| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mining California: An Ecological History. By Andrew C. Isenberg. New York: Hill & Wang, 2005. 242 pages. Illustrations, bibliography, index. Cloth $27.00.
In "The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West," an essay from her book Something in the Soil (2000), Patricia Nelson Limerick contended that "by many measures, the California Gold Rush was the most important event in the history of the American West" (p. 215). Not only did it give California a "good shaking"; the entire region felt the shock waves. Andrew Isenberg does not cite Limerick's essay, but wholeheartedly agrees.	1
Mining California adds another chapter to the grand story of the ecological and human costs of settler invasion and conquest in California and the rest of the American West (see, for example, Gray Brechin's Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, California, 1999). Yet nature retains some agency in the face of industrialization, urbanization, advanced technology, and corporate capitalism. Isenberg identifies drought as the key factor in the declining fortunes of southern California's large ranch owners who practiced extensive grazing. Another innovative feature of this study is the situation of the dispossession of native peoples such as the Modoc within the wider history of enclosure and social discipline usually associated with the fate of the British peasantry (E.P. Thompson goes west).	. . .

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