Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Environmental Politics – the New and the Old
- 1 From Conservation to Environment
- 2 Variation and Pattern in the Environmental Impulse
- 3 The Urban Environment
- 4 The Nation's Wildlands
- 5 The Countryside: A Land Rediscovered, yet Threatened
- 6 The Toxic Environment
- 7 Population, Resources, and the Limits to Growth
- 8 Environmental Inquiry and Ideas
- 9 The Environmental Opposition
- 10 The Politics of Science
- 11 The Politics of Economic Analysis and Planning
- 12 The Middle Ground: Management of Environmental Restraint
- 13 Environmental Politics in the States
- 14 The Politics of Legislation, Administration, and Litigation
- 15 The Reagan Antienvironmental Revolution
- 16 Environmental Society and Environmental Politics
- Notes
- Index
5 - The Countryside: A Land Rediscovered, yet Threatened
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Environmental Politics – the New and the Old
- 1 From Conservation to Environment
- 2 Variation and Pattern in the Environmental Impulse
- 3 The Urban Environment
- 4 The Nation's Wildlands
- 5 The Countryside: A Land Rediscovered, yet Threatened
- 6 The Toxic Environment
- 7 Population, Resources, and the Limits to Growth
- 8 Environmental Inquiry and Ideas
- 9 The Environmental Opposition
- 10 The Politics of Science
- 11 The Politics of Economic Analysis and Planning
- 12 The Middle Ground: Management of Environmental Restraint
- 13 Environmental Politics in the States
- 14 The Politics of Legislation, Administration, and Litigation
- 15 The Reagan Antienvironmental Revolution
- 16 Environmental Society and Environmental Politics
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Between the city and the distant wildlands was the settled countryside, containing varied lands and land uses: farms and woodlands, rivers and floodplains, wetlands, lakes and ocean shores, mines and “unproductive wastelands.” In the Environmental Era the countryside was a vast area in transition. Its fate was yet to be determined.
Until World War II the American countryside was land nobody wanted. Decade after decade rural people fled their farms and towns. As agricultural production per farm worker rose, fewer hands were needed, and those who were superfluous moved to the cities. The more productive agricultural areas came to be preferred, and the less productive, the so-called marginal lands, declined – in numbers of people, homes, and villages, and in property values. The relocation of American agriculture created vast areas of countryside to which few wished to lay claim. In the 1930s the rural population became somewhat stable as during the Depression the return of some to the countryside served as a safety value against economic privation, but by the 1940s the decline resumed at a rapid pace.
After World War II this was dramatically reversed. Lands that nobody had wanted were increasingly in demand. Some people financed farming for a livelihood with savings earned from urban occupations. More found in rural communities the kind of environment they sought for work, home, and play, which they had not found in the cities. They came to visit on weekends and vacations, to enjoy the more relaxed atmosphere away from crowds, where the air was cleaner and the water more sparkling.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beauty, Health, and PermanenceEnvironmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985, pp. 137 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987