| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ben A. Minteer. The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2006. Pp. viii, 264. $28.00.
In this book, Ben A. Minteer argues that environmental scholars have reinforced an anthropocentric-ecocentric dualism within conservation and environmental activism. In doing so, they have simplified a complex past and lost a pragmatic approach grounded in experience, regionalism, and civic mindedness. Examining four thinkers of the early twentieth century, Minteer expands the intellectual foundations of American environmentalism and hopes to influence contemporary policy by suggesting relationships between environmental values and other public and ethical responsibilities.	1
Minteer opens with Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr., an oft-forgotten horticulturalist, educational theorist, and leader of the Country Life movement that sought to revitalize farming life in a more urban-industrial nation. Bailey and his counterparts recognized rural deficiencies but accepted long-standing Jeffersonian traditions that assumed living in a closer relationship with nature supported a stronger civic order. Both Bailey and the better-known philosopher and educator John Dewey adopted a pragmatic epistemology that emphasized learning through experience and activity. They believed the understanding gained in school gardens was essential to students' citizenship. "Human interests and goods were thoroughly enmeshed in the parts and processes of the natural world, and fullness of experience could not be achieved by following the purely utilitarian strategy so dominant in urban life" (p. 29). Bailey's progressive ideas idealized the agrarian past and garnered little support in his lifetime. Nonetheless, Minteer contends, Bailey's environmental philosophy transcends the traditional dichotomy by seeking wise and efficient resource usage and emphasizing moral and civic stewardship.	. . .

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