Review

Textbooks, Readers, and References

This work is a welcome addition to Greenwood's primary documents series on American History and Contemporary Issues. According to the series editors, these works are designed "to meet the research needs of high school and college students" by making "key primary documents on a given historical event or historical issue" available in one volume. (p.xxi) Taking this objective as both their charge and organization ethos, Peninah Neimark and Peter Rhoades Mott have compiled a comprehensive range of documents detailing the evolution of environmental thought and environmental controversies in the United States. Divided into seven sections covering specific historical periods, the volume has numerous organizational and pedagogical strengths. The editors introduce each section with a short essay establishing the historical context. Similarly, brief historical sketches precede each document. Neimark and Mott anticipate many of the questions that high school students and university undergraduates might have concerning historical personalities and periods. The editors not only explain who Francis Bacon, George Perkins Marsh, and John Wesley Powell were but also cross-reference the documents to indicate the ways in which these individuals influenced later developments. In addition, Neimark and Mott include several referential frameworks that will be of use to students and teachers, i.e. a table listing significant dates in American environmental history and appendices chronicling significant environmental legislation. The glossary will be helpful to those new to the study of environmental history and environmental issues. Also, the editors deserve special thanks for including an index, a feature much appreciated by students and scholars but all too often absent from many compilations of documents.	1
The 146 documents contained in the volume range from the creation story in Genesis to the Kyoto Protocols. In Part One, "Foundations of American Environmental Thought and Action," the editors present biblical (Genesis) and classical (Virgil) views of nature as bases for later European (Jean Ribaut, Baltasar de Obregon, and Thomas Hariot) and American colonial (William Bradford, Peter Kalm, and Jonathan Edwards) views of the American environment. Part Two, "Politicians, Naturalists, and Artists in the New Nation, 1776–1840," includes both the expected (excerpts from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and a brief compilation of views appropriately titled, "The Founding Fathers on the Care of the Land") and the unexpected (an 1818 Massachusetts statute protecting birds and Benjamin Rush's plea for the preservation of Sugar Maple as a means of ending slavery). Part Three, "The Origins of Environmental Activism, 1840–1890," neatly surveys the increasingly manifest realities and reactions as the United States pursued its continental and economic destinies. John James Audubon's lamentations on the slaughter of buffalo herds, excerpts from George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), the Constitution of the Boone and Crockett Club (1887), and John Wesley Powell's writings on arid lands in the American west are but a few of the excellent choices to be found in this section. In Part Four, "The Conservation Movement Era, 1890-1920," the editors provide an environmental counterpoint to America's urban and industrial transformation. The expected, textbook orthodoxy appears: Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot on conservation, John Muir on the Hetch-Hetchy controversy, and Upton Sinclair on meatpacking horrors. But the editors also include Frederick Law Olmstead's campaign against soot and Jane Addams' diatribe on the ills and evils of garbage.	2
The final three sections of the volume cover more familiar historical and environmental territory in a thorough and, at times, surprising fashion. Part Five, "Rethinking Our Relationship to Nature, 1920–1960," provides literary (John Steinbeck on the Dust Bowl), scientific (J. Robert Oppenheimer on the perils of science), and philosophic (Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic) views on the environment. Similarly, Part Six, "Heyday of the Environmental Movement, 1960-1980," is an eclectic survey of a pivotal period in environmental history. Although personalities and individual manifestos predominate (Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, and Edward Abbey), the editors also present a balanced range of policy, politics, and judicial action (the Endangered Species Act, the Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment, and the Sierra Club v. Morton decision). Finally, in Part Seven, "Confronting Economic and Social Realities, 1980–2000," Neimark and Mott present a thought-provoking array of opinions and policy challenges. Julian Simon's contrarian views on population growth, Edward O. Wilson's neo-Malthusian arguments, and Bernard Cohen's reassessment of the nuclear energy debate are but a few of the offerings likely to provide both added insights on controversial topics and additional fuel for classroom debates. Neimark and Mott more than deliver what they promise in their preface. Their volume provides both students and teachers with detailed "evidence of the continuing interaction between environmental factors and the course of development in the United States." (p. xxv)	3
Fort Hays State University Roert E. Rook

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