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Book Review
| Politics, Pollution, and Pandas: An Environmental Memoir. By Russell E. Train. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003. xiii + 376 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $28.00.
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| Russell E. Train's resume makes him a shoo-in for any environmental "who's who" list: undersecretary of the Department of Interior (1969), first chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ, 1970), second administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, 1973), founding director and later head of the World Wildlife Fund in the United States, board member and advisor for numerous organizations. In Politics, Pollution, and Pandas: An Environmental Memoir, Train promises to "tell the environmental story of the Nixon and Ford years and their aftermath from the perspective of one who was privileged to have a central role in both the formulation of environmental policy and its implementation" (p. xii). Unfortunately, the book falls short of this ambitious goal, and instead offers only tantalizing glimpses into this extraordinary time of environmental change. |
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While Train's memoir provides some autobiographical details about his family heritage and elite upbringing, the bulk of his writing focuses on his long and impressive career in public service. This self-described "quiet revolutionary," served, for a time, as a judge on the U.S. Tax Court, but while the position offered a certain prestige and stability, two African safaris, in 1956 and 1958, began to draw Train's interest and passion toward conservation. In 1965, he made the rather risky gamble of resigning his robes and become president of the non-profit Conservation Foundation. At the time, environmental advocacy was still in its infancy, and as a Republican, Train was a rare commodity. That identity caught the eye of the new Richard Nixon administration, which gave him the nod as undersecretary of Interior, though he concedes that "it was plain I was being nominated as a pro-environment Republican to balance the (Walter) Hickel nomination" (p. 54). Interestingly, one of Train's first challenges was to fend off Hickel's request that he appoint James Watt as his deputy, which Train accomplished by threatening to resign himself. In 1970, when Nixon needed a chair for the newly created CEQ, Train was the obvious choice. For the next three years, Train believed he "was in the forefront of a revolution in the way government and society as a whole perceived the environment and made decisions affecting it" (p. 82). Train continued the "good fight" at the EPA, and his memoirs provide invaluable insight into the politics of protecting clean air standards. In 1977, Train took the helm of the World Wildlife Fund, and spent the ensuing years traveling the globe and publicizing the organization's agenda, and the book's final chapters read much like a travelogue, albeit a fascinating one. |
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Train's position at the center of the environmental revolution is indisputable, yet his role in it, and the machinations of that revolution, remain elusive. Too often, the book's narrative strays into rather tedious details about menus or office decor, rather than providing substantive information that only Train would know. Indeed, this tendency to include minute descriptions, which one might record in a journal or diary, but which provide little insight into the man, the era, or the movement, is the book's great weakness. Still, there is much here that will prove helpful to scholars of the era and of interest to Train's many colleagues and friends. |
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Sara Dant Ewert, associate professor of history at Weber State University, is the coauthor, along with Hal Rothman, of The Encyclopedia of American National Parks (M.E. Sharpe, 2004), and associate editor of the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of the US National Parks. Her other scholarship has focused on the environmental politics of Senator Frank Church and the significance of the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act. |
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