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Title: Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History by Ted Steinberg ISBN: 0-19-514010-9 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: November, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: a real environmental history
Comment: Since environmental history staked its claim to status as an independent subfield of history, environmental historians have clamored for the acknowledgment of the rest of the profession. While many environmental historians have won awards and been honored by the profession at large, injecting the substance of the discipline into mainstream historical scholarship and teaching has been a harder task. The field has come a long way since Donald Worster was asked by his graduate school mates how he would present history from the bear's point of view, but it has long been too easy to consign environmental history to the ghetto of disciplinary subfields. American historians have embraced the idea that the U.S. was and saw itself as "nature's nation," but explored that idea no farther. For the longest time, no one truly attempted to understand what that particular relationship meant in the nation's history.
Some of the blame for this circumstance falls on the discipline. For the better part of a generation, synthesis was beyond the reach of environmental history. The field produced brilliant monographs, but little that appealed beyond the boundaries of a growing field to main vein of American history, wrapped up as it was and is in the topics of race, class, and gender. Only in recent years have a series of syntheses been published, paving the way for the next step, the integration of environmental history into mainstream history.
Ted Steinberg Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History is a bold attempt to jump that gap. One of the first people to be trained in environmental history by an established environmental historian, Steinberg produced three major works before undertaking this volume. Here he makes the case for treating the American environment as an actor on the stage of national history. He argues that the commodification of nature became the catalytic factor in the transformation of the physical nature of the North American continent. "The benefits of modern, from fast food to flush toilets, for all their virtues," he writes, "have come at the price of ecological amnesia" (xii).
Steinberg retells American history through this lens with varying degrees of success. The book is bold and in places wise; simultaneously and despite Steinberg's attempt to create distance from declensionism, he is closely tied to the idea in Marxian terms. His characteristic incisive insights are tempered by the need to cover vast swaths of the past in narrative style, creating something that is simultaneously a textbook and a far more sophisticated argument about the role of nature in history. The complexity of the topic and the need for broad coverage imperil the reader, for the larger argument, that the nature of American nature mattered in the history of the continent, gets lost in the telling and retelling of American history. While the reader is offered Thomas Midgely, the chemist who put lead back into gasoline to eliminate engine knock early in the twentieth century, and Norman Borlaug, the progenitor of the Green Revolution, it feels like the kinds of stunts textbook writers use to invigorate the past for students, not the dawning of a new appreciation for the role of the physical environment in the human past. Despite the brilliance of the work and the marvelous grasp Steinberg displays, he can't quite bring the role of environment as a driving force to the fore.
Down to Earth is marvelous step toward the synthesis that will command the attention of the discipline, but it falls just short of reaching Steinberg's goal of giving environment a place in American history. The best synthesis to yet appear, Down to Earth opens the way for the final integration of environmental history into mainstream American history.
Rating: 5
Summary: Every one should read
Comment: A thoroughly engaging review of American history from the forming of the continent to the current day-- with an important difference. Originally conceived to be a textbook, this is a wonderful presentation of the significant role our natural resources and other environmental factors have played in the development of the U.S. I find Steinberg to be a skillful and diplomatic writer: he rightfully highlights the blessings and curses of the natural environment (and our obligation as stewards) without minimizing or displacing other influences.
Rating: 3
Summary: A Good History with some Disappointing Rhetoric
Comment: DOWN TO EARTH: NATURE'S ROLE IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Ted Steinberg is an interesting book, particularly the first half which is a well-researched environmentally based history of the United States. The tenor of the book in these early chapters was very objective and gave a holistic sense of the many factors (natural, political and otherwise) that led to the development of our nation.
I must admit however that I was disappointed with the last few chapters of the book as it quickly declined (in my opinion) into a stereotypical environmentalist diatribe on the evils of American capitalism. The meat-packing, automotive (read "SUV's"), and biotechnology industries (along with the United States as a global dominant) are the waxed-mustachioed villains in the global environmental drama and, if only we would return to some pristine form of existence, then all would be OK. We have a responsibility of stewardship toward the earth's resources, however, global ecology and human health, safety AND PROSPERITY are not mutually exclusive items. Economic development within an integrative ecological context can be very profitable indeed, however it requires a shift away from the often adversarial posturing and categorization of positions into the camps of stereotypical tree-huggers as well as self-styled imperial despoilers. What is needed is a more balanced approach where humanity is recognized as part of nature, not as an alien component to be thwarted. Given the first part of the book, I had hoped that there would be new ideas and approaches rather than predictable rhetoric.
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Title: Changes in the Land : Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon ISBN: 0809016346 Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Major Problems in American Environmental History : Documents and Essays by Carolyn Merchant, Thomas Paterson ISBN: 0669249939 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 01 January, 1900 List Price(USD): $41.96 |
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Title: Nature's Nation: An Environmental History of the United States by John Opie ISBN: 0155002198 Publisher: International Thomson Publishing Pub. Date: January, 1998 List Price(USD): $52.95 |
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Title: The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History by Carolyn Merchant ISBN: 0231112327 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $52.00 |
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Title: Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement by Robert Gottlieb ISBN: 1559631228 Publisher: Island Press Pub. Date: January, 1995 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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