Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T22:00:55.075Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Legacies and Limitations: Environmental Historians Reconsider Progressive Conservation

Review products

TaylorJoseph E.III. Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. xv + 421 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-295-97840-6; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 0-295-98114-8.

JacobyKarl. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xix + 305 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-520-22027-7.

EwanRebecca Fish. A Land Between: Owens Valley, California. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xix + 221 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8018-6460-7; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 0-8018-6461-5.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Joseph Cullon
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For a comprehensive overview of Progressive conservation see Koppes, Clayton R., “Efficiency/Equity/Esthetics: Towards a Reinterpretation of American Conservation,” Environmental Review 11 (Summer 1987): 127–46.Google Scholar It is usefully read alongside Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 113–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar and White, Richard, “American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985): 297335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Lowenthal's, DavidGeorge Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (New York, 1958)Google Scholar has been revised and reissued as George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle, 2000).

3 For overviews of recent changes in scientific constructions of nature see Botkin, Daniel, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (New York, 1990)Google Scholar and Worster, Donald, “The Ecology of Order and Chaos,” in The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York, 1993), 156–70.Google Scholar

4 Attending to nature and culture as inextricably linked is fundamental to the practice of environmental history. See Worster, Donald, et al, “A Roundtable: Environmental History,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 10871147CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Cronon, William, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York, 1995).Google Scholar

5 For an especially engaging study of the impact of scientific management on the forests of the Blue Mountains, which nicely complements Taylor's work, see Langston, Nancy, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle, 1995).Google Scholar

6 Spence, Mark David, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York, 1999).Google Scholar

7 Judd, Richard, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge, MA, 1997)Google Scholar and Warren, Louis, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, 1997), 49.Google Scholar

8 Kahrl, William L., Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles' Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley, 1982)Google Scholar; Worster, Donald, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; and Walton, John, Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California (Berkeley, 1992).Google Scholar On the California landscape more generally, see Smith, Michael L., Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850–1915 (New Haven, 1987).Google Scholar

9 Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (Amherst, MA, 1980)Google Scholar and A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven, 1994).