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Reviews
| Preserving the Nation: The Conservation and Environmental Movements, 1870–2000, by Thomas R. Wellock. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2007. 308 pages. $19.95, paper.
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| Perhaps no other topic in twentieth-century U.S. history presents the same enticements for holistic synthesis as environmentalism. Traditional treatments emphasize a bureaucratic genealogy from Progressive-era national parks through New Deal-era conservation efforts to the mid-century legislation of Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency. To this narrative, new environmental historians have added much of interest: earlier nineteenth-century intellectual roots, wider international ties, deeper concerns for urban pollution, and the tensions of race, class, and gender. Human interest stories abound, from the elite exploits of Teddy Roosevelt, to the personal struggle of Rachel Carson against pollution, to the eco-terrorists who sabotage logging equipment. Most helpfully, present concern over global warming will make the subject relevant to the lives of twenty-first-century students. In Preserving the Nation, the author explicitly seeks to integrate new environmental history into a chronologically organized survey of "the conservation (later environmental) movement," a movement that he argues "grew out of America's particular, and even peculiar, responses to nature and the dynamics of global industrial expansion and political modernization." Wellock situates the movement broadly within the history of commercial and industrial growth, the rise of consumerism and critiques of capitalism, and the transition in American life from rural subsistence to the pursuit of suburban amenities. |
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The book's four chapters divide the movement's history into periods. "Roots and Progressive Era Conservation" begins with fish restoration projects in New England, the reforestation crusade of Vermont congressman George Perkins Marsh, and nineteenth-century concerns about urban sanitation. Wellock introduces the traditional distinction between the aesthetic wilderness "preservation" of John Muir and the utilitarian "conservation" of Gifford Pinchot and the U.S. Forest Service that culminated in the much chronicled public battle over the construction of a dam in California's Hetch Hetchy Valley to provide water for San Francisco. Roosevelt's support of Pinchot over Muir for the improvement of city life unites the three tributary movements of conservationism, preservationism, and urban environmentalism. Having laid out the major ideological positions in the first chapter, Wellock follows a rather straightforward chronological development throughout the rest of the volume, pausing periodically to point out the continuities between the Progressive-era generation and later developments. During the interwar decades, experts and bureaucrats in the New Deal administration expanded the influence of and popular participation in conservation efforts. Chapter Three chronicles the "Emergence of an Environmental Movement" between 1945 and 1973 as concern over pollution and fear of nuclear fallout brought popular support, bipartisan appeal, and legislative victories. The final chapter focuses on the rise of the conservative backlash since the 1970s and notes the proliferation of alternative movements based on radical, feminist, or race-based critiques of the main environmental movement. |
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The value of any survey text lies in its ability to unite conceptually and accurately a variety of themes and events from disparate periods and places. Wellock does not explain why he decided to organize his work around a single "movement" that morphs over time from conservationism into environmentalism, and the decision soon becomes strained early as he places Muir within a "preservationist wing" of the conservation movement (p. 1). Later, as he tells the story, even the "bewildering array of organizations that offered a variety of critiques of American society and focused on multiple issues and tactics" in the 1970s and 1980s are said only to mean "that the movement lacked coherence and unity" (p. 10). Because environmental history is important to current politics, the several organizing concepts that continue to be employed range widely. Among them are: Rothman's series of responses to the environment in Saving the Planet (2000); Robert J. Brulle's catalog of organizations in Agency, Democracy, and Nature (2000); Samuel P. Hays's model of negotiation between environmentally-oriented individuals and groups, environmental opposition, and policy-making institutions in A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (2000). Steven Stoll's U.S. Environmentalism since 1945 (2007), a new release from Bedford/St. Martin's, opts for organization by philosophical issue. |
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However, Preserving the Nation draws together both environmental history and new environmental historiography in a broad survey. The introduction and first two chapters most successfully contextualize developments within American culture and politics, while a thorough bibliographic essay opens the door to further study. In the context of an upper-level college course on environmental history, Wellock's survey would introduce students to not only environmental history, but to recent historiography, and to the intellectual challenge of writing synthetic history. |
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| Indiana University, Kokomo |
Keith A. Erekson |
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