| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3 | The History Cooperative

from the editor

THIS ISSUE BEGINS with a magisterial essay by John McNeill about the relationship between forests and warfare. McNeill ranges across the globe, and through thousands of years. His essay is gracefully written, full of arresting examples, with many subtle insights. I was especially impressed by one point: Throughout history, war and preparations for war have been significant shapers of land use. The essay is a revised version of a talk McNeill presented as the 2002 Lynn W. Day Distinguished Lecturer in Forest and Conservation History. The Day lectureship is sponsored by the Forest History Society, in collaboration with the Nicholas School of the Environment and the Department of History at Duke University. I am delighted to be able to give McNeill's talk a wider audience.

The image on the cover is a United States Forest Service poster published in 1946—a year after the end of World War II. At the time, the nation was suffering an acute housing shortage, because so few houses were built during the war and during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This poster marked a shift from wartime to peacetime arguments for forest-fire prevention. We are able to reproduce the poster courtesy of the Northwestern University Library.

Michael Rawson's article on the decision to build a public water-supply system in Boston reveals much about how urban Americans viewed nature in the mid-nineteenth century. To some Bostonians, water was a commodity to be bought and sold for profit. To others, pure water was essential to moral order. Working-class residents often saw water as a community resource to be enjoyed by all as a matter of right. Rawson's analysis of the water-supply debate in Boston neatly joins environmental, social, and cultural history.

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