| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WHQ online. About 215 words from this article are provided below; about 467 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the Western Historical Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the Western Historical Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Western Historical Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Western Historical Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

*Mining California: An Ecological History.* By Andrew C. Isenberg. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. 242 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $27.00.)
This provocative book aptly demonstrates how far environmental history has come since its emergence several decades ago. Recently, the once-narrow field, which originally dwelt on denouncing wanton human destruction of "wilderness" and celebrating its subsequent preservation by elite reforms, has matured into a broad-based analysis of nature and human influences on it and how the reciprocal interaction of nature and humans shapes the historical process.	1
In his study of mid- and late-nineteenth-century California, Andrew Isenberg goes far beyond the by-now familiar hand-wringing over the gold miners' devastation of wilderness that characterized works by earlier scholars such as Raymond Dasmann. Instead, Isenberg's chapters deftly trace how burgeoning gold-rush markets stimulated the sudden rise of speculative, large-scale, technologically based, resource-intensive and disorganizing corporate enterprises that spilled over from mining into water development, city-building, manufacturing, lumbering, ranching, and farming. In his analysis, he weaves the ecological together with the economic, social, ethnic, intellectual, and institutional factors to demonstrate the inseparability of causative forces, as well as to show how understanding California's natural environment and human approaches to it is essential to a full grasp of the state's history.	. . .

There are about 467 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.