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interview
susan flader
Susan Flader, professor emerita of western and American environmental history at the University of Missouri, has published seminal works on Aldo Leopold's life and thought, on forest history, and the history of parks. In this wide-ranging interview, she discusses the origins and development of her work on Leopold, the early years of the American Society for Environmental History (of which she is a past president), her activities as a citizen-activist, and the role of the humanities in shaping her work as an environmental historian.
Editor and Associate Editor: You did your graduate work in the Department of History at Stanford University in the 1960s. How did Stanford lure you west from Wisconsin? Could you give us a brief account of your intellectual debts to two of Stanford's great American historians, David Potter and Don Fehrenbacher?
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| Susan Flader: I had a choice of going either east or west: Yale or Stanford. When I made the rounds at Wisconsin to seek advice, it was Vernon Carstensen and Merle Curti who agreed, "Let's send her as far away as we can," telling me that Stanford had just lured David Potter from Yale. Until I hitched a ride west in a VW beetle with two other Stanford students that fall, I had never been west of Minnesota. |
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That first term I took David Potter's research seminar in history of the South, writing on Indian slavery in colonial South Carolina, though I had never previously studied Indians, slavery or the South. Somehow I managed to produce a paper that Potter liked, and I'll never forget how generous he was in writing a summary of what I was really arguing when I had failed to do so. David Potter was a deeply humane and penetrating scholar, but what impressed me most was the organic character of his thought. In that sense, I thought he had a lot in common with William Appleman Williams, with whom I had taken courses at Wisconsin. They were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but if the spectrum were a circle they would nearly meet. Unfortunately, Potter was not taking new students at the time, so I had to cast about for a different adviser. |
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Several times that autumn I went backpacking in the Sierras, and I fell in love with the mountains. That fall of 1963 was the run-up to the Wilderness Act; having read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park for a water supply for San Francisco, it occurred to me to try to combine my avocation with my profession for my next research paper. But when I asked Don Fehrenbacher if I could write on Hetch Hetchy in his western history seminar, he said, "Oh, I'm sorry, but I can't let you do that because western history ends in 1893." He suggested I talk with Otis Pease, who taught a seminar on the Progressive Era. As a result, I never studied with Don Fehrenbacher.
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Editor and Associate Editor: Another great figure at Stanford was Wallace Stegner, the head of the creative writing program there—a brilliant novelist but also a historian of the West and a leader in the environmental movement of his day. Could you tell us something about your encounter with him, and his influence on your work?
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