| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790–1930. By John T. Cumbler. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 268 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-19-513813-9.)

In Reasonable Use, John T. Cumbler argues that as New England industrialized in the nineteenth century, a generation of reformers arose who were the "pioneers of modern environmentalism." Scientists, engineers, and public health crusaders began to bring the power of the state to bear upon environmental disruptions caused by unprecedented economic and urban growth. These reformers achieved important successes and laid the groundwork for government efforts to ameliorate industrial pollution, but they could not overcome the superior economic and political power of capitalists to limit reform. 1

Cumbler recounts the environmental transformation wrought by the commercial revolution in nineteenth-century New England. He looks briefly at changes in farming and forest use mainly as they affected his central subject, water. Cumbler uses the Connecticut River as his narrative thread, and the mill town of Holyoke as his spindle. He describes the blocking of the anadromous fish runs by dams, the fouling of the river by sewage and industrial waste, and the scourge of water-borne diseases. Cumbler echoes scholars such as Theodore Steinberg, Sarah Elkind, and Richard Judd, but he adds a very useful political analysis of the struggle of New England's citizens to respond to these new challenges. . . .

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