Book Review

Environmental history is a bit behind women's history. Both fields initially explored topics that were mostly absent from the big picture of American history, but women's history has done more to alter that picture in the process. Adam Rome's The Bulldozer in the Countryside begins to remedy this.

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With exhaustive research in numerous popular, professional, and government publications, Rome argues that postwar suburbanization contributed to the rise of environmentalism. With chapters on mass-produced housing, heating and cooling, waste disposal, open space, hazardous landscapes, federal critiques of home building, and land-use regulation, Rome examines suburbanization from a physical, political, and intellectual standpoint. He begins with the way mass-produced housing made home ownership a cornerstone of national identity in the 1940s. Then he moves to the resulting environmental problems, tracing their initially unseen roots, the gradual public recognition of them, and the prescribed solutions. He concludes that the postwar housing shortage, the association of the American dream with home ownership, and the structure of consumer capitalism—which gave individual builders incentives to build cheap homes and individual consumers incentives to buy them, while diffusing the environmental costs across the general public—both shaped suburbia's landscape and rendered environmental problems nearly intractable.

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