Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History

By: Ted Steinberg

Read messages from the online discussion of this article, held Sept. 3-17, 2002, in which the author responds to postings.

Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History 3

Two years ago, David Oshinsky, writing in the New York Times, called attention to the fragmentation that had descended across American history. No longer interested in writing grand narratives in the tradition of Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, and Richard Hofstadter, U.S. historians had become more specialized in the wake of the political upheavals of the 1960s, telling stories about ordinary people—blacks, women, and gays—instead of engaging in top-down political or intellectual history. The results, in the minds of some, have been unfortunate. Historians seem incapable of giving larger meaning to their work and thus have failed to command the attention of the general reading public. More recent scholarship, David Thelen lamented, had become “too obscure to appreciate and too remote from everyday life.”¹	1
There may be a tendency in such critiques to romanticize the past. Indeed, one wonders whether readers were that much more engaged by history in Hofstadter’s day. But the general trend toward the fragmentation of scholarship can hardly be doubted. As Oshinsky points out, a veritable torrent of new historical categories—”race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality”—has come to the fore. Interestingly, Oshinsky does not mention the word “class,” and yet it too is clearly a driving force behind the more recent work in social and cultural history. Nor does he say anything about environment, an omission that seems particularly stunning, given the photograph of a forest that ran with the article. The caption notes that before the 1960s most historians paid little or no attention to Native American and other minority groups. The woods themselves remain in the background.	2
That nature appears as a backdrop in the article is hardly surprising, given the way most historians conceive of the natural world—defined here as plants and animals, soil and water, climate and weather—in their work. For the vast majority of the profession, nature is little more than a pretty scene or, at most, a preface to the more important social and political story that is about to unfold.	3
Only a small minority of scholars working in the field of environmental history have made nature the focus of their studies. Over the last generation, these historians have explored topics as spatially and temporally diverse as climate change and agriculture in imperial China (1400–1850), the vast ecological shifts that accompanied the introduction of sheep by the Spanish in sixteenth-century Mexico, the market economy’s effect on species diversity in colonial New England, conflicts between rural communities and the British colonial state over forests in nineteenth-century India, soil erosion on South African pastures in the twentieth century, and the rise of the modern environmental movement in Germany. Perhaps the most ambitious and far-reaching study published recently is J. R. McNeill’s Something New under the Sun, a kind of planetary history that assesses the ecological changes to soil, water, and air that occurred across the globe during the twentieth century.²	4
Although environmental historians have focused on many different continents and regions, it seems fair to say that the field has advanced further for the United States than in any other context. We know more about the United States than about Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and far more than about Europe, which has lagged behind in this area of specialization.³ The promise and limitations of the field are arguably best assessed, then, in the United States, which remains at the cutting edge. Such an assessment will allow us to distill out some general lessons of value to all historians.	5
Surprisingly, despite the profusion of work in U.S. environmental history, the field still occupies a spot on the margins of the profession.⁴ Consider survey textbooks, a useful if somewhat limited measure of the current state of American history.⁵ The inside covers of these textbooks contain perhaps the most telling statement of the inert role that nature plays in the past, a map of the United States, as if place were simply a given. For most textbook writers, environment means politics. The conservation movement and the emergence later of environmentalism remain the old standbys, stories that fit in well with the larger social and political history being told. There tends to be very little, if any, treatment of the roles played by climate change, deforestation, soil fertility, and plants and animals in the past. How Americans went about feeding themselves and getting rid of human and animal waste barely rates a mention, and yet it remains one of the fundamental aspects of human existence.	6
This is not to say that textbook writers have made no progress in incorporating environmental history into their narratives. Topics such as the ecological transformation precipitated by colonization, pollution in late nineteenth-century cities, or the 1930s Dust Bowl are now more likely to be treated. Often, however, the discussion of environment amounts to little more than tokenism, with the natural world incorporated in a very uncritical and reflexive manner.	7
Alfred W. Crosby’s ideas about the Columbian Exchange, for example, are now a stock item in virtually all U.S. history college textbooks, with authors briefly discussing the biological changes that occurred as Old World plants, animals, and microbes crossed to North America. Textbook writers keen to point out to students the role of power in American history as they discuss topics such as workplace conflict and women’s rights have rarely, if ever, applied such an analysis to something as seemingly devoid of politics and objectively “true” as the Columbian Exchange. And yet, as geographer Judith A. Carney has explained, it is important to consider the “ethnic and gendered dimensions of indigenous knowledge” necessary for this sweeping biological and ecological exchange to have taken place. Focusing on the cultivation of rice, Carney demonstrates that it was not primarily Europeans, as is commonly believed, who were responsible for introducing this crop into the New World. Rather, West Africans, especially women, domesticated one important species of the plant and later successfully brought the knowledge necessary to grow the crop to the North American continent.⁶ (See Figure 1.)	8
Figure 1: This advertisement from the late eighteenth century draws attention to the homelands of arriving Africans on the assumption that those in the market for slaves would know about their superior knowledge and skills in the area of rice cultivation. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The textbooks, then, fall short on two scores. They fail to see nature as an active, shaping force in the past, presenting it instead as a stable backdrop. And when nature is introduced, it is often presented as if it existed in a political vacuum, free from the workings of power in society. A fuller understanding of how change takes place, and of who wins and who loses as a result, requires that we knit together the concepts of nature and power. In the process, a more satisfying understanding of human agency will emerge.	9

To date, the most lucid if environmentally deficient discussion of the relationship between human agency and structure is offered by William H. Sewell. Sewell begins with Anthony Giddens’s promising notion of the dual nature of structures: that human agency and structure do not exist in opposition to each other so much as in tandem, with one presupposing the other.⁷ This theoretical perspective, Sewell points out, has underwritten some of the best work in social history. But he also observes that Giddens’s notion of structure remains vague and ambiguous. Sewell posits instead a new view of structures as made up of “schemas” and “resources.” Schemas are essentially the meanings and interpretations through which people see the world. Resources, both human and nonhuman, are the media that empower people to make history. As he writes: “Structures, then, are sets of mutually sustaining schemas and resources that empower and constrain social action and that tend to be reproduced by that social action. But their reproduction is never automatic. Structures are at risk, at least to some extent, in all of the social encounters they shape—because structures are multiple and intersecting, because schemas are transposable, and because resources are polysemic and accumulate unpredictably.”⁸	10
Yet Sewell’s notion of nonhuman resources—what some would call nature—seems somewhat undertheorized. Agency arises, he writes, “from the actor’s control of resources.” He continues: “The specific forms that agency will take consequently vary enormously and are culturally and historically determined.”⁹ They are also, to a degree, ecologically circumscribed. Structures are at risk, he explains, because of the unpredictability associated with the accumulation of nonhuman (and human) resources. But the source of that uncertainty rests at least partly with the very nature of those resources. To conceive of the world of plants and animals, climate and weather, and so forth, as nonhuman “resources” is to render them dead and to obscure their role in historical change. In other words, I am arguing instead for a concept of human agency that credits ecological and biological factors without reducing them to rigid determining elements operating on a one-way causal highway.	11
The anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport once observed that humankind “survives biologically or not at all.”¹⁰ That fact is too little recognized by historians. Such daily and obvious routines as securing enough food and getting rid of bodily waste, essential practices that must occur in ways that do not undermine a culture’s ecological base, have received painfully little attention from historians. Indeed, one of the questions that might be asked is how the ecological consequences of eating and flushing became so invisible, so enmeshed in the wish to forget.	12
Historians have concerned themselves with race, class, and gender because they offer a means of exploring the history of oppression. Power inequalities unfold along these three lines.¹¹ But they also literally take place, occurring in landscapes with their own peculiar ecological attributes. The transformation of the natural world—for resources to feed, clothe, and shelter—is yet another venue for exploring the history of power. By focusing on how different groups within a culture went about transforming nature to feed themselves and the struggle that ensued to shape how that happened, we can create a more usable past, one more relevant to the everyday lives of people today.	13
What follows is an attempt to describe briefly the genesis of environmental history, as well as the objections raised to it. The essay will then go on to show, in a concrete way, how viewing nature as an active, shaping force in the past can help change our understanding of some conventional topics in American history. My goal is to leave readers with both a more nuanced view of human agency and an appreciation of the way power operates through and across landscapes.	14

Environmental history in its present form emerged during the 1970s in the context of national and global debates over the fate of the planet. It built on the work done in American political and intellectual history by Samuel P. Hays and Roderick Nash, as well as the earlier environmentally oriented studies of Walter Prescott Webb and Frederick Jackson Turner. It also drew on the Annales school, which has long made the environment an integral part of its approach to the past.¹² And yet environmental historians sought to move beyond the ideas and methods of their French predecessors. Fernand Braudel, for example, made nature a major focus of his study of the Mediterranean world, arguing that environmental trends, which he believed occurred slowly and repeatedly, influenced the course of human history. But because virtually all of the material that deals with this issue is confined to the opening of the book, it acts chiefly as a preface to the largely social and political study that follows.¹³ Environmental historians in the United States have tried to move beyond this approach by integrating nature into all aspects of their narratives, as opposed to setting it off in a section of its own. Their goal is to examine the reciprocal relationship between humankind and nature, that is, how the natural world has constrained and shaped the past, how humankind has affected the environment, and how these environmental changes have in turn limited the choices available to people as they made history.	15
What is most remarkable about the field’s recent evolution is that it came of age at precisely the same time that many historians were moving in precisely the reverse direction, away from a concern with material reality toward the social construction of knowledge. William Cronon has already addressed the challenge that postmodernism poses for environmental historians. He makes the case for the art of telling stories but points out that our narratives about the past, in the end, must make ecological sense.¹⁴ Environmental historians, however, have spent perhaps too much time looking over their shoulders at the postmodern ghosts chasing them and not enough time considering what social historians, who have evinced indifference to the field, think of their work.¹⁵ Nothing speaks better to this indifference than the small amount of literature critiquing environmental history from a social history perspective.	16
Elizabeth Blackmar offers what remains perhaps the only critique of the field as seen through the eyes of a social historian. She broaches the issue of moral responsibility and its place in environmental history, and worries that a field seeking to reconcile human and natural history might somehow descend into ecological reductionism. Such a course, she explains, risks “letting people off the hook for the history they have wrought,” allowing them “to evade the question of politics.”¹⁶ That is, of course, a legitimate concern, and one can perhaps point to some works that have fallen into this trap.¹⁷ But neither the methods nor the assumptions of the field necessarily dictate that it is any more prone to moral handwashing than other fields of history.¹⁸	17
Blackmar also objects that environmental history seems better suited to address agrarian life and culture. When urban issues are discussed—such as water pollution and toxic waste—the tendency among most environmental historians is to embrace “the stance of engineers and managers contemplating a problem to be solved.”¹⁹ In other words, rather than exploring how power has shaped the approach taken toward pollution and waste, many environmental historians are simply replicating the interpretive frameworks and skewed assumptions of their subjects. She is on firm ground here; much of the work that has emerged on the issue of cities and the environment has failed to integrate fully a concern with power and class into its analysis. Too much emphasis has been placed on urban ecological change without explaining what the social impact of such change has been.²⁰	18
Blackmar’s more general point that the field has been biased toward agriculture at the expense of urban and industrial issues is, moreover, one shared by some environmental historians themselves. Some of the discontent arises from Donald Worster’s 1990 call for an agro-ecological approach to the past. Simply put, Worster argued that how a culture goes about feeding itself involves the restructuring of the natural world, that is, the domestication of ecosystems. Sometimes, the effect of that restructuring can lead to harmful ecological consequences that undermine a culture’s very ability to exist. He urged environmental historians to embrace such an agro-ecological model as they went about unpacking the ramifications of capitalist development. Critics have indicted Worster’s approach as too narrowly construed to encompass fully the range of interests currently employed by environmental historians.²¹ That may well be a fair criticism. But it would be wrong to imagine that an agro-ecological approach can only be applied to agrarian societies. Metropolitan-based societies face the same dilemma of finding a way of feeding themselves. Moreover, one can factor power into this question simply by asking which groups in society ended up harmed, as a culture evolved from, for instance, a reliance on nearby land to supply it with food toward a more consumption-oriented mode that rested on dispersed factory farms and distant slaughterhouses.	19
Regardless of the merit of Blackmar’s critique, environmental history still exists as a very peripheral concern for most scholars. Historians might be more inclined toward the field if they felt that it could enrich their rendering of some of the oldest and most venerable topics in history. Or, perhaps more important, that an environmental approach could help penetrate the mystifying forces at work under the capitalist economic system and ultimately give us a fuller sense of the environmental and social costs that arise as a culture attempts to survive biologically on the planet.	20
Some examples will help make clear these points. I have chosen the cases below, first, for their range through time and, second, because they deal with topics familiar to most historians. In effect, I will be telling four somewhat different stories about the American past: industrial change in the East, the enclosure of common resources in the New South, the Progressive Era attempt to clean up the city, and the conservation movement and its impact on Native Americans and rural whites. Generally speaking, the examples all fall within the period between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth. All of them deal with the conflicts that emerged as industrialists, reformers, and other more powerful groups in society sought to rationalize the use of the natural world in ways that disproportionately affected America’s dispossessed.	21

Most American history textbooks have little or nothing to say about the role of the environment in early industrial transformation.²² Typically, they locate the origins of factory life in New England and go on to describe the rise of the Lowell mills, the women workers who, at least initially, made up the work force, and the class conflict that resulted as wages were cut in the 1830s. Rarely is the natural world mentioned, except for an occasional reference to the rivers along which the textile mills were located. An exception is Gary B. Nash and Julie Roy Jeffrey’s popular The American People, which has a brief section devoted to the environmental consequences of industrial growth. Economic change, the authors note, led to deforestation, air pollution, and a decline in spring fish runs. “Yet most Americans,” the section concludes, “accepted the changing environment as an inevitable part of progress.”²³	22
In fact, the evidence suggests that some people did object to the environmental impact of industrial transformation. Perhaps because the authors sequestered the environment in a separate section, instead of integrating it into the main lines of their story, they failed to grasp this point. Had Nash and Jeffrey made nature their point of analytical departure, they might have realized that the widespread opposition to industrialization’s ecological dark side offers a nice parallel to the class conflict that concerns them (and other textbook authors).	23
Consider the issue of the decline in spring fish runs. Since the seventeenth century, New Englanders had come to depend for food on various species of anadromous fish, the most important of which were shad, salmon, and alewives. The adult members of these species migrate from the ocean to rivers, generally in the spring, in order to reproduce. As the fish swam upstream to spawn, the colonists and their descendants gathered at various fishing spots along rivers and used hooks, nets, and seines to harvest them. Enormous numbers of fish passed upstream as late as the eighteenth century. In the Merrimack River watershed, fishers caught 840,000 shad in 1784 alone.²⁴	24
Fish played a critical role in the diet of seventeenth and eighteenth-century New Englanders. This was still a world where the seasons largely determined the availability of food. Winter proved problematic mainly because of the monotony of the food supply, which often consisted of little more than pork, peas, and bread. But it was in the early spring that families confronted their toughest dietary challenge, as grain and meat supplies neared exhaustion. In such a context, the spring fish runs were literally a godsend. As one proverb had it, “We hope meat will last ’till fish comes, and fish will last ’till meat comes.”²⁵	25
A number of factors contributed to the decline of the river fisheries. First, overfishing may well have played a role, especially during the middle to latter part of the eighteenth century, as population pressure in older coastal towns increased.²⁶ Second, the deforestation that accompanied the clearing of land for agriculture during this same period led to soil erosion; no longer held in place by the roots of trees, the soil washed into rivers and streams, where it covered and destroyed spawning beds.²⁷	26
But the greatest threat came from dams erected to create canal transportation and, more important, to power textile and other factories. As water was increasingly drawn into the world of exchange, the fish—prized and depended on by backcountry farmers since the beginning of European settlement—declined dramatically. In the early 1770s, Rhode Island farmers from the Blackstone River Valley, finding the supply of fish reduced as a result of industrial development downstream, succeeded in forcing the legislature to pass “An act making it lawful to break down and blow up Rocks at Pawtucket Falls to let fish pass up.” Before the nineteenth century, the common law protected both the public’s right to fish and licensed people to remove dams and other obstructions themselves if they interfered with their ability to partake of this resource. The Rhode Island legislation reinforced this common-law avenue of redress, but the fact that it had to do so is evidence that such rights to fish had already been compromised.²⁸	27
The mills involved in the Rhode Island dispute, however, paled in comparison with the large-scale factory complexes built along the region’s more powerful Merrimack and Connecticut rivers in the nineteenth century. During the 1840s, the Boston Associates constructed dams at Lawrence and Holyoke, Massachusetts, which effectively delivered the finishing blows to the region’s embattled fish species.²⁹ Fish were largely irrelevant to the plans of this innovative group of Boston capitalists, who mainly viewed water as a commodity, an objectified entity, separate from the land, that had to be controlled, packaged, and sold for energy.³⁰ From their perspective, water was in need of domestication; it could no longer be allowed to flow according to seasonal rhythms but instead required control in accordance with industrial time. The factory enterprises the associates had in place by mid-century involved elaborate water-control infrastructures—dams and canals, sometimes built at great distances from the factories themselves—measures that delivered water to the mills when they needed it most, especially during the dry spells of late summer.	28
Reengineering the valley to benefit such large-scale enterprises played havoc with both ecological and social relations. Changes to the flow of water flooded and destroyed meadowland that farmers depended on to provide fodder for their livestock (perhaps even compromising agricultural prospects, which had formerly benefited from the nutrient subsidy that the meadows provided arable land, as fodder fed to animals produced manure to fortify the soil). It also interfered with lumbering operations and the waterpower needs of small-scale mills. Conflict erupted as a result. That conflict was especially acute in the region of the New Hampshire lakes, where water was commandeered by the Boston Associates and made to answer the energy needs of the factories along the lower Merrimack at Lowell and Lawrence. In 1859, malcontents rioted and attempted to tear down a dam in Lake Village, New Hampshire. The dam affected the lives of people throughout the upper Merrimack Valley and also came to symbolize the incredible arrogance at the heart of the associates’ designs for water.³¹	29
The full story behind the changes in law and property that occurred in response to the environmental impact of industrialization is far too involved to do justice to here. I simply want to call attention to the way that bringing nature into the center of the study of economic change can enlarge our understanding of how oppression manifests itself throughout an interdependent river system. Focusing on water and fish, in this case, can help historians grasp the full transformative effects of the factory order, especially the far-reaching social ramifications of ecological change.	30

Textbook writers have more of an excuse for failing to pay proper heed to nature’s role in southern history. In truth, they have had few studies to draw on. From a spatial standpoint, environmental historians have spent far more time considering the West and New England than the South.³² Not surprisingly, even the most environmentally sensitive textbooks replicate this lopsided state of affairs. Alan Brinkley’s well-regarded American History: A Survey contains a number of sidebar essays dealing with the environment. Putting aside how placing the environment in a sidebar locates it outside the main lines of the American past, we find that the bulk of the essays deal with the West and, to a much lesser extent, the North. Otherwise, passing mention is made in the main text to the role of southern soil and climate in growing tobacco and later cotton.³³ A number of other textbooks do discuss the part that animals, especially livestock, played in the antebellum South. They note that slaves often went hunting and fishing to supplement plantation rations and that yeoman and poorer white farmers commonly turned cattle and hogs loose to graze in the woods.³⁴	31
But whatever little attention is paid to the natural world in the antebellum period does not carry over into the period after the Civil War. The books typically focus on cotton’s stranglehold over the economy and the development of the crop-lien system. Occasionally, passing reference is made to the closing of the range, beginning in the 1870s.³⁵ Otherwise, the battle to control the common lands of the South is, for the most part, overlooked.	32
Yet it seems amply clear that such lands played a significant role in southern history both before and after the Civil War. The importance of the open range in this region was in part the result of climate. Because the South is located in a humid subtropical zone, where winters are significantly less harsh than in the North, it was possible to keep large numbers of animals without building barns to protect them from freezing weather. Cattle and pigs could thus survive off the range on a year-round basis.³⁶ The focus on cotton has tended to obscure the important part that livestock played in the antebellum southern economy. In 1860, for example, the region’s livestock was valued at twice that year’s crop of cotton.³⁷ That the animals flourished was in part a tribute to the huge quantities of unimproved land, a great deal of it unenclosed, that dominated the landscape, even as late as 1860, land made up of woods and marsh that slaves, yeomen, and plain folk turned to for hunting, fishing, and grazing.³⁸	33
Animals roamed freely across the landscape of the antebellum South, a custom institutionalized in law. Fence laws, which dated from the colonial period, made agriculturalists responsible for enclosing their crops adequately or liable for any damage caused by roving animals. Apart from these laws, a set of customs and legal decisions protected the rights of those who sought to graze animals on the open range. As one Georgia farmer put it in 1885, “The citizens of this county have and always have had the legal, moral, and Bible right to let their stock. . . run at large.”³⁹ But the very fact that this privilege needed to be pointed out betrayed the struggle that was then taking place over the attempt to invoke the law to privatize what many took to be their customary right to common land.	34
In the wake of Emancipation, a movement emerged in the South to rationalize both labor and land. Desperately concerned to reassert control over the labor of the newly freed slaves, the planter class sought to limit access and use of the open range. Game laws passed beginning in the 1870s limited the ability of African Americans to hunt and fish. In 1875, three counties in Georgia outlawed the killing of partridge and deer between April and October, precisely the months when planters needed field hands the most.⁴⁰ At times, such laws were directed specifically at areas with large black populations. An 1876 Alabama game law applied only to fourteen counties in the Black Belt.⁴¹	35
Game laws aimed at a largely marginal and dispossessed group drew nowhere near the outcry that attempts to curb open-range grazing did. The effort to repeal the so-called fence laws, because they cut across lines of class and race, proved far more contentious.⁴² “Why in the name of common sense,” one planter asked, “am I compelled to maintain 12 or 13 miles of hideous fence around my plantation at an annual cost of upwards of a thousand dollars, in order to prevent the cattle and hogs which my neighbors turn loose . . . from destroying my crops and robbing my property?”⁴³ If such concerns, in part, represented a thinly veiled attack on labor, there were also more practical environmental issues at stake in the quest to end the open range. Southern fences were designed in a way that used a large amount of wood, a resource that had become increasingly scarce in the postbellum years, especially in light of the depredations that occurred during the Civil War. The most common fence was the zigzag or Virginia fence, a design favored because it required much less labor than the post-and-hole variety.⁴⁴ But what it lacked in labor it made up for in wood, a resource also under mounting attack from increased development and industrial timber operations by the latter part of the nineteenth century.	36
For several reasons, including ones of principle and the design of fences, those who favored an end to the open range triumphed. It would take decades, in some places until the 1970s, before the range was fully closed.⁴⁵ But by the late nineteenth century, the law was moving in a direction that now made the owners of livestock legally responsible for the damage their animals caused to the property of others. The new legal climate had biological consequences to match its social effects on those seeking to gain their subsistence from the land. The closing of the range worked to limit the spread of the cattle tick, a carrier of the parasitic infection babesiosis, familiarly known as Texas fever. With the cattle no longer free to roam at will, the federal government, in the early twentieth century, seized the opportunity to intervene with a program for eradicating the tick. But the capital-intensive measures required to eliminate the problem wound up benefiting the large stock raisers at the expense of the yeoman farmers who could not afford to purchase the necessary technology.⁴⁶ Thus did a social development, the closing of the range, bring about a biological shift, a less hospitable environment for the tick, that led to still more social transformation, a negative one from the standpoint of farmers seeking to survive on the land.	37

While nature’s role in southern history has gone relatively unnoticed, textbook writers seem more inclined to discuss the issue of the environment in treating late nineteenth-century urban change. In general, the books convey a picture of the urban landscape as disease-ridden and filthy, replete with polluted water, heaps of manure, and garbage-strewn streets. Progressive reformers then intervened to clean up cities, lobbying for public water supplies and sewer systems, municipal trash collection, and other environmental measures.⁴⁷ And of course these reforms did indeed improve public health. Yet the problem with such a portrayal of the cleansing of the urban environment is that it fails to acknowledge the virtues of the filth. In other words, it does not allow readers to see the social and environmental logic behind the city in its dirtier incarnation.⁴⁸	38
Nation of Nations, for example, calls attention to the pigs and sheep that roamed New York City as late as 1860. It also briefly mentions that the horses used for transportation produced tons of manure, providing an ideal environment for disease to take root.⁴⁹ Roaming pigs were indeed an annoyance, especially in the eyes of better-off city dwellers. These animals were feral and occasionally killed children; they also fornicated and relieved themselves in public. Horse manure, meanwhile, bred countless numbers of flies, which carried disease, including typhoid fever.⁵⁰ The pigs and horse manure unquestionably represented a nuisance and health problem, but the story of their role in the city should not end there. Pig meat and horse droppings once played important parts in the lives of working-class families and surrounding farmers.	39
Before the advent of municipal trash collection, working-class women may have kept pigs very cheaply, sending the creatures out to feast on the piles of garbage that littered city streets. They then formed a valuable source of protein. A kind of urban commons existed in some nineteenth-century American cities, and when reformers sought to close it down they met stiff resistance. In New York, the best-documented case, city officials tried to ban swine from the streets beginning in the 1810s. By 1819, setting hogs free to roam the city had become a crime. But the practice continued. In 1821, authorities seeking to lock up the animals faced off against Irish and black working-class women, who organized to defend the creatures. The effort to create a hog-free city continued, with other porcine conflicts erupting in 1825, 1826, 1830, 1832, and 1849. By 1860, the area below 86th Street was secured as a pig-free zone, but the animals still thrived further north in Harlem, where they may have continued to supply meat for the working class.⁵¹	40
The horse manure found in cities also had its uses. Farmers living on the outskirts of urban areas relied on it to fertilize hay and vegetable crops. The hay was eventually sold as horse feed to dairies and stables, while the vegetables enhanced the diet of the city’s better-off residents. In such places as New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston, manure traveled one way and vegetables and hay the other, as organic matter was recycled in the nineteenth century, if not before.⁵² Manure was the ecological lifeblood of the truck farms that once dominated Brooklyn and Queens, with the excrement acting as a vehicle for returning nutrients that planting crops had robbed from the soil. (See Figure 2.) Horse manure played such an important role in farm life that one King’s County landowner even stipulated in his will that his son receive “all manure on the farm at the time of my decease.”⁵³	41
Figure 2: The lifeblood of truck farms on the outskirts of Manhattan, manure produced by city horses was shipped to farmers, who used it to boost soil fertility and grow vegetables for urban consumption. Harpers’ Weekly, August 6, 1881. Courtesy of the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland.
Even human excrement helped boost soil fertility in regions adjacent to cities. In 1880, almost half of the more than two hundred cities surveyed deposited night soil on the land or sold it to dealers who transformed it into fertilizer. In 1912, so-called necessary tubmen, a job that often went to African Americans, cleaned out roughly 70,000 privy vaults and cesspools in Baltimore; the waste was eventually shipped off to farmers, who purchased it in thousand-gallon quantities and used it to, in effect, pay off the ecological mortgage they had taken out on the soil by growing vegetables.⁵⁴	42
Ultimately, the rise of public water supplies, the flush toilet, and the building of sewer systems combined to divorce urbanites and their waste from the soil cycle. Instead of playing a part in bolstering soil fertility, human waste coursed into rivers, streams, and lakes, where it led some species of animal and plant life to flourish and others to decline markedly. The potential ill effects of transforming human excrement from an agricultural resource into plain, ordinary shit were not completely lost on contemporaries. In 1871, for example, Horace Greeley lamented New York’s practice of flushing human waste into sewers. The city, he wrote, “annually poisons its own atmosphere and adjacent waters with excretions which science and capital might combine to utilize at less than half the cost.”⁵⁵ Karl Marx in the third volume of Capital wrote: “Excretions of consumption are of the greatest importance for agriculture. So far as their utilization is concerned, there is an enormous waste of them in the capitalist economy. In London, for instance, they find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense.”⁵⁶	43
Flush toilets and sewers not only removed urbanites from the soil cycle, they also helped cut people off from the environmental consequences of their behavior. City residents became increasingly ignorant of where their bodily waste wound up once they pulled the handle. But that did not stop human waste, with its high phosphorous content, from entering waterways, where it eventually caused algae to flourish in great amounts. The algae blooms, in turn, drained oxygen from the water and launched a chain of ecological consequences that at times helped reconfigure the species of fish that made up some of the nation’s largest lakes. Rivers were similarly affected as sewage caused dissolved oxygen levels to plummet to the point where fish suffocated.⁵⁷ These changes often occurred in places far from the original source of the waste itself, out of sight and thus largely, if not totally, out of mind.	44
This erosion of ecological memory was compounded by another set of changes, which masked the social and environmental consequences involved in how Americans went about obtaining food. The shift toward a flush-it-and-forget-it mentality occurred at roughly the same time (the 1880s) that refrigerated railroad cars allowed large commercial farms in the South and West, especially California, to outcompete the nearby truck farms that once provided cities with fruits and vegetables.⁵⁸ Large single-crop factory farms, which in California at least depended on migrant labor and large inputs of water and fertilizer, were invisible to urbanites who bought oranges and raisins from local grocers and, increasingly, chain stores.⁵⁹	45
Also invisible to them were the meatpacking plants that took live animals and disassembled them into dressed beef, ready for shipment to eastern cities (now largely devoid of roving pigs and whatever meat they might have provided working-class families).⁶⁰ The industrialization of livestock farming, especially in the years after World War II—combined with a later trend toward corporate consolidation—resulted in huge concentrations of cattle, hogs, and chickens in some southern states (mainly those with a tendency toward anti-unionism and lax environmental regulations). The result has been unheard-of amounts of animal waste, which in turn has made agriculture today a leading source of water pollution.⁶¹	46
The roots of some of North America’s most pressing ecological dilemmas, in other words, go back to the turn of the century, when eating and flushing became severed from space. City dwellers became less aware of the conditions under which their food was produced and about where their bodily waste went. Together, these shifts mark a key turning point—on a par even with the ecological consequences set in motion by the Columbian Exchange—in the nation’s environmental history.	47

The environmental topic that to date has received the most attention from American historians is of course the conservation movement. Every textbook I consulted (with one exception noted below) spends space discussing Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and their quest to manage the nation’s forests and other natural resources efficiently, wisely, and in a way that would allow industry to prosper and Americans to enjoy the nation’s natural wealth for generations after. Revealingly, the one textbook that has the least to say about this topic is the American Social History Project’s Who Built America?—which devotes to the issue just two sentences and a map detailing national parks and forests.⁶² Is the reader to conclude that conservation was irrelevant to the lives of ordinary Americans, the main protagonists in this otherwise compelling textbook? One can certainly understand the authors’ decision to downplay the conservation movement in light of the way the topic has been treated in most textbooks—as primarily a political and intellectual trend. Yet the decision to conserve resources begs the question: For whom were they being conserved?	48
Consider the movement to establish national parks, specifically the creation in 1872 of Yellowstone in northwestern Wyoming. Park officials and others would for decades call the park area a “wilderness.” In fact, it was nothing of the sort, at least not from the perspective of those Native Americans who depended on it to hunt, fish, and gather food. (See Figure 3.) Although park officials claimed that Indians avoided the area out of superstitious fear of its geothermal features, in truth, the Indian groups were very familiar with the region and what it had to offer in the way of plants and animals; they also commonly set fire to the land in order to encourage regrowth in those species of wildlife and vegetation that they depended on most to survive. Moreover, it bears noting that park preservation and Indian removal proceeded in lockstep motion. A number of treaties and executive orders signed between 1855 and 1875, for example, effectively removed the Bannock, Shoshone, Blackfeet, and Crow Indians to reservations, where it was hoped they would be unlikely to interfere with the stream of tourists headed for Yellowstone. Forcing Native Americans onto reservations, however, where they were denied adequate rations, only made them more dependent on Yellowstone for its fauna and flora. In 1896, in the leading case of Ward v. Race Horse, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a provision in an 1868 treaty that allowed the Shoshone and Bannock to hunt game on unoccupied government land, a move that effectively undermined the rights of Native Americans in the Yellowstone area to engage in the subsistence practices that had sustained them for centuries.⁶³	49
Figure 3: “The Tower of Tower Falls,” Yellowstone National Park, circa 1875, by Thomas Moran (1837–1926). This wild and pristine view of Yellowstone is drawn as though no human being had ever stepped foot in the area, whereas Native Americans had long been familiar with Yellowstone’s offerings. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Rural whites also turned to Yellowstone as a source of food, as well as a way of escaping the discipline and subservience bound up with wage labor. Those who poached game in the park, for example, seemed to come from the ranks of the working class. In 1912, a park official observed that the elk that wandered outside of Yellowstone’s boundaries were often killed by “families that otherwise might have had a slim meat ration for the winter due to dull times for workingmen in this section of country.” Two years later, an unemployed man was arrested for poaching game in the park, claiming that being “broke all the time” drove him to crime.⁶⁴ Whites also cut and gathered wood inside the park for subsistence purposes and allowed their livestock to graze in the area as well. To deal with the poaching, wood gathering, grazing, and other customary uses of parkland, officials instituted a set of rules and laws to wrest control of the area away from both Indians and rural whites. By the 1880s, however, the number of unlawful transgressions had risen so high that park administrators felt compelled to call on the U.S. Army to help bring order to the chaos.⁶⁵	50
The criminalization of such customary practices as hunting, collecting, and fire-setting was part of a broader plan by the park’s administrators to manage the area in a way that would help stimulate tourism. Specifically, the goal was to encourage those big-game species—elk and bison, especially—that seemed to appeal most to visitors. To accomplish this goal, the army declared war from time to time on such predators as mountain lions, wolves, and coyotes in an attempt to keep them from harming those species that tourists came from far and wide to see. Conservation of some species went hand in hand with the extermination of others. The policy had some ironic results. Deprived of their predators, the elk population grew, perhaps to as high as 30,000–40,000 animals by 1909–1910, putting significant pressure on the range’s vegetative cover. A summer drought in 1919 followed by a severe winter left so little forage that some 6,000 elk, according to park service estimates, starved to death—killed, at least in part, by those purportedly charged with saving them.⁶⁶	51
Like the effort to preserve big-game animals, the attempt to conserve forest resources also resulted in unpredictable and at times tragic consequences. The suppression of forest fires lay at the heart of the Progressive Era’s and especially Gifford Pinchot’s view of conservation. Native Americans had a long tradition of using fire to manage forests. In New England, for example, setting fire to the land encouraged the growth of new vegetation that, in turn, led to an increase in precisely the wildlife (elk, deer, turkey, and other creatures) the Indians relied on to survive.⁶⁷ Even as late as the early twentieth century, rural southerners carried on the tradition of burning to keep down the brush and drive out game. In California, timber owners engaged in the practice to reduce the stock of fuels and limit the spread of conflagrations when they did start.⁶⁸ Pinchot and his disciples at the Forest Service, however, in their attempt to assert control over the nation’s timber resources, transformed light burning, an accepted and customary practice, at least in the South, into a crime. Forest fires, as Pinchot put it in 1898, “encourage a spirit of lawlessness and a disregard of property rights.”⁶⁹ Yet suppressing forest fires proved in the end both misguided and self-defeating. Fires aid the decomposition of forest litter and help recycle nutrients through an ecosystem. Without them, growth slows down. Worse still, by suppressing fires, the Forest Service allowed fuels to build up, increasing the possibility for catastrophic conflagrations.	52
The conservation movement needs to be seen as yet another chapter in the eclipse of the commons, as part of the struggle between those seeking to rationalize the use of natural resources and those who tried to assert their customary rights to hunt, fish, cut wood, and graze animals. In this respect, it has as much in common with the closing of the southern range or the rise of the pigless city as it does with the workings of the administrative state during the Progressive Era. Criminalizing activities that stood at the center of people’s ability to survive off the land left them more dependent on the cash economy and drew them even further into the world of wage labor and exchange, but to what extent we do not yet understand. We know even less about whether the customary practices these common people engaged in prior to enclosure made ecological sense, that is, whether commoners who fished in New England’s rivers, grazed animals in southern forests, or took game in the West were doing so in a manner that was ecologically sustainable over the long term.⁷⁰ Clearly, it would be wrong to romanticize Native Americans or rural whites as the nation’s first conservationists. But it is equally wrong to leave the impression, as many textbooks do, that federal conservation improved the environment, plain and simple, without taking into account its complex social and ecological effects on the ground.	53

Elsewhere, I have spelled out in detail what an ecologically informed survey of American history might look like.⁷¹ Here, I will examine how environmental history changes the way we view the role of agency and power in the past. In particular, how, if at all, should such an approach shape our understanding of capitalism? Capitalism, indeed, is one of the structures that most interests William Sewell in his effort to provide a theoretical framework for understanding agency. Sewell argues that it is not wage labor so much as the commodity form that constitutes the core schema of capitalist development. As he writes: “The core procedure of capitalism—the conversion of use value into exchange value or the commodification of things—is exceptionally transposable. It knows no natural limits; it can be applied not only to cloth, tobacco, or cooking pans, but to land, housework, bread, sex, advertising, emotions, or knowledge, each of which can be converted into any other by means of money.”⁷² Certainly, the enclosure of all the various common resources that in large part defines nineteenth-century U.S. environmental history lends support to Sewell’s assertion of the interchangeableness at the heart of the capitalist structure.	54
But are there really no “natural limits” to the commodity form? On the one hand, given the extraordinary number of commodified dimensions to modern life, I am inclined to agree. On the other hand, however, ecological constraints do at least pose obstacles to capitalism’s colonizing tendencies and contribute to the unpredictability that at times ruptures the surface of the economic structure. The power of capitalism derives in large part from its ability to reduce everything to the lowest common financial denominator, that is, to money. As Sewell points out, changes in one realm, the automobile industry to use his example, can result in ramifications and parallel changes in other spheres, such as the rise of rubber plantations centered on forced labor. Rubber, in other words, became commodified to meet the demand of the early twentieth-century auto industry for tires, with far-reaching consequences for tropical areas across the globe.⁷³ But there were, historically speaking at least, some natural limits to the commodification of rubber, as Henry Ford’s failed Fordlandia venture in Brazil during the 1920s and 1930s demonstrates.	55
The demand for rubber exploded in the 1920s, the product of increasing numbers of cars and the Goodyear company’s introduction of a new, more comfortable-riding tire that required 30 percent more elastic material than the one it replaced. Unfortunately for U.S. automakers, Southeast Asian plantations, controlled by the British and Dutch, had a virtual monopoly on the rubber market. In 1927, Henry Ford tried to break the Asian monopoly by purchasing rights to 2.5 million acres of land in the Brazilian Amazon, where rubber had long been grown. Indeed, the Hevea species first evolved there before Europeans transplanted it for use in Asia. By 1929, nearly 1,500 acres of rainforest had been cleared and planted with rubber trees. Five years later, however, leaf blight traumatized the project. Rubber trees had evolved to adapt to the fungal menace by growing in a scattered fashion across the forest floor. But the imperatives of capitalist production demanded the concentration of trees—allowing laborers to tap the latex without having to travel much as they went about their job—a move that provided the fungus a convenient avenue for spreading its ills. With the blight wreaking havoc, Ford’s associates moved to a new site, but again things went wrong as drought struck in 1938 and swarms of caterpillars in 1942. In 1945, Ford withdrew from the project.⁷⁴	56
To understand the “chronic instability or unpredictability of capitalism’s surface structures,” to quote Sewell, we need to perhaps consider a fourth dimension in our historical analysis, apart from race, class, and gender.⁷⁵ Taking into account the independent world of nature should cause us to rethink the meaning of human agency.⁷⁶ We need, in short, a less anthropocentric and less arrogant view of the concept, something more along the lines of what the anthropologist Sherry Ortner once proposed: “To say that society and history are products of human action is true, but only in a certain ironic sense. They are rarely the products the actors themselves set out to make.”⁷⁷	57
One of environmental history’s greatest achievements has been to draw our attention to obscured or buried relationships—the connection between the control of water and the demise of fish, between the rise of cleaner cities and the decline of the working-class’s roaming pigs, between conservation for white, middle-class vacationers and its consequences for rural whites and Native Americans. Whether pursuing such an agenda can help put history back together again remains to be seen. But at the very least, such an ecologically minded and socially sensitive approach will give us a more humble view of human agency as well as a clearer picture of how oppression operates, creating a link between history and matters of everyday existence, survival, and struggle. Without it, we risk letting people off the hook.	58
Ted Steinberg, a professor of history and law at Case Western Reserve University, has been studying environmental history since 1984. His work has been characterized on occasion as muckraking and polemical, as if these were bad things. His books include Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (1991), Slide Mountain: or, The Folly of Owning Nature (1995), and Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (2000). His most recent book, which inspired the present article, is Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (2002). Notes I wish to thank Dror Wahrman for first suggesting that I write this essay and for his trenchant criticism along the way to its completion. My gratitude also goes out to Michael Grossberg for his help sorting out what matters most, as well as to the AHR staff and the anonymous reviewers recruited to help me. In addition, I am indebted to Timothy Burke, Ken Ledford, Adam Rome, Jonathan Sadowsky, and Donald Worster for their excellent advice and guidance.¹ Quotation from David Oshinsky, “The Humpty Dumpty of Scholarship,” New York Times (August 26, 2000): A17. This concern over fragmentation is an old one, first raised in the 1970s. For more on this debate, see Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1976), xii–xiii; Thomas Bender, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 73 (June 1986): 120–36; Nell Irvin Painter, “Bias and Synthesis in History,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 109–12; Richard Wightman Fox, “Public Culture and the Problem of Synthesis,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 113–16; Roy Rosenzweig, “What Is the Matter with History?” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 117–22; Thomas Bender, “Wholes and Parts: Continuing the Conversation,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 123–30; and Eric H. Monkkonen, “The Dangers of Synthesis,” AHR 91 (December 1986): 1146–57. Nor is public concern with specialization unique to history. The field of anthropology has also come under criticism for its fragmentation. See Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (January 1984): 126.² Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt (New York, 1998); Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (New York, 1994); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); Ramachandra Guha, “The Prehistory of Community Forestry in India,” Environmental History 6 (April 2001): 213–38; William Beinart, “Soil Erosion, Animals and Pasture over the Longer Term: Environmental Destruction in Southern Africa,” in The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment, Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, eds. (Oxford and Portsmouth, N.H., 1996), 54–72; Raymond H. Dominick III, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871–1971 (Bloomington, Ind., 1992); J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000). For some useful reviews of the environmental historiography, see Gregory H. Maddox, “Africa and Environmental History,” Environmental History 4 (April 1999): 162–67; David Edmunds and Eva Wollenberg, “Historical Perspectives on Forest Policy Change in Asia: An Introduction,” Environmental History 6 (April 2001): 190–212; Mark Cioc, Björn-Ola Linnér, and Matt Osborn, “Environmental History Writing in Northern Europe,” Environmental History 5 (July 2000): 396–406; and Michael Bess, Mark Cioc, and James Sievert, “Environmental History Writing in Southern Europe,” Environmental History 5 (October 2000): 545–56.³ One measure of the relative dominance of the United States in the literature can be found by examining the books published in Cambridge University Press’s well-regarded series in environmental history, edited by Donald Worster and Alfred W. Crosby. Of the twenty titles published thus far, eight treat the United States proper. Only one deals exclusively with Europe, though obviously, given the tendency of environmental historians to favor either ecosystems or other environmental entities over national ones, a number do touch on the area and its role in such developments as the slave trade or colonialism.⁴ In part, environmental historians, by founding their own specialized organization, played a role in cutting themselves off from the rest of the historical profession. See Alfred W. Crosby, “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” AHR 100 (October 1995): 1188.⁵ Textbooks still play a very important role in the teaching of American history, with the leading texts remaining profitable investments for the major publishers.⁶ Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972); Judith A. Carney, The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 7.⁷ Giddens outlines his views on structure and agency in the following works: Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 1–40; Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley, 1979), 49–95; Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies (New York, 1976), 118–26. For a general introduction to Giddens’s work, see Christopher G. A. Bryant and David Jary, “Introduction: Coming to Terms with Anthony Giddens,” in Giddens’ Theory of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation, Bryant and Jary, eds. (London, 1991), 1–31.⁸ William H. Sewell, Jr., “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (July 1992): 19.⁹ Sewell, “Theory of Structure,” 20.¹⁰ Roy A. Rappaport, “The Flow of Energy in an Agricultural Society,” in Energy and Power, Dennis Flannigan, et al., eds. (San Francisco, 1971), 80. For useful explanations of Rappaport’s work, and cultural ecology more generally, see Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” 132–34; and Donald Worster, “History as Natural History: An Essay on Theory and Method,” Pacific Historical Review 53 (February 1984): 1–19.¹¹ Historians have embraced race, class, and gender as categories of analysis, but also as axes on which power operates. It is in the latter sense that I think nature, viewed as yet another axis, is worth taking into consideration, at least for the purposes of this essay. But that said, although there is little question that nature is different from other categories of social organization such as class, race, and gender, it does share with these concepts the ability to shed light on both the causes and consequences of historical phenomena.¹² For an overview of the field, see Richard White, “American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (August 1985): 297–335. For an essay on method, see Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, Worster, ed. (New York, 1988), 289–307.¹³ Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., Siân Reynolds, trans. (New York, 1976). See also J. R. McNeill, The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (New York, 1992).¹⁴ William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347–76.¹⁵ This point about the indifference shown environmental history by social historians is made by Alan Taylor, who has tried to bridge the divide between the two fields. See Taylor, “Unnatural Inequalities: Social and Environmental Histories,” Environmental History 1 (October 1996): 6–19.¹⁶ Elizabeth Blackmar, “Contemplating the Force of Nature,” Radical Historians Newsletter, no. 70 (May 1994): 4.¹⁷ See, for example, Paul Bonnifield, The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depression (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1979), a work that sees the dust storms of the 1930s as literally a “natural” disaster. Blackmar is far more inclined toward Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979), which locates the origins of the disaster in the economic culture of capitalism.¹⁸ Speaking from personal experience, I can say that it was the prospect of moral engagement that attracted me to environmental history in the first place. See Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, 2000), which explores the history of natural calamity over the last century and argues that what Americans have called “natural disasters” are, on closer examination, actually acts of social and economic injustice.¹⁹ Blackmar, “Contemplating the Force of Nature,” 4.²⁰ See, for example, Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio, 1996). For all the merits of Tarr’s work, which has done a great deal to bring to life the darker ecological underside of urbanization, it largely fails to consider the issue of power. For an essay that does apply a class analysis to the issue of sewers and flush toilets, see Peter Linebaugh, “(Marxist) Social History and (Conservative) Legal History: A Reply to Professor Langbein,” New York University Law Review 60 (May 1985): 238–42. Linebaugh was responding to John H. Langbein’s criticism of Douglas Hay, et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975), in particular, Langbein’s complaint that Marxist analysis is as irrelevant to the issue of crime as it is to “the history of climatic changes, the invention of the flush toilet, or what have you.” See Langbein, “Albion’s Fatal Flaws,” Past and Present 98 (February 1983): 97.²¹ See Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1087–1106; William Cronon, “Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1122–31; and Worster, “Seeing beyond Culture,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1142–47.²² I consulted the following textbooks: Edward L. Ayers, et al., American Passages: A History of the United States (Fort Worth, Tex., 2000); Paul S. Boyer, et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, 4th edn. (Boston, 2000); Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, 10th edn. (Boston, 1999); Christopher Clark, et al., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, rev. edn., 2 vols. (New York, 2000); James West Davidson, et al., Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic, 4th edn. (Boston, 2001); Robert A. Divine, et al., America: Past and Present, 6th edn. (New York, 2002); John Mack Faragher, et al., Out of Many: A History of the American People, 3d edn. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2000); David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant, 12th edn. (New York, 2002); John M. Murrin, et al., Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, 2d edn. (Fort Worth, Tex., 1999); Gary B. Nash, et al., The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, 5th edn. (New York, 2001); Mary Beth Norton, et al., A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, 6th edn. (Boston, 2001); George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 5th edn., 2 vols. (New York, 1999).²³ Nash, American People, 301. A sidebar essay in Brinkley, American History, 335–37, deals with flowing water and mentions that dams blocked fish.²⁴ Daniel Vickers, “Those Dammed Shad: Would the River Fisheries of New England Have Survived in the Absence of Industrialization?” (paper delivered at Conference in Honor of John Murrin entitled “What If? Counterfactualism and Early American History,” Princeton, N.J., March 2001), 15.²⁵ Quotation from Diana Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (Hanover, N.H., 2000), 63. For more on the seasonal nature of the colonial food supply, see Sarah F. McMahon, “A Comfortable Subsistence: The Changing Composition of Diet in Rural New England, 1620–1840,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 42 (January 1985): 26–51; and Sarah F. McMahon, “‘All Things in Their Proper Season’: Seasonal Rhythms of Diet in Nineteenth Century New England,” Agricultural History 63 (Spring 1989): 130–51.²⁶ Vickers, “Those Dammed Shad,” 23–24.²⁷ Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond, 64.²⁸ Gary Kulik, “Dams, Fish, and Farmers: Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation, Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 39.²⁹ For a discussion of industrial transformation as it unfolded in the Merrimack River Valley, see Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York, 1991). For industrial change in the Connecticut River Valley, see John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State: New England, 1790–1930 (New York, 2001).³⁰ For more on the commodification of water, see Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 77–95.³¹ Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 99–134.³² See Otis L. Graham, “Again the Backward Region? Environmental History in and of the American South,” Southern Cultures 6 (Summer 2000): 50–72.³³ Brinkley, American History, 372.³⁴ See, for example, Nash, American People, 333–34; Norton, People and a Nation, 338–46; Boyer, Enduring Vision, 340; and Faragher, Out of Many, 311.³⁵ See, for example, Boyer, Enduring Vision, 459–62. Passing mention is made of the closing of the range in Tindall and Shi, America, 849. An important exception, however, is Clark, Who Built America? 2: 109–11, which deals with the class conflict that emerged in the southern countryside during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Murrin, Liberty, Equality, Power, 337–38, contains a one-paragraph discussion of the customary and legal reasons behind the lack of fencing in the South.³⁶ Paul K. Conkin, “Hot, Humid, and Sad,” Journal of Southern History 64 (February 1998): 3–4; R. Ben Brown, “The Southern Range: A Study of Nineteenth Century Law and Society” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1993), 7.³⁷ Brown, “Southern Range,” 3.³⁸ Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Carbondale, Ill., 1972), 73–74.³⁹ Quotation from Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1983), 252; see also pp. 58–63 for more on the southern commons.⁴⁰ Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 242.⁴¹ Brown, “Southern Range,” 190.⁴² Brown, “Southern Range,” 199.⁴³ Quotation from Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” Radical History Review 26 (October 1982): 46.⁴⁴ J. Crawford King, Jr., “The Closing of the Southern Range: An Exploratory Study,” Journal of Southern History 48 (February 1982): 57. See also Shawn Everett Kantor and J. Morgan Kousser, “Common Sense or Commonwealth? The Fence Law and Institutional Change in the Postbellum South,” Journal of Southern History 59 (May 1993): 215.⁴⁵ King, “Closing of the Southern Range,” 54.⁴⁶ Claire Strom, “Texas Fever and the Dispossession of the Southern Yeoman Farmer,” Journal of Southern History 66 (February 2000): 49–74.⁴⁷ See, for example, Faragher, Out of Many, 563–64. Nash, American People, 578–79, contains a sidebar essay on the rise of the flush toilet. The essay ends by asking readers a set of questions about the social impact of the toilet, that is, its effects on family life and class relations. The stunning ecological consequences of this new technology, however, are barely even broached.⁴⁸ Instead, the tendency is to treat horse manure and human waste as “problems” in need of a solution, without recognizing the far more complex role that waste played in cities before they were cleansed. See, for example, Boyer, Enduring Vision, 536; and Divine, America, 552.⁴⁹ Davidson, Nation of Nations, 648. This particular textbook also links crime and filth, treating these topics in succession and, in a sense, replicating the assumptions of Progressive reformers who believed that a healthy environment could defend against a life of crime.⁵⁰ See Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, “The Centrality of the Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City,” in The Making of Urban America, 2d edn., Raymond A. Mohl, ed. (Wilmington, Del., 1997), 120–23; and Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink, 326–29.⁵¹ See Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review 1985 (July/August 1985): 899–935; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 477, 747, 786; and Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago, 1962), 113. Hartog does note that many of the pigs in New York City, his place of study, belonged to butchers. How extensive the practice was among the urban poor remains unclear. A stronger connection between livestock, in this case cattle, and the poor has been established for nineteenth-century Atlanta. See Brown, “Southern Range,” 280–84.⁵² McShane and Tarr, “Centrality of the Horse,” 120; Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia, 1985), 6–21.⁵³ Quotation from Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City, 1999), 46.⁵⁴ Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink, 295, 299.⁵⁵ Quotation from Wines, Fertilizer in America, 32.⁵⁶ Karl Marx, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, Vol. 3 of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1894; rpt. edn., New York, 1967), 101.⁵⁷ William Ashworth, The Late, Great Lakes: An Environmental History (New York, 1986), 123, 132, 134–35; Margaret Beattie Bogue, Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783–1933 (Madison, Wis., 2000), 169; Charles Hardy III, “Fish or Foul: A History of the Delaware River Basin through the Perspective of the American Shad, 1682 to the Present,” Pennsylvania History 66 (Autumn 1999): 507, 518, 522–25, 533n.⁵⁸ Linder and Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County, 68–70.⁵⁹ On California factory farming, see Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley, Calif., 1998); and Douglas C. Sackman, Orange Empire: Nature, Culture, and Growth in California, 1869–1939 (Berkeley, forthcoming).⁶⁰ On the ecological and geographic impact of meatpacking, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), 207–59.⁶¹ According to a recent General Accounting Office report, approximately five tons of animal waste are produced each year for every U.S. citizen. See U.S. General Accounting Office, Animal Agriculture: Waste Management Practices, GAO/RCED–99–205, July 26, 1999. In 1995, after heavy rains, urine and feces from a lagoon at a North Carolina animal “barn”—home to some 12,000 hogs—overflowed and coursed into the New River, killing almost all aquatic life within a seventeen-mile stretch. The amount of toxic waste spilled in this incident was more than twice the amount involved in the notorious Exxon Valdez disaster.⁶² Clark, Who Built America? 2: 240, 241.⁶³ Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York, 1999), 4–5, 45–53, 67–68; and Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, Calif., 2001), 231n. For more on Ward v. Race Horse, see David E. Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice (Austin, Tex., 1997), 91–104.⁶⁴ Quotations from Jacoby, Crimes against Nature, 137.⁶⁵ Jacoby, Crimes against Nature, 99–120.⁶⁶ Jacoby, Crimes against Nature, 119; Michael B. Coughenour and Francis J. Singer, “The Concept of Overgrazing and Its Application to Yellowstone’s Northern Range,” in The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: Redefining America’s Wilderness Heritage, Robert B. Keiter and Mark S. Boyce, eds. (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 211. For more on the relationship between conservation and the extermination of animals, see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977; rpt. edn., New York, 1985), 261–71.⁶⁷ See Cronon, Changes in the Land, 51.⁶⁸ Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, rev. edn. (Seattle, 1997), 101, 143–60.⁶⁹ Quotation from Stephen J. Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (New York, 2001), 80.⁷⁰ Late in his life, E. P. Thompson, who did more than any other historian to further our understanding of common rights, observed that, contrary to Garrett Hardin’s famous assertion of the inevitable tragedy that followed from the use of common resources, “the commoners themselves were not without commonsense.” In other words, those who used common resources engaged in a variety of self-regulatory behaviors. See Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1991), 107; and Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 13, 1968): 1243–48. What is missing, however, from Thompson’s analysis is any appreciation of the fact that not all self-regulatory behavior makes ecological sense. As anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport has explained, there is a disparity between how a culture goes about understanding and thus transforming the natural world and the actual structure of a particular ecosystem: “images of nature are always simpler than nature and in some degree or sense inexact, for ecological systems are complex and subtle beyond full comprehension.” Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (Berkeley, Calif., 1979), 97.⁷¹ See Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York, 2002).⁷² Sewell, “Theory of Structure,” 25–26.⁷³ Sewell, “Theory of Structure,” 26.⁷⁴ Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley, Calif., 2000), 232–33, 244, 258–61.⁷⁵ Sewell, “Theory of Structure,” 26.⁷⁶ It should also cause us to rethink the meaning of culture. Richard White argues forcefully that the line between “nature” and “culture” is, in fact, hardly a line at all but a blurry boundary that would seem to defy all efforts at nailing it down. That is an important insight. But it is equally important to realize that attempts to articulate a hard line between the natural and the cultural have been carried out in order to serve various political interests. See White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995).⁷⁷ Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” 157.