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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Gregory Summers. Consuming Nature: Environmentalism in the Fox River Valley, 1850–1950. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2006. Pp. xiv, 256. $29.95.
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| The Fox River flows thirty-five miles from the outlet of Wisconsin's largest interior lake, Lake Winnebago, to the beginning of Green Bay, which flows, in turn, into Lake Michigan. There are six small-to-medium cities in the valley, the largest being Appleton and the city of Green Bay. It is a heavily industrialized valley, and Gregory Summers's book covers the rise of its industry and the impact of this industry on the valley's people and environment. |
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Summers has written a well-organized and exceptionally well-documented study that is an important contribution both to regional history and to environmental history. However, it is as much, if not more, economic as environmental history, and the title should say so explicitly (although there is a hint in the word "consuming"). The two longest chapters are predominantly economic history: chapter three discusses electrification, building highways, and the shift from wheat to dairy fanning; and chapter four discusses the rise of a valley consumer society. Summers uses the term consumption very broadly and does not distinguish between a lumber company's consumption of a forest, after which the forest is gone, and a bird-watcher's consumption of nature by virtue of having driven on paved roads and stayed in a resort to see birds in a forest that is essentially unchanged by bird-watching. |
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