--from Pueblo tribes in the Southwest and Chinese fishermen in California to Mexican braceros in Oregon and Basque sheepherders in Idaho--as she details the region's historical dependence on the land and sea. Otter, walrus, abalone, grasslands, timber, and water are some of the vital resources discussed by anthropologists, historians, and biologists in stories that tell how cultures struggle to adapt in changing environments. Acclaimed novelist John Nichols, environmental lawyer Charles Wilkinson, and essayist David Mas Masumoto are among the contributors to this collection. Spanning the last 200 years, To Harvest, To Hunt represents Native American, Native Alaskan, European, and Asian immigrants as varied in their perspectives as the landscapes the book describes. Students, scholars, and general readers will come to appreciate the region's once-abundant resources and find this book an illuminating overview of the dynamic between people and the land.

"To Love the Wind and the Rain" is a groundbreaking and vivid analysis of the relationship between African Americans and the environment in U.S. history. It focuses on three major themes: African Americans in the rural environment, African Americans in the urban and suburban environments, and African Americans and the notion of environmental justice.  Meticulously researched, the essays cover subjects including slavery, hunting, gardening, religion, the turpentine industry, outdoor recreation, women, and politics. "To Love the Wind and the Rain" will serve as an excellent foundation for future studies in African American environmental history.

From the time when humans first learned to harness fire, cultivate crops, and domesticate livestock, they have altered their environment as a means of survival. In the modern era, however, natural resources have been devoured and defiled in the wake of a consumerism that goes beyond mere subsistence. In this volume, an international group of environmental historians documents the significant ways in which humans have impacted their surroundings throughout history.     John McNeill introduces the collection with an overarching account of the history of human environmental impact. Other contributors explore the use and abuse of the earth's land in the development of agriculture, commercial forestry, and in the battle against desertification in arid and semi-arid regions. Cities, which first appeared some 5,500 years ago, have posed their own unique environmental challenges, including dilemmas of solid waste disposal, sewerage, disease, pollution, and sustainable food and water supplies. The rise of nation-states brought environmental legislation, which often meant "selling off" natural resources through eminent domain. Perhaps the most damaging environmental event in history resulted from a "perfect storm" of effects: cheap fossil fuels (especially petroleum) and the rapid rise of personal incomes during the 1950s brought an exponential increase in energy consumption and unforseen levels of greenhouse gasses to the earth's atmosphere. By the 1970s, the deterioration of air, land, and water due to industrialization, population growth, and consumerism led to the birth of the environmental and ecological movements.     Overall, the volume points to the ability and responsibility of humans to reverse the course of detrimental trends and to achieve environmental sustainability for existing and future populations.

Environmental issues in the USA are more important now than ever before. The devastation inflicted by Hurricane Katrina, growing evidence of global warming, and a struggling national energy supply highlight the unfolding crisis. Environmental fears translate into US automobile giants plying consumers with 'fuel efficient' cars in the 'MPG Lounge' of sales. Politicians talk of energy independence and getting tough on polluters. Fears gravitate around a fast-approaching doomsday scenario, an environmental endgame, of wholesale collapse, unless something is done.Yet fears of doomsday are nothing new. John Wills shows how the current environmental crisis is firmly rooted in the past. As well as explaining how today's problems are manifestations of older systems of economics, culture and politics, he also argues that America has already witnessed a range of 'doomsday scenarios,' both real and imagined. He identifies and explores a cast of 'doomsday landscapes' that includes the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia, the Santa Barbara Oil Spill, the 'Fable for Tomorrow' town featured in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), and Nevada's Doom Towns 1 and 2 blown apart by atomic testing in the 1950s. He reflects on contemporary ruminations over whether nature as a category endures given both the rising contamination of the US landscape and consumer proclivity for celebrating fake mementos of the outdoors (such as plastic lawn flamingos and artificial plants). And most significantly, he poses the question of whether Americans have been inviting doomsday through their long-term environmental actions.

This study traces the origins of conservation thinking in America to the naturalists who explored the middle-western frontier between 1740 and 1840. Their inquiries yielded a comprehensive natural history of America and inspired much of the conservation and ecological thinking we associate with later environmental and ecological philosophy. These explorers witnessed one of the great environmental transformations in American history, as the vast forests lying between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi gave way to a landscape of fields, meadows, and pastures. In debating these changes, naturalists translated classical ideas like the balance of nature and the spiritual unity of all species into an American idiom. This book highlights the contributions made by the generation of natural historians who pioneered the utilitarian, ecological, and aesthetic arguments for protecting or preserving nature in America.

American nature writers as literary artists & political catalysts.
Ch. 1. Colonial and Early American Responses to the Wilderness -- Ch. 2. Emerson, Thoreau, and Environmental Reform -- Ch. 3. George Perkins Marsh and the Harmonies of Nature -- Ch. 4. As the Angels Have Departed: John Burroughs and the Religion of Nature -- Ch. 5. God of the Mountains: The Rhetoric and Religion of John Muir -- Ch. 6. Days of Wasteful Plenty Are Over: Theodore Roosevelt and His Environmental Legacies -- Ch. 7. Alone in a World of Wounds: The Question of Audience in A Sand County Almanac -- Ch. 8. New Environmentalism and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring -- Ch. 9. Monkey Wrenching, Environmental Extremism, and the Problematical Edward Abbey.

Covers the environmental issues for each U.S. state and Canadian province. Essays include an introduction that describes the geographical and geological features of the state/province, information on how global climate change could affect the state/province and its inhabitants, information on natural resources, energy, Green Economy, Green Jobs, and Green Building, and a special section that covers a major environmental topic in each state/province.