Environmental History Archives - Page 3 of 3

Episode 118: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity

Host: Christopher Rose, Department of History
Guest: Megan Raby, Department of History

Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research.

Megan Raby describes how, from these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American “tropical biologists” developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity.

The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps

Photo of Alfred Crosby (via Washington Post)

By Megan Raby

This essay is adapted from Dr. Raby’s remarks at a symposium to honor Al Crosby that was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin on February 4, 2019.

Alfred Crosby’s work has been with me for a long time––actually longer than I can remember. I routinely assign Ecological Imperialism in my undergraduate course on Global Environmental History, but long before I had ever read that book, I had unknowingly encountered his work. That is, of course, through the concept of the “Columbian exchange”––also the title of his most influential book. By the time I went to elementary school, this once revolutionary way of framing the role of disease, crops, weeds, and domestic animals as central to world history was presented simply as common knowledge.

By putting environmental history at the center, Crosby replaced the older narrative of conquest with a narrative of biocultural encounter and exchange. Instead of a one-way process largely determined by European might, Crosby showed the importance of, on one hand, the great tragedy of virgin soil epidemics and indigenous demographic collapse and, on the other, the ongoing story of how the crops domesticated by the indigenous peoples of the Americas remade the landscapes and cultures of the rest of the world.

In many ways, I think we take this narrative shift for granted today. But to be taken for granted in this way is, I think, a major accomplishment for any historian…perhaps especially for an environmental historian. Even as the field continues to be one of the most rapidly growing subfields of history, many environmental historians still fear that their work remains on the fringes. Is environmental history still seen as a novelty or fad? Do our colleagues take the field seriously enough, say, to give pigs and dandelions a key place in a survey course on U.S. or world history?

Al Crosby’s feat is all the more impressive because he was essentially writing “environmental history” before there was such a thing. In interviews, he often pointed out that half a dozen presses rejected The Columbian Exchange before it finally got published in 1972––its biological perspective on European contact with the Americas was seen as just too arcane of a subject.

But only a few years later Crosby could be counted among the first generation of self-described environmental historians. Crosby was one of the founding members of the American Society for Environmental History, for example, when it was founded in 1977. There was now a new group of scholars who insisted on taking nature seriously as an actor in human history––focusing not on military conquests or presidential politics, but rather on how humans and nature have fundamentally shaped and reshaped each other.

Crosby was no longer alone, but he still stood out. And the ways in which he stood out reveal the lasting impact and relevance of his contributions.

For one thing, it is important to note that the other major founders of environmental history were, for the most part, focused on the United States and especially U.S. Western history. In contrast, Crosby’s work was truly global in scope. Rather than the one-way story of European expansion, The Columbian Exchange shows us New World crops remaking Europe, Africa, and Asia. And with Ecological Imperialism, he tested his thesis about the interplay of ecology and empire not just in the Americas, but with cases everywhere from the Canary Islands to Iceland and New Zealand. In fact, in all his books––on everything from the rise of quantification to the history of energy––Crosby explored truly global exchanges and transformations.

Some of the most groundbreaking work in transnational African and Latin American environmental history in the 1990s and 2000s––works that are themselves now classics––were in fact directly inspired by aspects of Crosby’s arguments. Elinore Melville explored the process of ecological imperialism beyond the temperate zone, by following Spanish sheep into sixteenth-century Mexico. James McCann showed how New World maize became an African staple, adapted to local cultures and climates. Judith Carney argued that rice culture in the Americas took more than just the movement of seeds; its success was dependent on the enslaved Africans who worked in the rice fields and their agricultural experiences and knowledge. These works took the interconnections between biology and cultural knowledge that Crosby himself emphasized, but pushed them into new contexts and new corners of the world.

With the sole exception of his book on the 1918 flu pandemic, Crosby’s temporal scale was as grand as his geographical scope. Recently, there has been a surge of self-described “Big Histories” or “Deep Histories” that view human history and the present through the lens of evolution, neuroscience, or even cosmology.

Crosby was doing “Big” and “Deep” history well before the arrival of these studies. The full title of Ecological Imperialism notes that it starts in 900, but in fact, its explanatory frame extends back beyond the Norse expansion into the North Atlantic. It begins 200 million years ago, with the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea, and, hence, the beginning of the evolution of quite distinct biogeographic realms in the Old and New Worlds.

This event was cataclysmic because it brought human and geological history into the same frame, in Crosby’s words:

“The seams of Pangaea were clos[ed], drawn together by the sailmaker’s needle. Chickens met kiwis, cattle met kangaroos, Irish met potatoes, Comanches met horses, Incas met smallpox––all for the first time.” (131)

This, Crosby explains––along with the penchant of Old World humans for living at close quarters with domesticated animals––was the ultimate cause of that immunological difference that made the Columbian exchange so unequal and allowed the empires of Europe their sweeping success in lands with similar climates.

Crosby brought in Pangea and the Paleolithic, but unlike some “Big Histories,” he was not trying to write a history of everything. Nor, I think, did he reduce history to geological and biological science. The scope, scale, and interdisciplinary nature of his work flowed necessarily from the kinds of questions he asked. These were indeed big questions, and also fundamentally historical questions––questions about human agency, about global inequalities in power, and about the roots of global imperialism.

At a time when others might attribute the spread of European empire to “their superiority in arms, organization and fanaticism,” Crosby had the audacity to ask, in the Prologue of Ecological Imperialism, “but what in heaven’s name is the reason that the sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion?” (7)

In the years since, authors like Charles Mann and Jared Diamond have sold many books repeating or updating aspects of Crosby’s argument. Other authors have dug deeper into the theoretical frameworks he offered, building on and extending them. One example is Stuart McCook’s new work on the “neo-Columbian exchange”––by which he means a second wave of globalization of crops and plant pests since 1700, mediated by imperial scientific institutions and global corporations. Likewise, UT History PhD, Gregory Cushman, has explored the role of fertilizer in enabling a process of “neo-ecological imperialism”––the importation of nutrients and energy from far away ecosystems to prop up a new crop of colonial powers. Not coincidentally, both authors place seemingly mundane historical objects at the center of modern history––a common approach today in global histories, after Crosby’s dandelions–for McCook it is the humble cup of coffee, for Cushman it is bird poop!

In many of these direct and more subtle ways, Crosby’s influence is indelible. Crosby helped to make mosquitos and sheep a respectable topic for historians––something that might even have something to tell us about “big questions,” like the rise and fall of empires.

I really regret that I never got a chance to meet him in person. At the same time, in some ways I feel almost like I have met him because, much more than most academic writers, Crosby’s personality, his great enthusiasm for his topics, and his often wry sense of humor shine through in his writing. Crosby’s voice and approach live on as much in the expanding new scholarship of environmental history as in his own body of work––as pervasive, permanent, and familiar in the historical landscape as the plentiful dandelions that sparked his imagination.

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2015)

By Marisol Bayona Roman

Though the authors of The Shock of the Anthropocene apply their skills as historians of science throughout, the book is far more than a straightforward history. Written at the intersection of science, history, and the broader humanities, Bonneuil and Fressoz provide well-reasoned and well-founded arguments that surgically take apart the dominant view of the Anthropocene as an epoch of human-provoked environmental crises that have only recently come to our attention, and for which scientific advances and sustainability-oriented mindsets are the only solution.

The book is divided into three parts, each oriented toward a particular goal. The first part introduces the scientific data on greenhouse gas emissions, biosphere degradation, changing biogeochemical cycles, and energy mobilization upon which the definition of the Anthropocene rely. Fressoz and Bonneuil show how the distinction between the realms of nature and culture—think, for example, of the opposition that emerges in Europeans’ quests to conquer the wilderness of the New World and impose their ways onto “savage” and “uncultured” natives in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—is no longer so clear-cut, and how placing the blame for the environmental crises of the Anthropocene on an ambiguous human whole can propagate a hegemonic narrative. These observations set up part two of the book, in which the authors reintroduce the political and break down the hegemonic qualities of the Anthropocene discourse. They show the ways in which scientific research has helped produce an undifferentiated and distanced view of the Earth and the anthropos that minimizes the key role of major nation-states in the development of today’s environmental crises, and the dangers of designating the scientist as the ultimate hero of the epoch. This completes the foundation for part three, a collection of seven histories that expose the imprecision inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene by focusing on one aspect of its development. For example, in their history of energy—the Thermocene, as they call it—the authors note how the dominant account, which asserts that the transitions from wood to coal to oil have been driven by a search for efficiency, obfuscates responsibility for the negative consequences of these decisions. Bonneuil and Fressoz demonstrate instead that the history of energy is one of successive additions (i.e. wood and coal and oil) shaped by political, military, and ideological decisions that have often gone against principles of efficiency and technological progress. The authors close this history by addressing the political on a global level, highlighting the key role of Anglophone countries such as the United States and Great Britain in the technological changes and environmental consequences of the Thermocene.

This publication is of great merit. The sheer breadth of knowledge on which the authors rely is a wonderful example of interdisciplinary research, and the clarity with which they synthesize and present the information is impressive, to say the least. However, this feat produces a dense text that limits its potential readership. The section “The discourse of a new geopower,” for example, is crucial to the transition between Part Two and Part Three because it reveals how the current “authorized narrative” of the Anthropocene represents, reproduces, and supports certain hegemonies on a global scale. But in order to follow the thread of this chapter, the reader must contend with Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower, Peder Anker’s imperial ecology, and Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere, all introduced in the span of three pages. These concepts are explained briefly and cited appropriately, but their complexity prohibits this book from being a leisurely read for those who are not already familiar with the ideas. These shortcomings aside, The Shock of the Anthropocene is a welcome and necessary read for scholars of any field concerned with the status of the concept of the Anthropocene.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (2017)

By Steven Richter

Beginning with the title and continuing through the final pages, James C. Scott’s Against the Grain seeks to subvert the historical narrative of inevitable progress toward civilization that has been dominant for millennia. Instead of framing agriculture as a driver of enlightened civilization, he conceives of it as a social and ecological building block that spawned early states that were more coercive than civil. Scott may not have launched the first attack of this kind, but his clear prose synthesizes evidence from a broad range of disciplines to craft a well-reasoned barrage of arguments, causing irreparable damage to a foundational element of western thought – that, since the first agricultural civilizations, the organized state has brought about enlightened and morally superior society.

Beginning from the perspective of a “thin” Anthropocene, a historical approach that emphasizes the ways in which human action has shaped the environment and landscapes, Scott emphasizes the richness of social-ecological relations before organized states appeared. The more traditional “thick” Anthropocene claims the environmental impact of modern industry has so thoroughly transformed the planet that it constitutes a new geological epoch. The “thin” perspective points out that that human activity, especially ecosystem niche creations through fire, so pervaded the landscape that it is difficult to think of ancient nature as separate from human influence.

Early settled communities built around the diverse and abundant sustenance activities along rivers and wetlands slowly domesticated plants and animals millennia before states first emerged. These novel arrangements, which Scott terms the “late Neolithic multi-species resettlement camps,” constituted the core of a long, slow transition. Contrasting with the more abrupt “Neolithic Revolution,” such a transition yielded not only plants with bigger seeds and more docile animals, but also dangerous new organisms that thrived in larger communities – diseases. Only through the combination of elevated birthrates and inherited immunity in settled communities could states eventually coagulate. But in many ways, these states represented, to borrow a phrase from Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech, “the end of living and the beginning of survival.”

Scott primarily defines states through the presence of tax collection, officials, and walls, with grain serving as the keystone to the political-economic system. Predictable, transportable, and calorie-dense, grain represented a surplus that could be monitored, collected, and, crucially, controlled. Put another way, grain was the perfect resource for taxation, allowing for the emergence of a ruling class. Despite the advantages yielded by such a surplus – a large, non-agricultural workforce – grain-derived civilization remained fragile. A single bad harvest could throw an early state into disarray, and even without catastrophic floods or drought, extractive agricultural and forestry practices often led to a slower demise. When combined with this ecological instability, the laborious nature of agrarian life made it so unappealing that early states likely built walls for restriction as much as for protection.

An Ancient Egyptian Statue of Grinding Grain (via Wikimedia)

Early states had to overcome tremendous social and ecological friction, so much that they typically were short lived. Only through the control and acquisition of its primary resource – people – could early states persist. The incorporation of human assets, whether by conquest of small neighboring communities or through slave trade, invigorated early states. Such a capricious system lacks robustness, and state failure could come from without or within. Such narratives of “collapse,” as it has often been framed, should be viewed critically. Scott argues what may appear to an archeologist as the catastrophic downfall of a monumental capitol may be more accurately, though not exclusively, thought of as disassembly into decentralized, independent communities. It is crucial to keep in mind that, perhaps as late as 1600, non-state peoples constituted the vast majority of global human population. States were “small alluvial archipelagos,” surrounded by hordes of ungoverned people who provided valuable trading and military allies, at least when they weren’t raiding and pillaging.

By incorporating innovative forms of evidence, Scott illuminates a critical perspective on the origins of modern states. He should have pointed out the difficulties of life outside states to create a more balanced narrative, but this omission takes little away from the central argument. Crucially, Scott compels the reader to be cognizant of the invisible or illegible, both historically and in our present lives. To make his argument, Scott relies on historical sources, such as dental analysis of ancient teeth, that prove just as informative as formal edicts or other, more visible historical sources. In a time with so much information, Against the Grain reminds us to be critical of whose story is told and why. For this reason, Scott’s work should have a place in courses focused on both the present and the future, not just the past. It suggests that students ask about the role coercion and bondage play in the twenty first century, or if our economy is built around appropriation or ecological wisdom. The reader, while learning about the distant past, cannot help but ponder what about our daily lives we take for granted and which narratives or stories should be elevated, and which should be relegated to the past.

Steven Richter is currently a PhD Student in the Community and Regional Planning program in the University of Texas School of Architecture whose focus is on sustainability, regional land use, and natural capital.

Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA

By Josephine Hill

Today we often associate hybrid or genetically modified corn with agricultural monopolies, big business, and capitalism, in the early Cold War some feared that the rise of hybrid corn would sow the seeds of Communism in the United States. Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick’s editorial cartoon, “Alien Corn,” published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 28, 1948, shows Henry A. Wallace grinning at a corn plant, whose leaves bear hammers and sickles and whose tassel sports a Soviet star –- the fruits of Communism.

Alien Corn (04-28-1948), by Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick. The cartoon is held at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Cartoon Collection. Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri.

Wallace was the founder of the Hi-Bred Corn Company (today owned by the Dupont Corporation). He was also vice president to Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of Agriculture (1933-1940), Secretary of Commerce (1945-1946), and 1948 presidential nominee of the Progressive Party. Appearing during the 1948 election season, the cartoon most directly reflects contemporary suspicions about Wallace’s possible Communist sympathies, which were fueled by his endorsement from the U.S. Communist Party, his progressive platform that included universal health care, voting rights for African-Americans, and an end to segregation, and his interest in Eastern religions. Here, the fear of the “alien” seems to have stronger political than environmental implications, yet this title presciently describes the many ways in which these two concerns would become more and more closely intertwined.

Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick at work. Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri, Photograph Collection.

The cartoon also seems to reference concerns about the role that Wallace originally envisioned for hybrid seeds in the American agricultural landscape. During his early experiments in western Iowa in the late 1920s, Wallace invented and distributed hybrid corn seeds to farmers across sixteen counties. He imagined that the seeds could provide a means of developing a non-profit, quasi-cooperative agricultural model, that would allow many farmers to contribute a consistent product to a common pool, keeping fifty percent for themselves and donating the other half towards research that would in theory improve the quality of their future crops. Wallace’s model, therefore, for some evoked the ideological spirit of Soviet collectivism. However, in “Alien Corn,” Wallace’s hammer and sickle-laden corn stalk is ironically enclosed by a cement wall and a spiked iron fence, perhaps intended to portray Wallace as a personal profit-seeking hypocrite.

Henry Agard Wallace, 1888–1965. Via Wikipedia

The fence also points towards Pioneer Hi-Bred’s rising profitably and increasing corporatization. In 1949, a year later, it would sell one million units. Much of this expansion had occurred due to the environmental and economic events of the twenty years since Wallace began distribution. During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the Department of Agriculture bought and regulated the drought-resistant hybrid seeds in order to stabilize food prices, a program that proved popular and contributed to Wallace’s rising political success. This remarkably rapid growth, combined with the marriage of hybrid seed companies with the chemical companies Dupont and Monsanto (who would provide the pesticides and fertilizers compatible with hybrid seeds), accounts for the major ideological shift in political conceptions of the role of hybrid seeds between the early 1920s and mid-century. Originally envisioned as lynchpins in a cooperative agricultural model, under control of the government, the seeds became essential to the success of a regulated capitalism that would position itself as an antidote to Soviet Communism.

The cartoon also foreshadows an important political moment that occurred about ten years later, as tensions with the Soviet Union escalated. Wallace’s head salesman, Roswell Garst, hosted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to Iowa. There, the two powers exchanged ideas for agricultural innovations and the Soviet Union acquired U.S. patented seeds to be planted on Russian soil. Described in a newsreel as one of the “most folksy and jovial days” of an otherwise fraught diplomatic visit, Garst’s and Hi-Bred’s participation signaled the importance of hybrid seeds as geopolitical instruments, through which the United States could assert its technological and ideological power.

“Alien Corn” highlights the ambiguous position of United States agricultural products as both public and private resources in a moment that in many ways represented a turning point in American agriculture. Today, while agricultural industries are intensely corporatized, they also receive state subsidies and the protection of the FBI, which is becoming increasingly invested in patented seeds as geopolitical bargaining chips to be used in diplomatic relations with national powers such as India and China. At the same time, there is mounting public concern over the environmental and health effects of the widespread cultivation and consumption hybrid seeds. The cartoon then prompts us to think about how the environmental conditions inherent to hybrid seeds –including their ability to thrive as monocultures and their dependence on chemical pesticides— affect their local and transnational ideological implications.

Student Showcase – Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

Maham Sewani and Sania Shahid
Sartartia Middle School
Junior Division
Group Website

Read Maham and Sania’s Process Paper

In 2010 the Deepwater Horizon, an off-shore oil rig operated by British Petroleum, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the succeeding weeks an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, the largest marine oil spill in American history. This event brought the dangers of off-shore drilling to the forefront of America’s public consciousness, leading many to ask why we even allow such dangerous methods of oil extraction.

Maham Sewani and Sania Shahid, students at Sartartia Middle School, explored the history of this controversial technology with a Texas History Day website, “Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.” Looking back on the origins of off-shore drilling, Maham and Sania argue this technology has created both economic benefits and ecological perils. Here are two excerpts from their site:

A controlled fire in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, May 6, 2010. The U.S. Coast Guard conducted the burn to help prevent the spread of oil. (U.S. Military)

Rights and responsibilities of stakeholders within the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico have greatly evolved. Since the mid-1900s, several incidents have resulted in loss of lives, destruction of property, and environmental damage. This has led to the reorganization of governmental agencies, more stringent regulatory framework, and corporate pursuit of technological advances, resulting in improved capability to extract oil and gas in deeper and harsher environments in a responsible manner.

Oil drilling platform off the coast of California, near Santa Barbara (U.S. Department of Energy)

Accidents, changes in supply and demand, technological advancements, jurisdiction conflicts, and competing priorities between energy independence and environmental protection have led to an evolution in rights and responsibilities of oil and gas industry stakeholders in the Gulf of Mexico. These stakeholders include corporations, the federal government, and governments of states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. The evolution over the past 60 years has resulted in significant reorganization of governmental agencies, changes in rights to value derived from mineral resources between stakeholders, and passage of more stringent laws/regulations causing companies to be environmentally safe, while simultaneously pursuing technological breakthroughs for more efficient and effective extraction of oil and gas.

Recent Texas History Day projects:

A documentary on the draft’s controversial history in America

And a story of WWII internment you probably haven’t heard

Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, by Karl Jacoby (2003)

by Henry Wiencek

Who actually lived in The Adirondacks, Yosemite, and The Grand Canyon before they became national parks? This is the simple, but compelling, question Karl Jacoby asks in Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. When we think about preserving nature, Jacoby argues, Americans tend to assume an easy dichotomy between The Evil Poacher vs. The Righteous Park Ranger. But Crimes against Nature tells a deeper history of the rural communities who relied on these lands before their “preservation” and introduces some moral complexity into the story of America’s national parks.

Jacoby’s narrative starts with the legal, cultural and environmental changes taking place during the Progressive Era. As America became increasingly urbanized, many social reformers and politicians feared a dystopian future in which crowded, industrial cities replaced nature entirely. Teddy Roosevelt often spoke about the dangers of “over-civilization” as fewer and fewer Americans encountered the great outdoors. Starting in the late 19th-century, The federal government responded to these anxieties with the establishment of national parks that would protect “wilderness” from human development. These preserved park lands, officials reasoned, would encourage people to “get back to nature” and escape the pollution, disease, and social disorder of urban slums.

Teddy Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir pose at Yosemite National Park, 1906 (Library of Congress)

But the conservationist impulse to protect “wilderness” from the encroachment of human society, Jacoby points out, wholly disregarded the rural communities that had been living there for generations. Overnight, settlers and residents became outlaws and “squatters” residing on government owned land. The hunting and fishing which had sustained those communities was suddenly “poaching,” a crime that could result in fines or banishment. At the time of the Adirondacks’ preservation, 16,000 settlers lived within what became “preserved” and “uninhabited” land. Even the Grand Canyon at one time provided trails and access to natural resources for local Native American populations.

Map of Grand Canyon National Monument prepared by the National Forest Service, 1907 (Library of Congress)

In order to enforce these new sets of rules, federal and state governments mobilized a bureaucracy of Forest Police to prevent squatting and poaching. Officials set new legal boundaries around “conserved” areas and organized forestland into grids of property ownership. Jacoby argues these efforts to define and protect “preserved” zones oversimplified complex ecological systems and produced unintended consequences. When officials at Yellowstone began hunting predators such as coyotes and mountain lions to maintain animal populations, the number of elk soared, throwing off the park’s delicate ecological balance. Despite the conservationist impulse to preserve nature as it is, park managers were really creating “nature” as it ought to be.

Horace M. Albright, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, with bears from the park, 1922 (National Park Service)

Crimes against Nature also details a variety of confrontations that ensued between park officials and the local communities who refused to leave. Setting fires, hunting or even making violent threats all represented forms of resistance against the incursions of the state on rural lands. Although many conservationists regarded these rural populations as fascinating vestiges of a pre-modern world, that nostalgia co-existed with a fierce contempt for their “primitive” modes of subsistence. Conservationists and Forest Police railed against the “irrationality” and wastefulness of rural hunting habits and worried that such behavior would undermine the rule of law.

“View of Tutocanula Pass, Yosemite, California,” by photographer Carleton E. Watkins, 1878-1881 (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Jacoby concludes that both sides actually embodied distinct, but complementary, American ideals. While conservationists sought to prevent illicit behavior and maintain the rule of law, settlers regarded themselves as rugged individualists pursuing self-sufficiency. In contrast to the simplified narrative of conservation vs. poaching, Jacoby sees a morally complex story unfolding in the wilderness.

Read more on the history of national parks and preservation:

Neel Baumgartner on Big Bend’s “scenic beauty”

Erika Bsumek on Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification project

And watch Blake Scott and Andres Lombana-Bermudez’s short documentary on the history of tourism in the Panamanian jungle

“Her Program’s Progress”

This Associated Press photograph was taken in 1966 to accompany an article by Frances Lewine about Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification project, entitled, “Her Program’s Progress.”

“Mrs. Lyndon Johnson has begun a national movement to eradicate blighted and ugly scenery from America, feeling ‘ugliness is an eroding force on the people of the land.’ On visits to small towns, large cities, national parks and points of scenic and historic interest, she related such visits to the benefits of natural beauty. She has been instrumental in legislation and donations to improve, clean up or renovate national eyesores everywhere. Here, before a backdrop of Lake Powell, Mrs. Lyndon Johnson speaks at dedication ceremonies of the Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Arizona, in late September 1966.”

When Lady Bird took the podium, as one of a host of national and local politicians, she pointed out that the region surrounding the dam “consists of eons of time laid bare – on stone pages and in the treasure troves of Indian myths and artifacts” that would make the resulting Lake Powell “a magnet for tourists.” Evoking the genius of technology, the conservation of water, and the spirituality of nature, she remarked, “To me, the appealing genius of conservation is that it combines the energetic feats of technology – like this dam – with the gentle humility that leaves some corners of the earth untouched – alone – free of technology – to be a spiritual touchstone and a recreation asset.”

Only a decade earlier, the area that Lake Powell flooded had been a vast, arid desert, peppered with ancient American Indian cliff dwellings and majestic rock structures, like Rainbow Bridge. The resulting reservoir was impressive given that it filled up a network of side, slot, and crater canyons measuring more than 150 miles long and with a shoreline longer than the east coast of the United States. The dam — a barrier of five million cubic yards of reinforced concrete (more concrete than was used in Hoover Dam) — was hailed as one the “the engineering wonders of the world” by the Bureau of Reclamation as well as local newspapers, and state and local officials in both Arizona and Utah. It was honored as “the outstanding engineering project” by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Yet, among environmentalists it was (and is) considered one of the nation’s most controversial projects. Flooding the canyon disrupted the free flow of the Colorado River, destroyed the original natural beauty of the site, and made dozens of plant and wildlife species extinct.

Clearly, beautification was in the eye of the beholder. For Lady Bird Johnson, as well as many other Americans, technology did not necessarily ruin nature. Later on this leg of her 1966 Beautification tour, she also paid a brief visit to San Ildefonso Indian Pueblo, dedicating a highway and a park and planting seedlings. All of this earned her the nickname: “Our First Lady of National Beautification” from the New York News on November 13, 1966.

Often when thinking about Lady Bird Johnson’s Beautification Program, we overlook the ways she celebrated technology as much as nature — especially if it aided people’s access to nature or natural resources.

For more, see Erika Bsumek’s book: The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (University of Texas Press, 2023)

The text of the speech may be found: Lady Bird Johnson, “Glen Canyon Dam Dedication Ceremony,” item display 75982, Cline Library, Northern Arizona University.

Photograph: from the author’s private collection.

The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege (2012)

by Hannah Ballard

Flip through the pages of almost any American history textbook. Within the first few sections, you will find paragraphs dedicated to the American Revolution and the ideological groundwork that supported it; the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology that surrounds Abraham Lincoln; the rise of a cotton-based economy in the South and the enslaved manpower that sustained it; the westward expansion of the American population and the lines of communication andtransportation that they created in the wake of their migration. Fast forward to the twentieth century and that same textbook will likely devote space to the Manhattan Project, the Civil Rights Movement, and, perhaps less commonly, the country’s increasing reliance on foreign oil. In The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege ambitiously attempts to reconceptualize this well-traversed historical terrain, first and foremost, as “a story of people struggling with the earthy, organic substances that are integral to the human predicament.” In each chapter, Fiege uses his riveting storytelling abilities to show that the nation’s history “in every way imaginable – from mountains to monuments – is the story of a nation and its nature.”

The Republic of Nature challenges the historiography that relegates environmental history to the margins of key episodes in the nation’s history. By locating “nature” in some of the more familiar narratives of the American past, he forces his reader to ask what role nature plays in history and how the answer to that question shifts our understanding of human actions, interactions, and reactions between groups and with their environment. For instance, Fiege’s argument about the nature of slavery – namely that the driving force behind the institution was the marriage of plants and people – forced this particular reader (who considers herself at least somewhat familiar with American slavery) to rethink my understanding of the peculiar institution. Instead of a capitalist society in which commodification of the enslaved human body constituted the prime motivations of the master, Fiege recasts this familiar story as a power struggle between human (master) and plant (cotton) in which masters often failed to control the plant and thus transferred that loss of power to their slaves by more tightly controlling their lives and the productive abilities of their bodies.

American loggers, 1908 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Cotton farmers in the American south sometime between 1880 and 1897 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Workers at the Central Park Zoo in New York City manicure an elephant, date unknown (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

As title clearly indicates, Fiege’s work is limited to the history of the United States. It is interesting to consider how his work could be expanded beyond national borders to include the transnational perspective that is beginning to permeate the historical discipline. Fiege’s decision to write from a national perspective, however, produced a book that locates “nature” in varied contexts in order to unmake the familiar and remake it with an environmental focus. Occasionally, in the sweeping scope of his scholarship, the notion of “nature” becomes fuzzy as he attempts to thread it through such disparate events over a substantial expanse of time. With those minor criticisms in mind, this reader will still take distinguished environmental historian William Cronon’s word for it: “No book before it has so compellingly demonstrated the value of applying environmental perspectives to historical events that at first glance may seem to have little to do with ‘nature’ or ‘the environment.’ No one who cares about American history can ignore what Fiege has to say.”

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