OVER THE LAST hundred years some of the classic works in American history have dealt with the relationship between the natural environment and American society, but environmental history as a distinct field is a far more recent development. Early works on the environment clustered in western history. Frederick Jackson Turner in "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and Walter Prescott Webb in The Great Plains made the physical environment central to their analyses. Later, James Malin rejected the often crude environmental determinism of Webb and Turner, and attempted instead to engage in an ecological analysis which stressed the complexity and interdependency of the relationship between human social institutions and nature. Malin is a likely founder of modern environmental history, but he himself disclaimed the description of his work as ecological history. After Malin, direct examination of the historical relationship between society and the natural environment languished. Western history itself declined in influence during the 1960s, and although younger scholars within the field continued to do significant work on environmental topics, western histo-

American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field

California presents an important case of regional capitalism grounded in the wealth of nature. It belies the received wisdom that natural resource extraction is an anachronistic and inferior road to economic development. Prior to World War II, California’s economy rested squarely on minerals, agriculture, timber, and fisheries, yet this was consonant with high income, capital accumulation, development of manufacturing, and a high rate of technical innovation. Indeed, the latter were crucial to an extraordinarily rapid rate of discovery and plunder of resources for over a century. With due regard to the gifts of nature, the secret of California’s success is to be found in its social relations of production, especially open property rights and a syncretic class system, rapid capital accumulation, and a redoubtable state based firmly on the capitalist society that crafted it.

California’s Golden Road to Riches: Natural Resources and Regional Capitalism, 1848 – 1940

L'A. demontre comment les progres et les choix technologiques sont, depuis 1940, tres largement responsables de l'importance des problemes de pollution de l'environnement

At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment

I establish three closely related claims. The first two are interpretive, the third theoretical. (1) The prevailing conception of moral economy in political science, presupposed by opponents as well as advocates, rests too heavily on the distinction between nonmarket and market-based societies. (2) The prevailing conception of moral economy reduces to the unduly narrow claim that economic incorporation of a nonmarket people is the basis for the moral indignation that leads to resistance and rebellion. (3) Reconceptualizing moral economy in terms of social goods reveals additional grounds for politically significant moral indignation and permits moral-economic political analysis of a larger set of cases and phenomena. Water politics in the arid American West illustrate the power of a conception of moral economy based on social goods.

Rethinking Moral Economy

In addressing environmental and natural resource problems, there is a move away from primary reliance upon centralized regulation toward assignment of property rights to mitigate the losses of open-access. I examine the assignment of private property rights during the 19th and early 20th centuries to five natural resources, mineral land, timberland, grazing and farm land, and water on federal government lands in the Far West. The region was richly endowed with natural resources, but assigning property rights to them required adaptation from established, eastern practices as defined by the federal land laws. The property rights that emerged and their long-term welfare effects provide a laboratory for examining current questions of institutional design to address over-fishing, excessive air pollution, and other natural resource and environmental problems. A major lesson is that property rights allocations based on local conditions, prior use, and unconstrained by outside government mandates were most effective in addressing not only the immediate threat of open-access, but in providing a longer-term basis for production, investment, and trade. Another lesson is how hard it is to repair initial faulty property allocations. Accordingly, path dependencies in property rules are real, and they have dominated the economic history of resource use in the West.

The Assignment of Property Rights on the Western Frontier: Lessons for Contemporary Environmental and Resource Policy

Historians of water in the American West have an unusually rich platter of themes from which to select: ecology, economics, environment, the distribution of a life-sustaining commodity, government fairness, or the equality of citizens or social groups If they are of the school that seeks a theoretical model that saves the effort of researching evidence, they may make the scarceness of water the historiological frame for the tale and interpret Western history by the dictates of water deterministic environmentalism It is surprising, therefore, that some historians of Western water lore have succmbed to none of these lures, looking instead at the history of water from the perspective of the topic that more than any other historians of the American West have ignored: law Scholars of Western water law also have a choice of historical themes One possible approach asks what legal rules add to our knowledge of water in Western American history Michael CMeyer poses that question in one of the books under review The word "rights" in the title of our other book, Forging New Rights, implies that its author does also, but if law attracted him he apparently did not know where to find it The second approach, more challenging intellectually but beyond the interest of Western historians, is to enquire what the history of water can tell us about law: for example, the autonomy of law There is a dispute among American legal historians that may never be resolved about the laws autonomy One school of thought maintains that all law is politics, that nothing is autonomous, that every decision and judgment of the law is a product of the lawmaker's political, social, and economic bias and interests Stated in its most indefensible extreme (by a constitutional historian, not a lawyer), this school argues that "[t]here is nothing inevitable about the process The operation of a legal system is largely a story of rendered choices The system is not some vast, impersonal deus ex machina; instead it operates through discretionary judgments reflecting political and personal needs of power holders"' According to the opposite or "autonomous" perspective, neutral principles determine the process of legal decisionmaking Law is neither politics nor economics Law is opened to politics on one end but closed on the other by doctrine and professional methodology There are certain core values controlling judicial decisions,

Robert G. Dunbar

Papers

Forging New Rights in Western Waters