(2001). Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 153-153.

Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation

Hailed as \"one of the most eminent environmental historians of the West\" by Alan Brinkley in The New York Times Book Review, Donald Worster has been a leader in reshaping the study of American history. Winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Dust Bowl, Worster has helped bring humanity's interaction with nature to the forefront of historical thinking. Now, in The Wealth of Nature, he offers a series of thoughtful, eloquent essays which lay out his views on environmental history, tying the study of the past to today's agenda for change. The Wealth of Nature captures the fruit of what Worster calls \"my own intellectual turning to the land.\" History, he writes, represents a dialogue between humanity and nature-though it is usually reported as if it were simple dictation. Worster takes as his point of departure the approach expressed early on by Aldo Leopold, who stresses the importance of nature in determining human history; Leopold pointed out that the spread of bluegrass in Kentucky, for instance, created new pastures and fed the rush of American settlers across the Appalachians, which affected the contest between Britain, France, and the U.S. for control of the area. Worster's own work offers an even more subtly textured understanding, noting in this example, for instance, that bluegrass itself was an import from the Old World which supplanted native vegetation-a form of \"environmental imperialism.\" He ranges across such areas as agriculture, water development, and other questions, examining them as environmental issues, showing how they have affected-and continue to affect-human settlement. Environmental history, he argues, is not simply the history of rural and wilderness areas; cities clearly have a tremendous impact on the land, on which they depend for their existence. He argues for a comprehensive approach to understanding our past as well as our present in environmental terms. \"Nostalgia runs all through this society,\" Worster writes, \"fortunately, for it may be our only hope of salvation.\" These reflective and engaging essays capture the fascination of environmental history-and the beauty of nature lost or endangered-underscoring the importance of intelligent action in the present.

The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

By examining environmental change through the lens of conflicting social agendas, Andrew Hurley uncovers the historical roots of environmental inequality in contemporary urban America. Hurley's study focuses on the steel mill community of Gary, Indiana, a city that was sacrificed, like a thousand other American places, to industrial priorities in the decades following World War II. Although this period witnessed the emergence of a powerful environmental crusade and a resilient quest for equality and social justice among blue-collar workers and African Americans, such efforts often conflicted with the needs of industry. To secure their own interests, manufacturers and affluent white suburbanites exploited divisions of race and class, and the poor frequently found themselves trapped in deteriorating neighborhoods and exposed to dangerous levels of industrial pollution. In telling the story of Gary, Hurley reveals liberal capitalism's difficulties in reconciling concerns about social justice and quality of life with the imperatives of economic growth. He also shows that the power to mold the urban landscape was intertwined with the ability to govern social relations. |Features the pathbreaking work of Mark Catesby, the British naturalist and illustrator who founded natural history and bird art in America, preceding Audubon by nearly a century.

Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980.

Daniel Vickers examines the shifting labor strategies used by colonists as New England evolved from a string of frontier settlements to a mature society on the brink of industrialization. Lacking a means to purchase slaves or hire help, seventeenth-century settlers adapted the labor systems of Europe to cope with the shortages of capital and workers they encountered on the edge of the wilderness. As their world developed, changes in labor arrangements paved the way for the economic transformations of the nineteenth century. By reconstructing the work experiences of thousands of farmers and fishermen in eastern Massachusetts, Vickers identifies who worked for whom and under what terms. Seventeenth-century farmers, for example, maintained patriarchal control over their sons largely to assure themselves of a labor force. The first generation of fish merchants relied on a system of clientage that bound poor fishermen to deliver their hauls in exchange for goods. Toward the end of the colonial period, land scarcity forced farmers and fishermen to search for ways to support themselves through wage employment and home manufacture. Out of these adjustments, says Vickers, emerged a labor market sufficient for industrialization.

Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850

This thesis examines the social, cultural and political contexts of flooding in early modern England. It explores the relationships between floods and the productive practices and organising principles of the communities in which they occurred. Drawing on insights from the environmental humanities and social sciences, this thesis approaches flooding as a socio-natural phenomenon, in which humanity and nature played mutually influential parts. Taking in evidence from England as a whole, and with special reference to South Holland in Lincolnshire, and the Severn Estuary Levels in Gloucestershire, this thesis locates flooding at the forefront of cultural and political changes occurring over the early modern period. Following recent European approaches to histories of flooding, this thesis considers the ways in which early modern society contributed to, and sought to mitigate the effects of particularly damaging flooding. In five chapters it analyses the productive and destructive role of flooding in local communities, how these floods were interpreted by those they affected, the political nature of disputes about flooding and the impact of flooding on the early modern state. Together, these chapters stress the need to understand flooding as a socially and culturally generated phenomenon that had political implications. Far from being purely 'natural', flooding was a complex process which contemporaries both recognised and actively negotiated. In analysing an environmental process with specific reference to the traditional domains of social, cultural and political history, this thesis links the small but expanding subdiscipline of early modern English environmental history to broader historical narratives, showing the potential for an environmental approach to pre-modern England.

Flooding in early modern England : cultures of coping in Gloucestershire and Lincolnshire

James D. Rice's fresh study of the Potomac River basin begins with a mystery. Why, when the whole of the region offered fertile soil and excellent fishing and hunting, was nearly three-quarters of the land uninhabited on the eve of colonization? Rice wonders how the existence of this no man's land influenced nearby Native American and, later, colonial settlements. Did it function as a commons, as a place where all were free to hunt and fish? Or was it perceived as a strange and hostile wilderness? Rice discovers environmental factors at the center of the story. Making use of extensive archaeological and anthropological research, as well as the vast scholarship on farming practices in the colonial period, he traces the region's history from its earliest known habitation. With exceptionally vivid prose, Rice makes clear the implications of unbridled economic development for the forests, streams, and wetlands of the Potomac River basin. With what effects, Rice asks, did humankind exploit and then alter the landscape and the quality of the river's waters? Equal parts environmental, Native American, and colonial history , Nature and History in the Potomac Country is a useful and innovative study of the Potomac River, its valley, and its people.

Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson

In the spring of 1676, Nathaniel Bacon, a hotheaded young newcomer to Virginia, led a revolt against the colony's Indian policies. Bacon's Rebellion turned into a civil war within Virginia--and a war of extermination against the colony's Indian allies--that lasted into the following winter, sending shock waves throughout the British colonies and into England itself. James Rice offers a colorfully detailed account of the rebellion, revealing how Piscataways, English planters, slave traders, Susquehannocks, colonial officials, plunderers and intriguers were all pulled into an escalating conflict whose outcome, month by month, remained uncertain. In Rice's rich narrative, the lead characters come to life: the powerful, charismatic Governor Berkeley, the sorrowful Susquehannock warrior Monges, the wiley Indian trader and tobacco planter William Byrd, the regal Pamunkey chieftain Cockacoeske, and the rebel leader himself, Nathaniel Bacon. The dark, slender Bacon, born into a prominent family, soon earned a reputation in America as imperious, ambitious, and arrogant. But the colonial leaders did not foresee how rash and headstrong Nathaniel Bacon could be, nor how adept he would prove to be at both inciting colonists and alienating Indians. As the tense drama unfolds, it becomes apparent that the struggle between Governor Berkeley and the impetuous Bacon is nothing less than a battle over the soul of America. Bacon died in the midst of the uprising and Governor Berkeley shortly afterwards, but the profoundly important issues at the heart of the rebellion took another generation to resolve. The late seventeenth century was a pivotal moment in American history, full of upheavals and far-flung conspiracies. Tales From a Revolution brilliantly captures the swirling rumors and central events of Bacon's Rebellion and its aftermath, weaving them into a dramatic tale that is part of the founding story of America.

Tales from a Revolution: Bacon's Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Indians figured prominently in many of the now-classic works that helped to define the burgeoning new field of environmental history during the 1970s and 1980s. Although a great deal of new and interesting work on Native Americans and the environment has been conducted since 1990, most of it has been produced not by scholars who think of themselves as environmental historians, but rather by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians of Native Americans, and Native people themselves. This essay surveys this new, multidisciplinary literature, and suggests some ways in which non-specialists, and particularly environmental historians, might fruitfully engage with it.

Beyond “The Ecological Indian” and “Virgin Soil Epidemics”: New Perspectives on Native Americans and the Environment

Abstract:Environmental history came of age as a distinctive field, with its own journal and professional association, in the 1970s and 1980s. A disproportionate number of the most enduringly influential publications from that era centered on or dealt extensively with early America, but from 1990 until fairly recently environmental historians shifted their attention toward other times and places. This essay uses that divergence, together with a recent revival and convergence of early American scholarship with environmental history, to consider an array of issues that are central to both fields and to historical scholarship as a whole: the place of nonwritten sources, the possibilities and limits of interdisciplinary scholarship, periodization, scale, theories of causation, and the nature of power within and between societies. The essay concludes with considerations of what we might better understand about environmental history as a whole in light of recent early Americanist scholarship and what we might learn about early America by attending more closely to the broader field of environmental history, as well as with reflections on the creative tensions between modern, premodern, Americanist, and global histories. This article is based on the 2017 WMQ-EMSI workshop, “Early American Environmental Histories.”

James D. Rice

Papers

Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson

Tales from a Revolution: Bacon's Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Beyond “The Ecological Indian” and “Virgin Soil Epidemics”: New Perspectives on Native Americans and the Environment

Early American Environmental Histories

Bacon's Rebellion in Indian Country