Book Review

This anthology of documents, along with extensive headnotes, has an ambitious purpose—indeed, more than one. The title's first words signal the first focus, confirmed in the introduction as a "narrative on the relationship between the American state and nature [that] begins in the late eighteenth century" (p. 5). The Table of Contents confirms this scope, as the documents run from James Madison through Al Gore, an inquiry stretching across our entire national history. The reader is already impressed that the combination of complex topic and vast narrative reach makes this a daunting but potentially important effort. Take a deep breath, and begin this book when well rested.

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But there is to be more. "Voices Heard" are those of the men who ran the State and also dominated the history of the environmental movement both in ideas and politics, along with the few women who broke into that circle of power. Thus we find selections from Madison, Jefferson, de Tocqueville, Olmsted, Marsh, Powell, TR, Pinchot, Muir, FDR, Hamilton (Alice), Douglas (Marjory Stoneman), Leopold, Carson, Ehrlich, Wilson, Gore, and others. Some are people of ideas, some people of political action (a few are both), and the book's editorial headnotes must shoulder the central aim of the volume, to "relate intellectual thought to political action" (p. 1). And "Voices Unheard"? Here the volume takes aim at another goal, to pay attention to and weave into the story the "unheard" or at least marginalized voices, who gradually achieved "a widening of the debate." Thus along the way there are selections from (Frederick) Douglass, Chief Seattle, Chavez, Deloria, and Bullard.

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