Book Review

The title of this book gets it backward: Andrew Kirk writes primarily about Denver's Conservation Library, secondarily about America's environmental movement, and not at all about collecting nature. (The title is especially perplexing given the better puns available with "conservation" and "preservation"!) As an institutional history of an archive, Collecting Nature works fine, but the scale of Kirk's ambitions exceeds the scale of his subject. He wants the early history of this archive to represent the early history of American environmentalism. That's a plausible leap, but a leap nonetheless.	1
The Conservation Library Collection (CLC) began in 1960 as a branch of the Denver Public Library. The pet project of ex-forester Arthur Carhart, the CLC quickly became America's leading depository for documents relating to conservation and conservationists. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the leadership of the library changed. As Kirk portrays it, Carhart and his cohort—"technophobic" outdoorsmen with Progressive pedigrees—gave way to young female techies with links to grass-roots environmentalism. Under this new leadership, and with the aid of federal money, the CLC reinvented itself during the energy crisis, becoming the Regional Energy/Environmental Information Center. But when the Reagan administration recalled the funding, the archive had to close. Its holdings were absorbed by the Denver Public Library, which only recently resurrected the CLC as a separate branch.	2
Collecting Nature touches on a number of topics of interest to environmental historians. The CLC's deep and sometimes troubled relationship with activists and activism resonates with the ongoing debate about the place of advocacy within environmental history. Thanks to Kirk's contextualizing, this book also adds to the growing literature on the gendering of environmentalism, and enriches our understanding of the shift from conservation to environmentalism. If this microhistory is representative, that shift was messier and more decentralized than textbooks suggest. (Tellingly, the CLC constantly struggled to define "conservation.")	3
As welcome as these insights are, one wonders if they could have been made in a single long essay. Even at 180 pages, the text feels padded. A preface, a prologue, and a de facto introduction in Chapter 1 contain redundancies. A scene with faded Hollywood star James Cagney goes on too long. Most of one page is devoted to a deadening list of the names and affiliations of every adviser of the CLC. Other paragraphs are misspent on the minutiae of grass-roots Colorado activism. At the other end of the scale, perhaps the strongest chapter is a biography of Arthur Carhart—an underappreciated figure who did much more than write the famous Forest Service roadless land proposal in 1919. However, in context of a book about an archive, a whole chapter on Carhart's life may be excessive.	4
Obviously Kirk reflected on the project's limitations: the book contains recurring apologies for microhistory. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this historical approach; you just have to choose your microcosm carefully. To his credit, Kirk has done as much with his topic as anyone could.	5
Jared Farmer is a doctoral candidate at Stanford University and the author of Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country (University of Arizona, 1999).

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