460 Exam 1

Fur trade was consequence between broken gift giving between humans and animals

calvin martin

Coyote tricks Eagle

letting him look into box containing moon and sun that they've stolen from Pueblo Kachinas, result is release of moon, coming of winter (and hence seasons)

key choice of each human community:

live "upon the country" (using local resources) or import from Outside

Kennecott (Ghost Town)

located in midst of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, at the end of a 63-mile gravel road which was once a railroad in 1900, prospectors discovered above Kennicott Glacier one of world's richest lodes of copper ore: 70% pure

Liebig's Law

low human populations essential for survival in environments where availability of food varied widely from season to season

Terrible accident at Los Alamos in 1946

Louis Slotin was "tickling the dragon" in setting up a plutonium bomb when his hand slipped and he accidentally initiated a fission reaction. Although his quick action ended the chain reaction before others could be injured, he himself suffered a lethal dose of radiation and died nine days later.

Remember the importance of the French Revolution for English romantics, especially Wordsworth

after an initial attraction to revolutionary ideals, a subsequent negative reaction to the excesses of the Terror and Napoleon, eventually leading to a retreat into individualistic encounters with Nature.

Virgin Soil Epidemics

native populations of the Americas lacked any historical immunological experience of many Old World diseases: measles, smallpox, chickenpox, mumps, malaria, yellow fever, etc., were all absent from the Western Hemisphere at the time Columbus made his voyage in 1492 as a result, those populations were comparatively healthy, but also vulnerable and very much at risk when exposed to disease organisms migrating from Eurasia and Africa

The earliest efforts at large-scale planning were generally in urban areas:

1893 Chicago World's Fair (also known as the Columbian Exposition) served as an especially influential model, designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham. Burnham went on to a major career as a planner, ultimately producing the famous Plan of Chicago in 1908 as an effort to rationalize the urban landscape. Beautiful graphics (with numerous maps and birds-eye views) sought to see the city "whole" in order to reinvent it:

Amid all this dramatic change, some troubling signs of possible vulnerabilities:

1947, US becomes net importer of oil; imports rise as % of U.S. production from 3% in 1940, 9% in 1950, 14% in 1960; 1956, first decline in new U.S. drilling; 1968, more natural gas consumed than found; 1971, U.S. no longer world's largest producer of oil

The spotted owl provided the occasion for legal action

1973 Endangered Species Act had mandated federal protection for species (not ecosystems) threatened with extinction, so owl becomes a surrogate for forest itself. To save the owl from extinction, saving remaining old-growth forests would be required. (The first such controversy over the Endangered Species Law had arisen in the late 1970s over the supposed threat of extinction for the snail darter fish at the Tellico Dam in Tennessee [TVA].)

1911

1st copper shipment reached Tacoma, WA, in 1911 mine produced $200-$300 million of ore over 27 years

Watt sought to open wilderness-designated lands to coal/oil exploration; sell or lease of large blocks of public lands for private development; reduce land-use regulation; favor states and private sector development.

A firestorm of opposition resulted, with large-scale petition drives opposing Watts' actions, large growth in memberships in and contributions to environmental organizations.

Through the 1970s, the principal source of climate fear was threat that we might be returning to Ice Age conditions caused by natural cooling and anthropogenic dust pollution

A national leader in advocating for this view was UW-Madison's Reid Bryson, founder of what is now known as the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

Note the role of cities like Montreal, Fort Orange (Albany), and New Amsterdam (New York City) in the colonial fur trade, as well as in the colonization schemes of major European empires.

Cities can rightly be seen as foci of emerging market relationships and networks that were proliferating across the continent. They were especially important as break-in-bulk points where land and river transportation interfaced with coastal and trans-oceanic maritime traffic.

There was a growing sense of apocalyptic change at the end of a decade of turmoil

Civil Rights movement; urban riots; Vietnam War and its associated protests; continuing Cold War with its threat of nuclear war; all combined with the famous vision of "earthrise" over Apollo 8's moon (photo taken on 12/24/1968), suggesting the unity of humanity and its dependence on a vulnerable planet earth

1963

Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed, sending most nuclear tests underground.

Livestock represented an enormous difference between Indians and Europeans, with much else in the landscape following from these co-invaders: cattle, horses, hogs, etc.

Livestock implied ownership of animals, animal power for plowing and hauling goods to market, to say nothing of all the uses to which animals were put for food, clothing, by-products, and other purposes.

CFCs had been invented in 1930 for General Motor's Frigidaire Division by the chemist Thomas Midgely.

Midgley had also invented tetraethyl lead for GM in 1923 as a gasoline additive to reduce "knocking" in the internal combustion engines of automobiles. (Given the eventual environmental impacts of these two inventions, the environmental historian John McNeill has quipped "Midgley, the same research chemist who figured out that lead would enhance engine performance, had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history.")

1963: Senate creates a Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, chaired by Senator Edmund Muskie (Maine Democrat), creating an institutional home in Congress for addressing these issues.

Muskie would become a key congressional leader on pollution questions for the next decade.

Final collapse came in 1950s and 1960s with devastating impact of DDT on shellfish populations

Note that pollution effects like these can be interpreted as another form of market failure arising from an unregualted common property resource: clean, unpolluted water essentially had no price and was not yet regulated, so no one had an incentive to keep it clean, and no one paid any market price for the side-effects of pesticides. Unpriced, no one had an incentive not to use polluting substances under these circumstances.

Oil inflation as a political economic crisis was made possible by an underlying shift from abundance toward scarcity in U.S. domestic oil reserves.

Oil crisis prompted large-scale rethinking of national and world-wide energy systems, encouraging conservation (insulated houses, smaller cars) as well as search for sources of supply (domestic oil, shale oil, coal). But energy conservation could conflict with pollution control and other environmental concerns: shift back toward coal consumption away from oil also a shift toward greater pollution; automobile emission controls often decreased engine's energy efficiency and hence fuel costs.

February 1970:

Nixon delivered his Special Message on Environmental Quality to Congress, announcing a series of sweeping administrative actions to improve federal regulatory apparatus for intervening on environmental problems This resulted in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They were justified as ways to coordinate interdisciplinary interventions on multi-media pollution.

Urban demand facilitated by railroad lead to mass hunting

Passenger pigeon

Cole's view from Mt. Holyoke thus becomes anxiety-laden, sinister. The fertile lowlands become signs of what?

Pastoral republican landscape or early signs of imperial decadence? The curve of the river (echoed by the birds circling overhead) becomes a symbol of cycling time, and hence, possibly, of the rise and fall of empire. And the strange clearings on the far hillside seem to form Hebrew letters that may be read either as Noah or Shaddai (the Almighty).

Merrimac River

Patrick Tracy Jackson's associates at Lowell, Mass, (originally called East Chelmsford) used power from Pawtucket Falls of Merrimac River combined with the Middlesex Canal to deliver power to water-powered factories.

By 1883 there were 21 canneries in California, with San Francisco shipping salmon around world

Peak of production occurred in 1882, when 12 million pounds were packed in the state. This collapsed by 1891 to 2 million pounds, with just 3 canneries left. The last California cannery closed in 1919.

Finally, the animal rights movement was also emerging from older anti-vivisectionist, humanitarian, vegetarian traditions, built this time on a rights-based defense of animal autonomy from human-induced pain/harm

Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation offered a philosophical defense of animal rights rooted in the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham that had also influence Gifford Pinchot--only now the "greatest number" for whom the "greatest good" was sought extended beyond the circle of human beings to include animals.

Celebration of irrigation represented a prophetic impulse:

Salt Lake Valley was seen as a modern-day exemplar of Palestine, the cactus desert transformed into a garden.

1953

When the canal was full, Hooker sold the property to the city for the site of an elementary school at the price of $1. The nearby working-class neighborhood that grew up adjacent to the school was eventually plagued with chemical odors, sludge seeping through basement walls, various health problems.

John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, 1939

became the most compelling popular account of the Dust Bowl experience and the "Okie" migrations that followed.

Result: Clean Air Act, 1970

far more aggressive than previous such legislation, calling for a 90% decrease in car pollutants within 5 years, with the EPA charged with overseeing and specifically instructed to ignore questions of economic or technical feasibility. The new approach was less the result of environmental lobbying than of politicians anticipating and trying to get out in front of public concerns.

By the early twenty-first century, there was mounting evidence of climate change and growing public concern

fear of flooding in coastal areas from sea level rise; shrinking mountain glaciers worldwide; spread of insect-borne diseases; even decreasing duration of ice cover on Madison's Lake Mendota.

Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884)

first developed mechanical reaper in Virginia in 1831, but didn't begin large-scale manufacture until he moved to Chicago to set up factory there in 1847. He and others produced series of innovations all designed to reduce labor costs: self-raking reapers, self-binding reapers, eventually reaper-thresher combines where market could support them

The flood gates at Glen Canyon Dam closed on Jan 21, 1963

flooding The Place No One Knew -- the title of a Sierra Club Exhibit Format book published in 1963 to lament loss of wilderness to a dam whose construction Brower had compromised to accept at the time of the Echo Park controversy.

In his important "Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery," 2/18/1981, the new president declared:

"American society experienced a virtual explosion in government regulation during the past decade. Between 1970 and 1979, expenditures for the major regulatory agencies quadrupled. The number of pages published annually in the Federal Register nearly tripled, and the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations increased by nearly two-thirds. The result has been higher prices, higher unemployment, and lower productivity growth. Overregulation causes small and independent business men and women, as well as large businesses to defer or terminate plans for expansion. And since they're responsible for most of the new jobs, those new jobs just aren't created."

First Ladies in the twentieth century (following on the model of Eleanor Roosevelt) could become significant political movers when they wished to shape Washington politics.

"Beautification" became Lady Bird's chief theme. Her first effort was to plant flowering plants in Washington DC to improve the beauty of the nation's capital.

Famous lament of the Mohegans in 1789

"The times are Exceedingly Alter'd, Yea the times have turn'd everything upside down, or rather we have Chang'd the good Times, Chiefly by the help of the White People, for in Times past, our Fore-Fathers lived in Peace, Love, and great harmony, and had everything in Great Plenty... But alas, it is not so no, all our Fishing, Hunting and Fowling is entirely gone."

1980: In the wake of Love Canal, Congress passed Superfund legislation to fund cleanups

$20 million was appropriated for the emergency relocation of families at Love Canal, mainly to purchase houses.

1934: the first federal duck stamp was created

(by cartoonist Jay "Ding" Darling) to raise funds for the federal game refuge system, including land acquisition and management. This is also about the time that wetlands began to be preserved, even though they had not previously been perceived as "sublime" in the original romantic sense. (Everglades National Park was created as the first such park in a wetland in 1947.)

In 1974, the chemists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina published a paper in Nature

(for which they would eventually win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry) hypothesizing the potential impacts of CFCs on atmospheric ozone. It was a remarkable example of how a seemingly benign solution to one set of environmental and health problems (the toxicity and explosive risks associated with early refrigerants) could have the unintended consequence of causing other problems in places where no one ever expected they might arise.

Alfred Runte's "worthless lands" thesis

(in his book National Parks: in early debates, the strongest argument for parks was that there was no other good use for lands set aside for this purpose (though tourism itself was a formidable economic use, as sustained lobbying efforts by railroads and other recreational interests demonstrated).

Nebraska Senator George Norris

(progressive Republican) was one of nation's most vigorous promoters of federal investment in hydropower development, authoring numerous bills and compromises to try to achieve that goal. Key factions in this debate: northern Democrats and western and midwestern Republicans generally supported public power; northeaster Republicans generally opposed government competition with private companies financed with private capital.

By 1939, CCC had contributed

8.5 million man-days to conservation, employing 2.18 million men (more like 300-500,000 at anyone time); planting 1.575 billion trees; building 140,000 miles roads and trails.

What has been described as California's dirtiest zip code, 90058, located between South Central and East Los Angeles (the state's largest Latino and Black Neighborhoods)

1 square mile of land with 4500 residents, 59% black, 38% Latino, 33 million pounds of toxic discharges into its environment.

established rectilinear grid pattern that can still be seen in many parts of American landscape today

1785 Land Ordinance

four years after plague started in Europe in 1346

1/3 of the population of that continent was dead: 25 million people

Limits to Growth

: in 1972, a team led by Dennis and Donella Meadows (Donella chief author) produced the most famous such prophesy of the early 1970s, using MIT computer modeling as a new more sophisticated version of Malthusian logic: plug complex economic, social, and ecological variables into an elaborate set of equations, then run various "scenarios" to see likely future outcomes. The "standard run" of their model produced a scenario leading to overpopulation, then falling resources, soaring pollution, and societal collapse. Even their "unlimited resources" scenario ultimately hit limits driven by pollution effects. Only their "stabilized model" held out hope for the human future.

Among the most important early centers for ecological research was the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Charles Bessey's botany classes there in the 1880s-90s attracted a star group of students

Actively opposed to the sentimentality of nature study, Bessey sought to promote rigorous scientific training, authoring what became the classic botany text for a generation, Botany for High Schools & Colleges (1880), to promote serious high school science. His emphasis was on plant anatomy, pursuing scientific research in the laboratory, not in the field. He opposed to non-laboratory botany as non-rigorous, too descriptive, too much like natural history.

Sport hunting was an elite leisure activity done for the love of fair play.

Advocates for honorable sport hunting like Frank Forester argued that one should only shoot birds on wing, being careful to use "fair" and proper technique, seeking to display manhood. They believed that the chase was only worth while if done with style, risk, and dash. Taking unfair advantage of one's quarry was the sign of unethical hunter.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall east of New Orleans as a Category 3 storm (it had earlier been a Category 5) on August 29, 2005.

After initial elation that the city had avoided a direct hit, people realized that the levees had been breached at several locations, resulting in 80% of the city being under deep water at the height of the flooding. More than 1800 people lost their lives in the storm and and subsequent floods: $81 billion in property damage; 90,000 sq mi (an area the size of the United Kingdom) was declared disaster area; 3 million people were left without electricity.

In September 1969, Wisconsin's Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed a day of national reflection on environmental crisis.

After much organizing, this became the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. It generated widespread activism and media attention, in what has been called the largest mass produce in American history, with more than 20 million people participating. Earth Day saw declarations of crisis, calls for a new spiritual vision, and practical suggestions: returnable bottles, protest pollution, preserve open space, put bricks in toilets to reduce waste of water.

Then collapse: by the 1950s

Alaska's production was only 40% of 1930s' levels. The, nadir came in 1967, when only 1.5 million cases were packed. This decline couldn't be attributed to pollution or watershed modification; its chief cause was simple overfishing.

Next great harvests were in British Columbia and Alaska.

Alaskan rivers produced huge yields. First Alaskan cannery opened in 1878; there were 37 by 1889, producing 720,000 cases annually. Alaska's peak year of production occurred in 1936 with 129 million fish caught and 8 million cases packed. This constituted 85% of the pack for the entire US, with, 25,000 packing plant workers in Alaska alone. In 1939, Alaska had 156 canneries shipping salmon to Lower 48, Europe, Australia, New Zealand.

ecological imperialism

Alfred Crosby

The differential impact on poor people and the linkage of poverty with race made the storm's aftermath a scandal:

Americans were ashamed at the racial injustices that were so obviously revealed in the wake of Katrina, and angry that their leaders were so ineffective in responding. A "natural" disaster had proven also to be a profound example of environmental injustice. Although Katrina became a symbol of global warming for many, it was a tragedy with much deeper and more complicated historical roots.

Bessey's most enthusiastic sudents formed a new "Sem Bot Club" to promote extracurricular botanical research.

Among its leading members: Roscoe Pound & Frederic Edward Clements. Clements and Pound were attracted to studying the relations among plant species, so left Bessey's lab to study plant communities, while still seeking to apply Bessey's rigorous quantitative scientific techniques to their work in the field. The two went on to produce a joint doctoral dissertation in 1898 on The Phytogeography of Nebraska. Pound then went on to a career in law and legal education, becoming one of the most influential deans of the Harvard Law School, but Clements continued to work in botany and biogeography, becoming one of the leading plant ecologists of his generation.

Railroads provided the capital for constructing and managing major hotels in key western parks, handling much of the tourist movement there.

Among the great railroad resort hotels were Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone, Northern Pacific RR, 1904; El Tovar at Grand Canyon, run by Fred Harvey for the Santa Fe Railroad, 1905. (Fred Harvey, with his "Harvey Girls," created wage employment opportunities for women in the various restaurants he managed.)

Cases like Love Canal increasingly frequent as public became aware of the hazards associated with old industrial waste sites, and as funds became available to intervene for their cleanup

Among the most notorious cases occured in 1983, when the EPA (under much political pressure) moved to purchase houses in Times Beach, Missouri, that had been accidentally contaminated with dioxin. $33 million was spent to buy out residences, and the town of 2500 residents was then bulldozed into oblivion after its citizens relocated.

Alaska Pipeline controversy made this point clearly

Arco discovered 10 billion bbls oil reserve at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope of Alaska in 1968, and a pipeline to transport this oil as it came online was proposed in 1969. The pipeline was then opposed by the Wilderness Society, Environmental Defense Fund, and other groups, which demanded that an environmental impact statement be made about the effects of its construction and operation on arctic tundra ecosystem. With the pressure of the oil crisis, Congress approved the pipeline 1973.

The 1980s saw diminishing public hopes for simple environmental solutions in 1980s. Instead, what we might call a politics of ambivalence emerged.

As a symbol of these new ambiguities and complexities, indoor air pollution became a political vehicle for shifting controversy away from corporations and industry, suggesting that domestic households were themselves a threat to public health. Growing concern about the quality of indoor air, with radon as a natural pollutant, significant health threat which in part derived from energy conservation measures that insulated houses and diminished ventilation during 1970s.

All major colonial cities on the eastern seaboard (Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans--and, of course, Montreal in the north) were oriented toward the ocean

Atlantic ports were their most important raison d'etre; Boston was dominant in early decades, then Philadelphia, with New York finally emerging in the early nineteenth century as the economic metropolis of the United States. (Montreal played a comparable role for Canada.)

Wild horses proliferated through South American grasslands, expanded from there into North America both as domesticated animals and as creatures who had escaped into the wild

Became important species on pampas of Argentina, and accompanied Spanish soldiers and missionaries into Alta California (modern-day California). So numerous by the time of California Gold Rush after 1848 that Anglo ranchers slaughtered many to protect rangeland for their cattle.

What led to declined of canneries

Best explanation was overfishing, with nets and weirs eliminating the entire breeding stock from rivers, so that no reproduction could occur. But also: silt and gravel from hydraulic mining muddied and filled rivers on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the Central Valley, raising water temperatures and turbidity past levels that young salmon could tolerate. Dam construction also blocked fish runs, and drainage of wetlands eliminated spawning grounds for other species. So salmon fisheries migrated once again. As we saw in the opening lecture on Kennecott, a key attribute of moving resource frontiers was that people harvesting them could move on when the initial abundance of a resource declined, thereby avoiding having to confront the problem of sustainability.

Conservation in this context meant preserving a world that was being lost, whether for wildness or to save a child's moral universe

Birdhouse as a practical symbol of gentle nature humanely protected.

ut vast hunting pressure during nesting season made reproduction increasingly difficult, disturbing adult birds and sometimes leading them to abandon nests.

Birds evidently needed a critical mass to sustain breeding population, so declined precipitously in closing decades of the nineteenth century.

among the most famous of all epidemics in world history

Black Death, beginning in Europe in 1346: massive consequences whose effects lasted for decades, even centuries

Among the most popular of natural history authors in the early twentieth century: Ernest Thompson Seto

Born 1860 in England, Seton moved to Canada at the age 6. He began work as an artist/illustrator, doing animal illustrations for scientific publications by mid-1880s. He worked as a wolf hunter in New Mexico in 1893, and began writing illustrated stories to help readers identify with the animals he cared about. One of his earliest and most popular short stories was called "Lobo, the King of Currumpaw," 1894, which appeared in his book Wild Animals I Have Known, published in 1896. He favored stories of noble wolves and other animals struggling against great odds, often dying tragically but heroically.

Leopold (1886-1948) would emerge as the major theoretician of wilderness in first half of the 20th century:

Born in Burlington, Iowa, Leopold received his BA in 1908 and then an MA in Forestry from the school that Pinchot's father had founded. His first post with the Forest Service was in the Southwest to work on forestry and game preservation, with a brief period with the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce to promote predator control. In 1924, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin to help lead the USFS Forest Products Laboratory, but left in 1928 to conduct wildlife surveys as a game consultant for the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute.

Early federal bureaucrats who defended conservation included Wisconsin's Carl Schurz (Secretary of the Interior from 1877-81) and Bernard Fernow (Forestry Bureau Chief, USDA, from 1886-98)

Both represented longstanding forestry traditions in Germany and Europe more generally from which US conservationists borrowed heavily.

On June 9, 1966

Brower ran a full-page ad in the New York Times declaring that "Only You Can Save Grand Canyon"; the next day, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the tax-exempt status of Sierra Club, eventually leading to Brower's ouster by the Club's board in 1969.

CFCs appeared to be ideal refrigerants: non-toxic, highly efficient, non-explosive, extraordinarily stable.

But the very stability that made them chemically inert and therefore safe under normal conditions meant that they were persistent enough to be transported into the upper atmosphere where they could be broken down by sunlight and the resulting chlorine ions could then serve as catalysts breaking down ozone molecules over and over again:

Hostility toward corporate pollution was an easy target because of its point-source nuatre; fear too of science and technology echoed earlier controversies about fallout and pesticides

But there was an echo of the anti-flouride campaigns of the 1950s, attacking flouridation of public water supplies as toxic, anti-libertarian, Communist threat. This helps explain the Mom & Apple Pie marketing of Crest when it was introduced as the first flouride toothpaste in 1956...and the black humor of Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), in which a general launches a nuclear war because of his fear that his virility has been threatened by flouride poisoning.

By 1883, there were virtually no animals left.

By 1889, there were only 85 left in the wild, and only 1091 left in the world, mostly in Yellowstone National Park and in the Canadian prairie provinces (Manitoba and Saskatchewan).

This shift depended on the invention of chlorofluorocarbons -- CFCs -- as easily compressed gases capable of very efficient cooling even with modest compression

CFCS seemed attractive because they were very stable compounds, non-reactive with most other chemicals, very low in toxicity. These attractive traits solved serious risks and expenses associated with previous industrial refrigeration using toxic, explosive compounds like ammonia.

If we consider the national per capita incidence of cancer in the U.S. purely in terms of gender, mortalities from various cancers have fallen quite drastically over the past century for variety of reasons (earlier diagnosis, more effective medical treatment, changes in diet, etc.).

Cancers whose rates have declined include stomach, colon, rectum, uterine. Lung cancer, on the other hand, rose quite dramatically over the same period, largely because of the growing popularity of cigarettes in the middle decades of the twentieth century (with women lagging men because women were slower to adopt smoking).

In 1848

Captain Thomas Roys headed into the Bering Sea, capturing 1800 barrels of bowhead whale oil in a single month. News of this enormously productive fishing ground generated an oil rush in 1849, with more than 70 ships visiting the Bering Sea to harvest bowheads for themselves.

Gifford Pinchot saw women as key to the conservation movement's success, given their role as educators of the next generation

Chapter 9, entitled "The Children," argued that "...almost without exception it is the mother who plants patriotism in the mind of the child. It is her duty. The growth of patriotism is first of all in the hands of the women of any nation. In the last analysis it is the mothers of a nation who direct that nation's destiny.... The great fundamental problem which confronts us all now is this: Shall we continue, as a Nation, to exist in well-being? That is the conservation problem."

Revelle proposed a key experiment:

Charles David Keeling's Mauna Loa monitoring station, which found rising CO2, which eventually yielded what is now arguably among the most important scientific graphs in history: the "Keeling Curve."

Water-borne diseases were yet another link in the chain connecting growing cities back to the natural world.

Cholera reached Europe for the first time in 1831, arriving in Montreal June 7, 1832, and in New York City on June 26.

Inside the agricultural village, functional divisions of the landscape marked ecological relations of production.

Clearing land involved girdling bark from trees, planting amidst stumps, eventually cutting or burning to create fields for plowing.

Roscoe Pound & Frederic Edward Clements.

Clements and Pound were attracted to studying the relations among plant species, so left Bessey's lab to study plant communities, while still seeking to apply Bessey's rigorous quantitative scientific techniques to their work in the field. The two went on to produce a joint doctoral dissertation in 1898 on The Phytogeography of Nebraska. Pound then went on to a career in law and legal education, becoming one of the most influential deans of the Harvard Law School, but Clements continued to work in botany and biogeography, becoming one of the leading plant ecologists of his generation.

Lake Erie was an equally famous case of pollution that was reported widely in the media

Cleveland's Cuyahoga River actually caught fire in 1969 (as it had many times before reaching back to the mid-19th century, but the nation suddenly paid attention in 1969). The unnaturalness of a river catching fire seemed a sign of the (apocalyptic) times.

Steam power meant that factories were no longer geographically limited to sites with significant heads of water.

Coal and water could be moved to any factory site with adequate transportation (and railroads would liberate system from spatial limits still further).

gained political and economic power by raising and trading horses

Comanches of Texas

The TVA stood as a model for whole new approach to earlier conservation concerns

Comprehensive planning sought an integrated vision of the entire watershed, managing all of its elements: river and tributaries; navigation; flood control; hydropower; forests; erosion; agriculture; recreation; transportation; cities; etc.

By the mid-1990s, an influential "hockey stick" graph seemed to show a clear signal that mean global temperatures were rising as a result of anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases.

Computer models were also becoming better able to mimic historical data

In 1855

Connecticut passed a "Two-Acre" law, which allowing towns to survey underwater 2-acre tracts in coastal waters and sell or license them to fishers. With this innovation, oystermen became very similar to farmers, acquiring property, seeding it with oysters, waiting for their beds to grow, and defending them against anyone who tried to steal from this private property. Oyster packing factories grew up along the shore, shipping packed oysters to urban markets all along the coast.

Romanticism was also a reaction against emerging industrialism and cities

Constable, Turner landscapes

Atlantic salmon runs were destroyed quite early by the construction of mills, dams, and canals, mainly during the early 19th century

Construction of mills at Lowell on the Merrimack River starting in 1822 began this process, and the dam at Lawrence in 1847 essentially ended the spawning runs there. This pattern repeated itself in California. There had been longstanding Indian fisheries that often took place, for instance, at major rapids on the Klamath and the Columbia rivers, regulated by ritual limits on how long the harvest would take place at those locations.

Trickster figure central to many Indian belief systems, can take several different animal forms:

Coyote, Great Hare, Raven

In 1895, Ronald Ross found malaria protozoan in mosquito gut (anopheles).

Cuban physician Carlos Finlay postulated that the same mosquito vector might be transmitting yellow fever as well. After the Spanish-American War, US troops occupying Cuba began dying from yellow fever. A US Army commission headed by Walter Reed confirmed mosquito vector, recommending that the disease could be controlled by eliminating mosquito habitats

Then came the seemingly miraculous discovery of new aromatic hydrocarbon came during WWII

DDT was used during the typhus epidemic in occupied Naples to de-louse GIs, then to malaria control in tropics. Hugely beneficial for Allied war efforts in tropical and subtropical environments were mosquitoes and other insects represented serious health threats for soldiers and civilians alike. In tropical areas during and after the war, there's not much doubt that DDT saved hundreds of thousands, even millions of human lives.

Popularity of American blood sports was further complicated by the additional icon of individualist frontier hero:

Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking were all famous in part as hunters.

Early fuel for steam engines was often wood, especially for steamboats

Deforestation along major transportation corridors like the Mississippi was partly driven by this demand for fuel. Coal industry emerged where trees scarce, with the anthracite mines of eastern Pennsylvania becoming important for factories and cities in the mid-Atlantic region. Some of earliest railroads were designed to carry this coal to market.

By the end of the 20th century, the two parties had become starkly polarized on environmental issues as never before

Democrats favored wilderness protection, pollution control, energy conservation, regulatory oversight; Republicans favored development, rolling back federal control, protecting private property rights from government.

So what about one of the possible solutions we first encountered when thinking about the Fisherman's Problem?

Don't rely on voluntarism. Instead, use the coercive power of government to force action. If people won't do the right thing on their own, why not make them do it? If people won't put bricks in their toilets, how about passing a law requiring them to do so?

1982, Manville Co. files for bankruptcy to escape liability

EPA proposed ban 1986, though asbestos continues to be used for some purposes in U.S.

Here, then, was a central dialectic of US environmental history between scarcity and abundance, plenty and waste, as noted in the closing sentence of Changes in the Land

Ecological abundance and economic prodigality went hand in hand: the people of plenty were a people of waste." (It's worth pondering what exactly the word "waste" means in this sentence, given how value-laden it is, and how potentially anachronistic its possible meanings might be.)

influential thinker from Massachusetts whose ideas about nature included mystic, direct experience of divine

Emerson

Adirondacks begin to gain growing attention in the 1850s and especially after the Civil War

Emerson, Lowell, & Agassiz's Philosophers' Camp, 1858 helped launch a much larger movement.

The new legal tools being created by White House, Congress, and the courts, all encouraged the creation of new environmental organizations specializing in their use to intervene on behalf of environmental causes:

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF, 1967) initially organized to oppose DDT spraying on Long Island; Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC, 1970) sought to litigate on a wide range of pollution and resource issues; Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (1971, later spun off in 1997 as Earthjustice) essentially became a non-profit legal organization representing other environmental groups when litigation and interventions in administrative legal proceedings were needed.

In 1980, a year after Three Mile Island, polls showed that a large percentage of the American public was hostile to new reactor construction

Environmentalist interventions in regulatory processes delayed the construction of new plants. Construction costs rose dramatically, with the result that new reactor orders ended and construction of some plants halted.

Sportsmanlike values were promoted by a growing popular press selling magazines to hunters and fishers in the post-Civil War era.

Especially popular were Charles Hallock and George Bird Grinnell's Forest and Stream, 1871; also American Sportsman (1871); Field and Stream (1874); American Angler (1881).

Alfred Crosby's thesis:

European expansion was most "successful" in "Neo-Europes" of temperate latitudes where biological co-invaders enabled Europeans to reproduce their bio-cultural systems: US, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina, Australia. Where what Crosby calls the "co-invaders" of Europeans failed to thrive, so often did European efforts at colonization.

Important to recognize that natives were attracted to European goods only partly because of the inherent technological virtues of those goods (e.g., the ability of a metal pot to boil water over a fire without shattering, or the ease with which woven textiles could dyed or washed)

European materials were quick absorbed into the symbolic systems that gave them meanings in native societies that no Europeans would have recognized. In a very real sense, they cased to be "European" in the process.

Here's one classic story of the fur trade, which I sometimes jokingly call the "cool stuff" narrative:

Europeans brought "superior" technologies (the gun is usually offered as a self-evident example). Indians recognized this "superiority" instantly, hurrying to trade as quickly as possible in order to acquire such goods. In the process, they eventually killed off their own subsistence base, depopulating animal species like beaver and deer.

Tragedy of commons

Fisherman's problem

Illnesses with possible environmental causes, including cancer, are by no means evenly distributed geographically.

For instance, deaths from all cancers in U.S. for white males are highest in the lower Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, but deaths from breast cancer for all women are highest in the industrial Northeast and Great Lakes.

if the horse is in fact a co-invader with human beings (and I think it is), it nonetheless "invades" in very different ways depending on the human cultures that choose to live with that animal:

For the colonists of Virginia and New England, the horse was a way to bring crops to market, to deliver the mail, to pull a plow. For Spanish ranchers, it was a source of tallow and hides for a thriving international trade. For European soldiers everywhere, it was an instrument of death and high strategy. For the Comanches, it was an animal crop to be raised, herded, eaten, and traded. For the Sioux, it was a way to a more abundant and reliable life of hunting bison than the old hunter-gatherer practices, and a means to greater dominance in a longstanding conflict with neighbors who had formerly enjoyed greater power and abundance. For the Pawnees, it was a way of adding more meat to an agricultural diet, but one that required considerable manipulation of the grasslands in order to insure its own food supplies, all of these activities being embedded in a ritual cycle whose gifts and practices tied together and guaranteed the mutual success of harvest and hunt

Feathered Hats

Game animals were used for clothing, especially for the millinery and feather trades, supplying decorative elements for women's hats. Songbirds and tropical and subtropical species like flamingoes, egrets, spoonbills, ostriches, all with beautiful plumage, were especially vulnerable for this purpose. Women's fashions created a worldwide market for colorful feathers.

Tragedy of the Commons

Garrett Hardin popularized this "fisherman's problem" in 1968 by relabeling it "Tragedy of the Commons"

1912-15, Juliette Low's Girl Scouts

Girl Scouts emphasized domestic, "feminine" values: home-making; group vs. individual achievement; nature as a field for nurture and communal support more than for competition or discipline.

One key promoter of a new ethic of sportsmanship among hunters was Henry William Herbert (1807-58)

He was born in England, migrated to NYC in 1831, and wrote Field Sports in the U.S. and British Provinces of America, in 1848 under the pseudonym Frank Forester. It was followed by several other hunting manuals before his suicide in 1858.

Next ring: extensive agriculture, especially of grain crops, on lands of lower value.

Grains capable of paying longer journey to market, especially wheat (much less perishable than vegetables and dairy products); corn was highly desirable as a subsistence crop on the frontier, but had to be converted to pork or whiskey for urban demand. Corn-based agriculture concentrated in the Ohio & Mississippi valleys in 1859; so too did porkpacking and whiskey manufacture; wheat followed as soon as the land was ready for planting it. Lumbering was also an extensive activity in this ring in US (though not in Europe, where lumber was a more intensive crop): white pine was harvested first in Maine, then in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton created one of several new national monuments under the Antiquities Act,

Grand Staircase-Escalante in southern Utah, in the face of considerable opposition from Utah politicians and citizens. On December 4, 2017, President Donald Trump announced that he would attempt to reduce that monument by 80-90%, something that had never before occurred.

editor of Forest and Stream who helped found Boone & Crockett Club and argued for regulation of hunting

Grinnell & Teddy Roosevelt

1870: the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition to Yellowstone prompted Cornelius Hedges' idea to set aside "a great National Park" so as to prevent its development and commercialization along the lines of Niagara

He and Nathaniel P. Langford lobbied extensively for its protection.

William K. Reilly was appointed to head EPA as a liberal Republican environmentalist by President George H. W. Bush.

He sought more efficient, rational, market-based environmental protections by asking how to allocate limited environmental funds so as to get greatest benefit--and yet was repeatedly frustrated that public misperceptions of cost-benefit balance led to irrational choices. Very expensive and highly localized toxic waste dumps vs less expensive but more widespread radon remediation: which would save more lives?

Carson was born in Springdale, PA, in 1907

Her mother raised her to love nature in the nature study tradition, along with music, books, and writing. Carson wanted to write from early childhood forward, but shifted to biology while a student at the Pennsylvania College for Women, then on to an MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins. Her first job was with the Federal Bureau of Fisheries as one of the first two female scientists ever hired by that agency.

Watt was widely criticized by secular environmentalists for an apocryphal remark before Congress that invoked evangelical faith and supposedly claimed that there was no need to protect natural resources because the End Times were near

His actual words (which did allude to his faith) were quite different, and the environmentalist backlash against was further alienating to conservative Christians. Watt was finally removed in 1983 for making a racial joke about one his review committees.

Representative Paul Schenck (Ohio Republican) tried three times in 1958, 1959, 1960 to get Congress to pass legislation investigating automobile emissions

His bills were resisted by the Public Health Service as too political. In 1960, a relatively modest law finally passed asking the Surgeon General to report on possible health effects of auto-related pollution.

Cole's landscapes express drama of God, humanity, Nature, and declension.

His remarkable series of five canvases for the narrative sequence called The Course of Empire (1833-6) depicted the rise of fall of European civilization from Savagery to Pastoral to Empire to Destruction to Desolation

This was also the moment when energetics was becoming a new analytical and metaphorical foundation for ecosystem analysis too: Raymond Lindemann and G. Evelyn Hutchinson at Yale had studied ecosystem energy flows in the 1940s;

Howard and Eugene Odum had analyzed trophic levels of ponds using radioactive isotopes. (It was from this systems ecology perspective on calories and nutrients moving along food chains and up trophic levels that the analytical foundations for subsequent controversies relating to Strontium 90 and DDT would emerge.)

Yet another key conservation agency created in the early years of the New Deal was the Soil Conservation Service, created in 1935

Hugh Hammond Bennett became its first head, remaining in that position until he retired in 1951, and authoring the nation's first major textbook on the subject in in 1939.

A key leader among American scientists during the IGY was Roger Revelle, head of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who declared in 1957:

Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years. This experiment, if adequately documented, may yield a far-reaching insight into the processes determining weather and climate.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in far northern Alaska was created by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960.

In 1980, 7.6 million acres were designated as wilderness in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), with a separate section (the "1002 area") designated for further study for possible resource development, with congressional authorization required before any drilling could occur there. Despite decades of controversy, no congressional majority could be assembled either to authorize oil drilling or to designate the 1002 area as wilderness. Now, in 2017, that authorization seems likely to be included in the budget bill passed in December, 2017.

Travel in general became more oriented to the mobility of the highway

In the past, tourists had gone to a large hotel and used it as a base station for a week or more of touring from that single location; auto-based tourists could travel every day or two, not lingering in any one place for long, and not concentrating in large numbers as was typical of rail-based tourism.

Game preserves served as retreats for a wealthy elite

In some areas, they eroded the rights of lower classes (including former slaves) to do subsistence hunting on common lands as a supplement to farming and other sources of food.

After an extended period of relatively infrequent hurricanes during the second half of the twentieth century, their frequency seemed to be on the rise by 1990s, with some climatologists hypothesizing that warmer ocean temperatures would increase the number of severe hurricanes

Independent of this hypothesized effects, property damage from hurricanes was also rising as people built expensive vacation houses on exposed shorelines during decades of relative calm.

Calvin Martin's spiritual argument in his controversial 1978 book: "keepers of the game" were linked in Indian cultures with disease.

Indians saw hunt as gift relationship regulated by sanctions of animal death on the one hand, and human disease on the other. So: European diseases could be perceived as an attack by keepers of game. Native peoples responded by making the fur trade a religious holy war against creatures who had broken their sacred compact with humans. Despite the apparent elegance of this argument, and the apparent respect it paid to spiritual beliefs of native peoples, it faced major problems in its lack of primary source evidence: very few documents, most of them from the 19th & 20th centuries, not the 16th century when the fur trade began...3-4 centuries earlier.

Eleanor Leacock's Marxist portrayal of Montagnais of eastern Canada in her 1954 dissertation:

Indians were originally primitive communists, with no participation in market economies, and no private property.

The atomic bomb in particular proved to be pivotal for subsequent emergence of environmentalism as a political movement derived from, but recognizably distinct from, the earlier conservation movement. All of this was intricately coordinated in top secret by the federal government as the Manhattan Project.

Invention and production of nuclear weapons necessitated whole new realms of coordinated planning: extremely complex production cycle geographically spread across country: uranium mining in Southwest on Navajo reservation; processing of Uranium green salt processing at Fernald, Ohio; separation of U235 from U238 in gaseous diffusion process at Oak Ridge, Tennessee (using cheap hydropower from TVA); plutonium production at Hanford in eastern Washington (with Columbia River hydropower contributing); bomb assembly at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

1960: Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, formed

Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia. Its members controlled 75% of world oil reserves by 1970.

Prices stablized at these new higher levels until 1978, when the Shah of Iran fell.

Iranian exports dropped and prices rose once again to as high as $45/bbl on the spot market by end of 1979 -- in stark contrast to average prices of $3/bbl at beginning of decade.

Lovins' arguments were reinforced, surprisingly, by a report released by the Harvard Business School in 1979 with the title Energy Futures

It argued that problems associated with the oil crisis would continue, that nuclear power had been undermined by regulatory failure, so that conservation and solar energy were the best immediate alternatives for the near future.

Erie was the shallowest of the Great Lakes and the most industrial.

It had seen steady accumulations of heavy metals since the 19th century, with rising mercury levels in fish, DDT byproducts in sediments, etc. Worse: eutrophication from over-fertilization of water with the nutrients nitrogen and phosphorous. These triggered algal blooms, and the algae died, the decay of the dead plants yielded an oxygen deficit that produced massive fish kills.

Olmsted's essay on "Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns"

It may be inferred from what I have said, that very rugged ground, abrupt eminences, and what is technically called picturesque in distinction from merely beautiful or simply pleasing scenery, is not the most desirable for a town park. Decidedly not in my opinion. The park should, as far as possible, compliment the town. Openness is the one thing you cannot get in buildings. Picturesqueness you can get. Let your buildings be as picturesque as your artists can make them. This is the beauty of a town. Consequently, the beauty of the park should be the other. It should be the beauty of the fields, the meadow, the prairie, of the green pastures, and the still waters. What we want to gain is tranquillity and rest to the mind. Mountains suggest effort....

By the 1950s, air conditioning was regarded as a key symbol of the new American way of life, a fulfillment of the American dream.

It played a non-trivial role in large-scale migration to the Sun Belt, places like Florida, Texas, and the American Southwest where high summer temperatures made AC seem increasingly essential for comfortable living.

Limits to Growth views achieved official government approval when President Jimmy Carter commissioned the Global 2000 Report, authored by Gus Speth and published just as Carter was leaving office

It provided abundant statistical evidence suggesting that the predictions of Limits to Growth were coming true, and that the: 21st century would be worse than the 20th century in myriad ways. Key conclusion: If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the worlds people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.

A key ally of TVA and other federal conservation agencies was Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), created in 1933.

It recruited young men, ages 17-23, in an effort to fight unemployment during the Depression by supplying inexpensive labor for conservation measures, using military leadership, order, and discipline. The "CCC Boys" earned $30/month, room, board, with camps around the country working on anti-erosion projects, tree planting, dam construction, road building, fire fighting, park renovations, etc. CCC essentially provided mass construction employment at a time when such jobs were very scarce.

NPS under Mather's leadership promoted parks as democratic playgrounds for recreation and education amid natural wonders.

It sought to widen public access through road construction, building of scenic overlooks, using landscape architecture to design a rustic experience for park visitors.

In 1987, most nations in the world signed the Montreal Protocol, agreeing to phase out of CFCs

It was successful partly because there seemed to be relatively easy replacements available for CFCs, making possible a technical fix to a well-defined problem about which most scientists agreed.

In 1956, Carson published an article entitled "Help Your Child to Wonder"

It was written very much in the traditions of the nature study movement about the values children like her nephew Roger could learn from being exposed to the natural world and its moral universe.

For Progressives like Pinchot, nature existed explicitly for human use.

Its development represented the highest good as long as it was well managed. Conservation for Pinchot and Roosevelt (who was also drawn to hunting and wilderness parks) was ultimately a question of values: defending the national good.

The 1920s saw the creation of the Regional Planning Association of America

Its leaders included Clarence Stein, Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, Catherine Bauer, Stuart Chase, and Frederick Delano (FDR's uncle, for whom he was named). Its goal was regional planning for New York City and its region, resolving transportation and other development problems by concentrating population in certain areas while limiting it in others. It mapped out alternative transportation routes, beginning the process of imagining how to redesign the city to accommodate automobiles and highways, a process that Robert Moses would seek to realize over the course of his long career as NYC's most influential planner.

Women were at least as influential in the movement to protect game animals as men were, less because hunting than because their concerns about the role women's fashions were playing in the destruction of songbirds and subtropical and tropical plumage speces

Just as male reformers argued that it was "unmanly" to engage in unethical hunting, female reformers argued that it was "unwomanly" to decorate one's clothing (as a tribute to feminine vanity) with the bodies of innocent, beautiful creatures. The role of gendered ideas in conservation politics should never be ignored.

The strategic thinking that characterized WWII carried on into the post-war world

Key influences on subsequent environmental thought included the collapse of European empires; the rise of Cold War competition between the US and the USSR; and the explosion of first atomic bombs (at Trinity in New Mexico on July 16, 1945; at Hiroshima on August 6; and at Nagasaki on August 9).

Simultaneously: the rise of the fast food industry, symbolized by Ray Kroc purchasing franchise rights to the McDonald Brothers' hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California, in 1954

Kroc's first franchise was in Des Plaines, Illinois, and he went on to purchase the entire company in 1961:

led U.S. Army reconnaissance party that visited Kennecott, Alaska, in 1885

LT Henry Allen

George Perkins Marsh's

Man and Nature, first published in 1864, is among the pivotal texts of U.S. conservation. I often pair it with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949) in shaping environmental politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

1837

Mandan epidemic

well-known (and terrible) virgin soil epidemic in 1837

Mandan epidemic

Mather also sought to publicize the wonders of the parks through widespread promotional efforts. One of his early efforts as the National Parks Portfolio, expensive publication filled with beautiful photos at expense of $48,000.

Mather couldn't use government funds for the publication, so contributed $5000 of his own money and got the rest from seventeen railroad companies. 275,000 copies printed in all.

With emergence of Louis Pasteur's germ theory, more effective responses became possible, ending the chain of infection starting with the 1866 epidemic

Municipal boards of health began to appear, using sometimes authoritarian measures to try to prevent infected people from contaminating drinking water.

Note the rise of public interest in environment during 1969-70 as reflected in polls:

May 1969, only 1% listed "pollution/ecology" among "most important problems" of US; 25% in May 1971; public concern over air/water pollution rose from 10th to 5th place (Vietnam War, inflation, taxes, economy always higher).

Well-organized market relied on telegraphic communication to communicate nesting locations and the prices that pigeons would bring when sold in urban areas

Meat was bland, so could be used for many purposes, and live pigeons were sold for target practice (origin of the modern "clay pigeons" that hunters still use for learning to shoot on wing).

dams and canals made water-powered factories possible, but also ended salmon runs

Merrimac

1960s saw an extraordinary wave of new laws relevant to environment:

Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act, 1965 Water Quality Act, 1965; Air Quality Act, 1967 Clean Air Act Amendments, 1970 Federal Water Pollution Control Act, 1972 Endangered Species Act, 1973

Ergo: rising quantities of solid waste in the decades following WWII

Motorized refuse collection had begun in some cities in 1910-20 period, but large-scale garbage collection was essential in most American cities by the 1950s because of growing waste streams.

NEPA, authored by Jackson, was one result of this complicated series of machinations:

NEPA's key operational clause, other than creation of Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), required all Federal agencies henceforth to issue an environmental impact statements (EIS) before taking any major action. This became device whereby anyone could intervene in environmental policy processes.

Most major laws of the 1960s-70s were passed during the Nixon Administration with majority votes from members of both parties:

NEPA, Clean Air, Clean Water, Endangered Species, EPA, NOAA, etc.

Wooden cities of nineteenth-century North America were perennially and very seriously threatened by fire

NYC fire of 1776 burned down 1/4 town. 1835 fire there consumed 500-700 stores, $20-40 million damages.

Indian horticulture was intimately integrated into seasonal movements of hunting and gathering: communities migrated to locations where food and other resources were most abundant at any given time.

Native material cultures hinged on the ability to move when ecological cycles made doing so attractive. This was in stark contrast to colonists, who sought to bring ecological cycles close to the sites of their fixed homes and farmsteads. In effect, the colonists sought to modify and regulate the seasonal cycles within the boundaries of their homesteads and villages.

One of the most important vehicles for women's work in conservation was the nature study movement, which sought to integrate the study of nature into the curricula of public schools.

Nature study could sometimes be romantic, sentimental, embracing the natural world and its creatures as anthropomorphic vehicles for the exploration of human values: fables, moral lessons. It took many forms: Florence Holbrook's nature myths, with made-up fictional stories of Indians and nature spirits or Clifton Hodge's fairy world of divine enchantment, with a child's experience of God in nature as an explicitly religious educational goal.

New England whaling fleets gradually migrated around the world as North Atlantic whaling areas declined from competition and over harvest.

New England ships were Rounding Cape Horn off the tip of South America by the 1790s, reached Hawai'i by 1819, and the Gulf of Alaska by 1835.

Oil would prove to be the great twentieth-century energy source. The first oil well in U.S. was discovered at Titusville, Pennysylvania, invested in by Edwin L. Drake, who struck oil there on August 27, 1859

Petroleum ("rock oil" or kerosene) soon replaced whale oil for illumination, and eventually diminished classic urban pollution problems of the 19th-century city that we've now almost forgotten: horse manure and coal smoke.

Fear of fire increased pressure for more water supply systems capable of delivering high volumes of water for fire-fighting.

Philadelphia's Fairmount Works was the first major centralized water system in 1822. New York City's Croton Aqueduct followed in 1842: a five-mile-long lake at Croton covered 400 acres, with a masonry aqueduct carrying water 33 miles downstream to the Harlem River, where it crossed the Harlem River on a bridge 1450 long, 100 feet above the river, before continuing on to the receiving (now in the middle of Central Park). Major urban fires (NYC in 1835, Chicago in 1871, the San Francisco earthquake in 1906) all prompted greater concern about and political support for municipal water supplies. (The Hetch Hetchy conflict in Yosemite, which we'll study after the midterm exam, was linked to this).

Downing's books offered recipes for achieving the qualities of picturesque and the beautiful that theorists like Kant, Burke, and Gilpin had written about in the second half of the eighteenth century:

Picturesque: wild, dark, coniferous, masculine, Gothic Beautiful: pastoral, light, deciduous, feminine, Greco-Roman classical

Initial reactions to air pollution during the Progressive Era and through mid-century treated it as a "smoke" problem

Pittsburgh's ordinance used the "Ringelmann Chart" for simple eyeball measurement of smoke density, outlawing "dense smoke" as a nuisance. The technical apparatus for measuring and understanding air pollution very weak until the science of analytical chemistry and the instruments for studying it became ever more refined across the middle decades of the century. Pittsburgh's efforts involved active cooperation between industrialists and city government.

The planner was new kind of professional expert with skills to integrate disparate activities and functions into a unified, harmonious whole.

Planning was proliferating throughout society, in governments, corporations, non-profit organizations, etc.

Much rivalry between these two:, both saw themselves as presidential contenders for the 1972 election. Their chief antagonist:

President Richard Nixon, who underwent a sudden conversion to environmentalism in 1969 as polls began to indicate growing public concern. This shift in the White House was managed by John Ehrlichman, a former Seattle land-use attorney, who designed a series of policy moves to preempt environmental image-making of likely Democratic presidential contenders. (Ehrlichman would later be caught up in the Watergate scandal, but that was long after the events we explore in this lecture.)

March 1, 1872

President Ulysses S. Grant signed bill making Yellowstone the nation's 1st national park: "a public park or pleasuring ground"

The broader US public was fairly removed from many of these more radical forms of protest

Polling showed a strong public commitment to environmental protection, but this was balanced by an equal concern for economic prosperity and an implicit sense that no real tradeoff was needed between the two.

Sept 3, 1964

President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) signed the Wilderness Act into law. It defined wilderness as a place "where earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." 9.1 million acres were initially set aside, creating a system of protected areas.

Post-Civil War, large estates emerged for truly wealthy, many from New York City

Railroad access and growth of resort hotels made the mountin experience available even for more middling classes. Lodges served as centers for hunting and fishing, usually constructed with rustic architecture that became characteristic not just of the Adirondacks but of other wild resort areas as well: wild retreats for urban tourists.

Air pollution was another case in point: in May 1970

Ralph Nader issued a task force report on clean air, attacking Muskie for passivity and being overly pro-industry; to prove his bona fides with environmentalists, Muskie became much more aggressive in authoring new clean air legislation.

Forest Service lands

Reagan administration cutting of old-growth forests was attacked by wilderness activists who now saw the Progressive Era conservation of TR/Pinchot utilitarianism and multiple use as an assault on nature. In their eyes, the Forest Service had sold out to corporate development of lands that should be preserved forever in inviolate natural condition.

Bison tongue became urban delicacy

Red herring

Wampum production becomes centralized

Red herring

In 1905, Clements authored

Research Methods in Ecology to promote rigorous new techniques for ecological analysis: the transect, bisect (roots), and quadrat to map co-occurrence of species. These led to a more quantitative approach to ecological research.

Florence Robinson organized a one-woman war against oil refineries in Cancer Alley

Robinson was a professor of biology at Southern University, living in Alsen near Devil's Swamp where a borrow pit for toxic wastes had been created in 1964. Starting in 1993, Robinson led citizen science efforts to gather scientific data about health effects of petrochemical processing and toxic waste dumping in Louisiana communities along Mississippi.

The presence of the Sublime inevitably shapes even "non-human" landscapes.

Romantic artists depicted America as primordial wilderness, Garden of Eden, original paradise, paradise regained.

1973 Yom Kippur War

Saudi Arabia demanded price rise from $3-$6/bbl. Arab nations boycotted U.S. oil shipments in response to U.S. airlifts of aid to Israel. U.S. price oil rose by 130% to $11.65/bbl by year's end. (bbl is an abbreviation for barrel, which for petroleum holds a standard volume of 42 U.S. gallons)

Woodworking was a key technological difference between natives and colonists, and what the colonists created was very much a wooden world

Saws, axes, froes, and other tools were used for cutting and splitting wood. Construction became increasingly wood-intensive compared with England, as did burning wood for fires: wooden clapboards replaced plaster, shingles replaced thatch. Colonists ultimately abandoned the half-timbered framing of houses that was so characteristic of wood-scarce Tudor England.

After the war, DDT was used in broad-gauge attacks on insects, hailed for its astonishingly low acute toxicity in humans compared with its lethality for insects.

Scientists noted in 1944 that it accumulated in milk and fatty tissues, and induced nervous disorders in rats when they were exposed to very high levels--but there were few apparent human health effects. So it was approved for public use by the FDA in 1945, and was soon being applied to a wide range of agricultural and consumer uses, including via mass aerial spraying. Sales grew rapidly, and so did its proliferation in the environment.

On Feb 1, 1967

Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall reversed his earlier position, rejected the Bureau of Reclamation's proposed Grand Canyon dams, and accepted as an alternative a new coal-fired power plant in the Four Corners region on the Navajo Reservation, eventually polluting air in canyon.

James C. Scott's famous book

Seeing Like a State (1998) links this birds-eye view to what he calls "high modernism" in twentieth-century governmental planning: the seductive power of the state seemingly to transform for the better almost everything that came within its field of vision.

Rising public concern meant political opportunity, especially for Washington politicians seeking to identify themselves with a national issue that could serve as the springboard for becoming a candidate for the presidency. Key figures:

Senator Edmund Muskie (Maine Democrat) had been a key figure in environmental politics since the Johnson administration; Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (Washington Democrat) would author NEPA

From this point of view, we can interpret European merchants as marketers of status goods, shuttling between wampum makers on Long Island Sound and fur hunters in the northern interior.

So: trade goods had their own attractions, but disease amplified search for status, helped proliferate market along existing trade networks. Accurate or not, this argument tried to identify a middle-of-the-road position between material and spiritual explanations.

Long Island Sound oyster beds began to fail to set starting around 1910.

Sewage from adjacent lands polluted the beds, making oysters more dangerous to eat and thereby reducing demand. Siltation likewise caused problems in coastal water.

Moore's friend Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) strongly supported his efforts at population control

She had fought for birth control since opening her first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. Arrested many times during her public protests on behalf of women's reproductive rights, she published Birth Control Review and founded the organization that eventually became Planned Parenthood. Sanger convinced Katherine Dexter McCormick to underwrite $2+ million development funds to develop a birth control pill, which was released on US market in 1960.

Lois Gibbs emerged as a local leader, having been politicized by the local school board's refusal to transfer her son to a new school after he came down with severe asthma and convulsions.

She led a neighborhood petition campaign that eventually brought state and congressional action to help families relocate. In 1980, she founded the Citizens' Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, later renamed the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ), to help neighborhoods like hers deal with toxic waste dumps in their vicinity.

The single most effective champion of the anti-litter/billboard cause was Claudia Alta Taylor, a.k.a. Lady Bird Johnson.

She married Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) on 11/17/34. When he became President after Kennedy's assassination in 1963, she joined him in the White House with a strong political agenda for advocating on behalf beauty in America, whether in urban, rural, or wild areas.

Wilson Dam issues

Should power be generated by the government, or by private companies? (cf the argument during Hetch Hetchy controversy over whether San Francisco should control its own water supply) Should this dam be sold or leased to a private company, or run by the government? Should power be used to promote local development in northern Alabama, or a larger region? Should such federal dams be built on a case-by-case basis, or as part of integrated regional development?

American painters faced the problem of painting historical epics in a landscape that was seemingly without history

So instead they sought to infuse the infuse land with a moral vision, embracing wilderness landscapes as the ultimate terrain for encountering the sublime. American artists sometimes felt apologetic for the lack of historical depth to their national landscape, which had none of the classical ruins or monuments of Greco-Roman antiquity that were so abundant in Europe. So they turned to wilderness and monumental natural wonders as a romantic alternative.

Game animals were used for clothing, especially for the millinery and feather trades, supplying decorative elements for women's hats

Songbirds and tropical and subtropical species like flamingoes, egrets, spoonbills, ostriches, all with beautiful plumage, were especially vulnerable for this purpose. Women's fashions created a worldwide market for colorful feathers.

horse Important role in early military encounters:

Spanish conquistadors first gained their skills as Iberian horse soldiers. Horse-based cavalry played vital role in European military tactics as the "eyes of the army," gathering information about disposition of enemy forces and bringing it back to military commanders. (Robert E. Lee's defeat at Battle of Gettysburg is sometimes ascribed to his inability to communicate with his chief cavalry officer J. E. B. Stuart.)

For the first half of the twentieth century, air pollution was mainly perceived as a problem at the local level rather than the national; there was essential no federal action addressing air pollution until the 1950s. Government action was pioneered instead at the local level

St. Louis passed an air pollution ordinance in 1940; Pittsburgh in 1941 (which would become a national model). On the West Coast, Los Angeles and the State of California took a series of legal steps to address the special smog problems that characterized the Los Angeles Basin.

This led to increasing public anxiety about the potential health effects of these accumulations, despite assurances by the AEC and the government

Such anxieties led to mistrust of the government and of scientific authorities, and also struggled with the uncertainties associated with statistical causality: no clear cause-effect relationship between radiation exposure in any single instance and injuries that might or might not manifest themselves as cancer or other illnesses in the future.

Important to compare Adrian Tanner's Bringing Home Animals here

Tanner, doing field work among the Cree in the early 1960s, found an intricate integration of Cree market labor, Hudson's Bay Co. post residence during summer, with spiritualized subsistence hunt in winter. Contrary to what Leacock's thesis seemed to imply both market exchange and wage work seemed able to coexist with traditional spiritual relationships with animals even as late as the 1960s

But note also the explosion of growth in oil states like Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Alaska, followed by economic decline when OPEC lost control of world oil prices in 1982

Texas lost a million oil jobs in 1982. The savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s was partly triggered by this collapse.

In the meantime, though, whole populations of whales had been drastically reduced by a world-wide harvest occurring in an unregulated competitive market

The International Whaling Commission was finally created in 1946 to try to impose some limits on continuing whale harvests in the mid-twentieth century, but its efforts would prove only partly successful.

Dust Bowl

The Plains drought of the 1930s was among the worst in the nation's history, with 9 years of below average precipitation. 1934 was the worst year ever with only 9" of rain. But what appeared to be an environmental disaster was not merely climatic in origin.

Western gushers transformed the economies of Texas and California, later Oklahoma: 1/10/1901, Anthony F. Lucas's oil strike at Spindletop sent 100-foot gusher skyward

The Texas Co. ("Texaco") was founded in 1902; Gulf Oil in 1907. Competition with these western fields, which Rockefeller proved unable to control, undermined monopoly of Standard Oil Co. just as the federal government was using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up the company in 1911.

Pesticide use has historically been greatest in the midwestern Corn Belt and in California's chief agricultural areas

The United Farm Workers increasingly focused during the late 1960's on the exposure of migrant workers to pesticides, moving on from Cesar Chavez's organizing campaign for better working conditions to an attack on pesticides, including national boycotts of grapes.

In 1943, the Brookings Institution a report entitled World Minerals and World Peace argued that "a modern war cannot be fought without tremendous quantities of a few minerals...."

The author of this Brookings study was UW-Madison's Charles Kenneth Leith, a geologist hired by President Charles Richard Van Hise while Van Hise was serving as UW President (Van Hise had himself authored the first textbook on conservation of natural resources in 1910). The report was in many ways an expression not just of the newly global scale of planning, but of the Wisconsin Idea. Report argued that the coordination of resource access was essential to the stability of the post-war world. This message was reinforced by the Twentieth Century Fund's America's Needs and Resources, published in 1947.

All past empires had risen from pastoral innocence into imperial glory only to fall back into decadence and savagery, and Cole's landscapes recapitulated this cycle.

The distant mountain stands as witness to the human drama in the foreground, symbol of the divine presence which remains constant throughout, even if different stages of civilization are very different in the honor they do or do not offer their god.

John Muir: Domesticating the Sublime

The boy loved to read and was mechanically gifted, famous for carving self-designed clocks from wood (one of which, housed in a glass case on the first floor of the Wisconsin Historical Society, is among that institution's greatest treasures). In 1866, he suffered a severe machine accident while working in a factory in Indiana. It almost blinded him. When he recovered his vision in one eye, he swore off industrial labor, walking to the Gulf of Mexico and eventually making his way to California, where he visited Yosemite for the first time in 1868. He began writing about the Sierra Nevada for Overland Monthly and other magazines. In 1892, he helped formed the Sierra Club.

Lovelock's striking conclusion

The chemical composition of the atmosphere bears no relation to the expectations of steady-state chemical equilibrium. The presence of methane, nitrous oxide, and even nitrogen in our present oxidizing atmosphere represents violation of the rules of chemistry to be measured in tens of orders of magnitude. Disequilibria on this scale suggest that the atmosphere is not mere a biological product, but more probably a biological construction: not living, but like a cat's fur, a bird's feathers, or the paper of a wasp's nest, an extension of the living system designed to maintain a chosen environment.... We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.

Although Katrina and New Orleans became symbols of global warming, we know from this course that they in fact reflect much deeper environmental historical phenomena that we've been studying all semester. Let's use them to practice some of the environmental history skills we've learned.

The city's location at the mouth of the Mississippi River meant that the interior drainage of much of the nation between the Appalachians and the Rockies all flowed past this city. People had been constructing levees along the river for centuries to prevent flooding, with large-scale levee building promoted by the Army Corps of Engineers from second half of nineteenth century forward. The theory was that levees would not only protect property adjacent to the river, but would speed the flow of the water, scouring and deepening the river bed. But floods kept getting higher, requiring levees to be raised repeatedly. New Orleans had suffered from flooding from the beginning when "crevasses" opened in its levees. The oldest part of city, the French Quarter, had been constructed on a natural levee that was the highest ground adjacent to the Mississippi. There was relatively little construction in the low marshy ground between the Mississippi and Lake Ponchartrain.

The great 1927 Mississippi River flood was widely blamed on bad levee design, producing strong commitment afterwards to higher levees, pumping facilities, and spillways where excess water could be directed.

The effectiveness of new flood control structures accelerated urban settlement onto lower ground, while at same time drying and compressing soil so that city began to subside, making low ground even lower. By the early 21st century, 49% of city was below sea level: New Orleans was effectively a bowl between the Mississippi and Lake Ponchartrain. The containment of the river between levees meant that marshes in the Louisiana delta were no longer replenished with silt, so that they too began to sink and disappear, thereby reducing the buffer they had previously provided against Gulf storms.

But because colonists were planting crops at the same time that they were keeping animals, they had an inescapable need to protect crops from animals

The fence became a powerful physical symbol of English vs. Indian land tenure and subsistence, laws, animal pounds, etc. All of these driven by need to bring animals and crops into close proximity while keeping them separate at the same time.

Mechanical refrigeration was first invented in 1851, but was only practical in large-scale applications because of its cost, size, and reliance on toxic gases like ammonia.

The first room-cooling device was developed by Willis Haviland Carrier (1876-1950) in 1902. By the 1920s, air conditioning units were being installed in government buildings and wealthy homes. Massive increase in demand awaited lighter, cheaper devices in the post-WWII period.

The Axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan) saw war as the best way to gain access to resources controlled by Allies (principally the British Empire, the US, and the Soviet Union).

The geopolitics of global resource economies became an increasing concern for US and allied planning, and were also at the heart of Hitler's geopolitical vision.

Hunting was thus yet another expression of romanticism.

The goal for elite hunters was to reencounter nature outside the city to revive the spirit. Often there was a gendered aspects to this, with the search for restoring one's "vigorous manhood" as one of the goals city dwellers sought on their sport hunting expeditions. The result was a new class politics of hunting, with sport hunters actively seeking to restrict or even prohibit hunting for subsistence and especially market hunting for their threats to game animals. Advocates for "ethical hunting" saw market hunters in particular as wasteful, unfair, unsporting, and unethical.

Asbestos essentially kills in a similar way, and was already beginning to emerge as a problem during 1930s, especially in shipyards and other pipefitting activities where it was heavily used as insulation

The long fibers of this naturally occurring rock meant that it could be woven into textiles or sprayed on surfaces subjected to high heat--and because it was made of silicon, it would not catch fire. Asbestos companies suppressed early evidence of health problems as the substance became widely used in shipbuilding, plumbing, insulation, building construction, auto brakes, etc.

Another strand of stories narrate the consequences of the fur trade.

The most obvious of these was the death of fur-bearing mammals. In southern New England, beavers, otters, foxes, martens, minks, muskrats, turkeys, gone by the end of the 18th century.

The post-WWII period saw major waves of neo-Malthusianism. A 1954 pamphlet entitled "The Population Bomb" showed nuclear weapons as best available metaphor for the apocalyptic dangers of unrestrained population growth.

The pamphlet was funded by Hugh Moore (1887-1972), inventor & president of Dixie Cup, who acted as major funder for publications promoting population control for the next 20 years.

Landscapes were composed, framed, and thematized as paintings according to principles set forth by William Gilpin in his 1792 Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, Picturesque Travel, and on Sketching Landscape.

The picturesque tradition formalized and standardized Claudian and other romantic principles of landscape representation.

It was against this miraculous substance that Carson mounted her attack in the book Silent Spring. Her critique included several strands:

The tendency of DDT and other chemicals to concentrate in food chains put the highest levels of those food chains at risk: predators, large vertebrates, including humans. (Noticed that ecological research on trophic levels made possible by radioactive isotope tracing made this insight about biological accumulation possible.) Because DDT and other such chemicals accumulated in fatty tissue and degraded only very slowly, their potential for long-term chronic health consequences was potentially substantial. For birds, DDT accumulation led to thinning egg shells, so that the mother bird sitting on a nest crushed her own young, and fewer and fewer chicks reached reproductive maturity. As a result, the populations of certain species -- brown pelicans, peregrine falcons, bald eagles, etc. -- fell dramatically. A different strand of Carson's critique: pesticides were not even effective in meeting their own long-term goals. Insects were R-selected species, reproducing so quickly that their gene pools quickly adjusted to accommodate new toxic environments. Resistant breeds of agricultural pests meant self-defeating cycle of new pesticides Final strand: the acute and chronic toxicity of chemical pesticides had unknown but worrisome implications for future human health effects: nervous disorders among pesticide workers, but especially rising rates of cancer, that central metaphor of unnatural change.

Rise of commercial fishing to supply food to gold rush migrants put increasing pressure on these salmon runs.

The world's first salmon cannery was opened by the Hume Brothers on the Sacramento River in 1864: packed 4000 cases of 48 1-pound cans in first year, half of which spoiled.

Fisherman's Problem

Their explanation was that fish (like other wild animals) were a "common property resource" with no legal property right attached. Many fishermen competed to capture these animals and bring them to market, but no one actually owned them, so no one took responsibility for defending them.

"the fisherman's problem"

Their explanation was that fish (like other wild animals) were a "common property resource" with no legal property right attached. Many fishermen competed to capture these animals and bring them to market, but no one actually owned them, so no one took responsibility for defending them. Worse: competitive incentives meant that fishermen would keep fishing as long as there was any profit to be made from doing so, since not fishing would only mean that one's competitors would get those fish instead of you.

As prices edged upwards, spring steel began to compete with baleen as a replacement.

Then, in 1907, the Parisian designer Paul Poiret introduced a "slim figure" to his dresses, eliminating the narrow waist and S-shaped figures so characteristic of Victorian and Edwardian fashion, qualities that the corset was designed to produce. This dramatically undermined the remaining market for baleen. By 1909, only three ships headed north; by 1910, there were essentially no buyers left for whalebone. The invention of the brassiere in 1913 as a replacement for the corset pounded the last nail into this market.

Birth control was at center of population controversy during this period, generating much conflict with the Catholic Church.

There was, moreover, a potential racist underside to advocacy efforts on behalf of population control.

The domestic effects of these unfamiliar scarcities were massive price increases for gasoline and heating oil, etc., with shortages and long lines at gas stations, rising expenses for heating and cooling homes, and so on

These helped fuel the severe economic inflation that characterized much of the 1970s (but don't forget the economic impacts of the Vietnam War and Great Society spending deficits, which also played important roles in contributing to this inflation.)

One of the most interesting but least noticed aspects of these laws was how many of them came into existence before the widespread upsurge in popular environmental concerns that occurred in 1969-70

These laws were not responses to Earth Day or grass-roots organizing; at least until the end of the decade, environmental issues were not that high on public agenda compared with economy, foreign policy (Vietnam), civil rights, urban disorder.

Railraods became the most important early promoters of travel to parks by virtue of their interest in selling train tickets.

They invested capital not just in branch lines, but also in great railroad resort hotels and promotional literature. The Northern Pacific Railroad promoted Yellowstone as a key part of the "Wonderland" that lay along the route of that line.

In 1960, the photographer Ansel Adams and the poet (and photography critic) Nancy Newhall collaborated to produce

This is the American Earth as the first volume in Brower's new Exhibit Format book series, sponsored by the Sierra Club. Based on the model of Stegner's This Is Dinosaur, it used beautiful landscape photography to educate readers about the value of wild nature even for those who could only visit it in their living rooms. Brower began to publish a growing number of these volumes, sparing no expense to make them as beautiful as possible.

1836

Thomas Cole's "View from Mt. Holyoke...After a Thunderstorm" Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature

o Conquered, retreat into nature, Direct encounter with nature unencumbered by society

Thoreau

Classic instances of dramatic pollution episodes in the late 1960s:

Torrey Canyon tanker disaster in Europe in 1967, Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969. Santa Barbara oil spill was described as "the blowout heard around the world," running wild for ten days, fouling beaches, killing wildlife. Images of oil-laden birds and marine animals become symbols of devastated nature.

In agriculture, there was a parallel transition from human and animal power to oil-powered tractors, dramatically increasing the labor efficiency of the food system while just as dramatically decreasing its energy efficiency (cf. the Habakkuk thesis again).

Tractors were only the most visible symbol of growing energy inputs to the whole agricultural system. Consider, for instance, the energy intensity of feedlot beef: from range-fed to grain-fed cattle. Huge world-wide increase in fertilizer production using energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process to convert atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer with fossil-fuel based energy. By 1970, 7-8 calories of fossil fuel were being invested to yield 1 calorie of heat-dried corn.

General implications: market hierarchies expressed themselves geographically.

Transport innovations such as canals and railroads (along with actual distribution of natural resources, since the real world was not the uniform featureless plain of von Thünen's thought experiment) changed the spatial expression of these hypothetical rings.

addressed the Fisherman's Problem by making it possible to privatize oyster beds

Two-Acre law

1929-39

USFS L-20 regulation sets up wilderness, wild, and roadless areas, with total acreage rising from .4 to 14.2 million acres by 1939. New U-regulations after 1939 much more restrictive, slowing this growth and frustrating wilderness activists.

Whales were valuable as commodities for several reasons

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the heaviest demand was for whale oil rendered on board ship from their blubber, used for illumination in lamps. This market was threatened by the discovery of "rock oil" (petroleum) in Pennsylvania in the late 1850s, but whaling continued for baleen, which was the nearest thing the nineteenth century had to plastic: strong and flexible, it was ideal for umbrellas and corset stays.

Meat markets were among the most important reasons for hunting in the nineteenth century.

Wild meat supplemented rural subsistence diets in frontier and poor areas (and in the South, longstanding common hunting rights had supported slaves, free blacks, and poor whites). Urban demand for wild meat supported growing meat markets in towns and cities , with $500,000 worth of game sold in Chicago alone in 1873. Some wild game meat was even shipped on to NYC and Europe.

Hetch Hetchy Valley

Yosemite Nat Park from a dam that would provide water for drinking and fire-fighting for San Francisco. It caused national controversy, but the dam was finally approved, to Muir's great consternation, in 1913.

The series of draft bills for protecting wilderness areas were principally authored by the executive director of Wilderness Society, Howard Zahniser (1906-64)

Zahniser had an editorial and journalistic background like Brower, and made the Society's magazine, The Living Wilderness, an eloquent vehicle for publishing the work of writers and artists interested in wilderness and wild nature. Unlike Brower, who loved the public eye, Zahniser preferred to work quietly behind the scenes. He was a tireless lobbyist in Washington, dying just a few months before the act finally became law in 1964.

The Wilson Dam

became the occasion for what has come to be known as the Muscle Shoals controversy of the 1920s: an extended political debate about what should be done with this federally funded dam.

The monumentalism of Niagara Falls:

a "natural wonder" as America's best alternative to European culture and the ruins of classical antiquity, embodying romantic nature and recalling the Edenic landscapes of God's creation, especially in the romantic sublime. But by the late nineteenth century, Niagara was perceived as crowded, commercialized, and developed for industrial waterpower by 1900 in ways that seemed to undermine its romantic beauty.

In response to Newhall's question in This Is the American Earth, "What is the price of exaltation?"

a 1962 volume in the Exhibit Format series respond with a famous quotation from Thoreau as its title: In Wildness is the Preservation of the World. Gorgeous color photographs by Eliot Porter coupled with words from Henry David Thoreau's journal.

A severe midwestern drought during the spring of 1988 was the context for James Hansen (NASA climate modeler) testifying before the Senate that this regional US weather crisis was a product of anthropogenic warming;

a controversial claim, even among climate scientists, but one that attacted enormous media attention.

The lecture offers as one key image of contrasting cultures:

a fixed wooden frame house of the colonists vs. the much lighter and more mobile wigwam. These two structures imply very different degrees of fixity and mobility of the two groups, a dichotomy that Changes in the Land uses to explain many of the differences between New England's native peoples and the English colonists.'

Shift now from water as medium of transport to falling water the source of energy for the nation's first industrial revolution

a form of solar energy. (England had earlier pioneered the use of water in the textile mills of Manchester.)

Mabel Osgood Wright

a founder of the Connecticut Audubon Society and editor of the Audubon magazine Bird-Lore, was also the anonymous author Garden of a Commuter's Wife (1901), which does a good job of articulating these gendered ideals of domesticated suburban landscapes. In Wright, we see the convergence of romantic ideas with bird-watching, conservation, gardening, childcare, suburban domesticity

Warren County, North Carolina

a landfill designed to become a regional and even national repository for PCB wastes being cleaned up elsewhere was situated here, leading to protests at the site starting in 1982. These lasted for 20 years with 100s of arrests, becoming some of the most significant civil rights protests in the South since the 1960s, effectively launching the environmental justice movement.

Toxicity from chemical-based industries could be dramatic or very quiet. The most horrific single instance in the 1980s was the Bhopal accident at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in India on December 3, 1984:

a leak of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas killed 2500 nearby villagers within a week, blinding thousands more, ultimately injuring 150,000

But the real monument to romantic American exceptionalism was Niagara Falls

a natural wonder grander than anything Europe could offer, serving as a surrogate for the historical depth of European landscape that otherwise seemed missing in America. It was probably the single most frequently painted and photographed icon in the entire North American landscape, capable of being assimilated to sublime, picturesque, republican nationalism, popular spectacle, an endless variety of symbols. Niagara also became key destination for tourism, with the resulting crowding producing the sense of an increasingly commodified landscape that became a symbol of lost sublimity.

disease immunities are often more historical than genetic

a population's history of exposure to a given disease allows mothers to transmit antibodies to offspring in utero and through breast milk

Harper's Ferry, West Virginia,

a striking example of a water-powered milltown, site of the famed federal armory (gun manufacturing site) that John Brown tried to raid in 1859 in an effort to promote slave rebellions in the South. The town's water-powered mills were severely damaged by flood in 1889, never recovered.

Clements argued that the essential ecological unit of vegetation was formation

a super-organism with an identity apart from the individual species comprising it, with a genuine life cycle of its own, passing through regular phases toward maturity. This sequence of stages he called succession, culminating in a stable mature stage which was capable of existing indefinitely in the absence of disturbance. This he called theclimax.

In 1935, the Leopold family acquired the Wisconsin River property in Sauk County that they called "The Shack"

a worn-out farm that they sought to restore (simultaneous with the creation of the UW Arboretum, also an exercise in ecological restoration in which Leopold was involved). The story of the family's efforts at ecological restoration is contained in in Leopold's posthumous Sand County Almanac (1949), along with his defense of what he called "the land ethic."

Growing horse populations on Plains (perhaps 2 million animals by early 19th century) also competed with bison for

access to grass, especially during winter months when snow and ice covered the edible rangelands.

But eutrophication was caused less by industry than by more domestic sources

agricultural fertilizers heavy in nitrates, and home laundry washed with new phosphate detergents, introduced by Proctor & Gamble in 1933 as "Dreft," which dramatically increased the phosphate content of sewage & lake water, including here in Madison.

Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover

all opposed public intervention, even though Hoover otherwise had quite a strong record as a Republican conservationist (NB: Teddy Roosevelt had of course launched the conservation movement as a Republican president).

1906: the Antiquities Act

allowed President to set aside national monuments to protect endangered archaeological sites and natural areas

One notorious case study: "Cancer Alley"

along the Lower Mississippi River in Louisiana between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where historic black communities had been displaced by a growing number of petrochemical facilities.

David Brower (1912-2000)

an enthusiastic California mountaineer with a background in publishing, became editor of the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1946, executive director of the Club in 1952. He would soon emerge as one of the most energetic and charismatic conservation leaders of his generation, immensely skilled in drawing public attention to the causes he supported and led

In 1937, Carson published her first piece of popular nature writing

an essay entitled "Undersea" in the Atlantic Monthly. This led to her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, in 1941, just as World War II began. During the 1940s, she shifted toward full-time editing for the government, often about issues relating to conservation.

On March 28, 1979, Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor (south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) experienced a loss-of-coolant accident and a partial meltdown of the reactor core through series of human errors, resulting in small radiation releases

an invisible but terrifying accident that provoke widespread public fear. (Release of Hollywood film The China Syndrome just 12 days before the accident amplified these fears.) "TMI," as it came to be called, became a symbol of the untrustworthiness of nuclear technology, leading many Americans to conclude that they had no interest in living anywhere near a nuclear reactor.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded under UN auspices in 1988

and began preparation of series of synthetic reports designed to identify consensus understanding among climate scientists.

Nixon ignored Earth Day

and retreated from environmental initiatives by 1971 in the face of economic problems (mainly inflation and growing federal deficits resulting from Vietnam War and oil/energy crisis).

Sperm whales were the most sought-after animals

and their populations declined across the early decades of the nineteenth century. So: other species began to be harvested instead.

Amory Lovins' Soft Energy Paths (1977)

argued for distinguishing between "hard" energy (high tech/high capital/environmentally damaging: e.g., nuclear) and "soft" energy (low tech/low capital/environmentally safe: e.g., solar) technology. Lovins was a kind of technocratic counterpart to the arguments E. F. Schumacher had made in his 1973 book Small is Beautiful.

David Potter's People of Plenty (1954)

argued that Turner was correct not about free land but rather about the more generalized abundance of natural resources as a defining feature of US economy and culture.

Widely publicized "Sagebrush Rebellion" in the early 1980s

argued that federal public lands in the American West should either be turned over to state governments or privatized altogether.

Samuel Cohn

argued that rats and fleas could not have caused the Black Death: anthrax?

Paul Sutter, in his important book Driven Wild

argues that the founders of the Wilderness Society were principally concerned with the impact of motorized recreation and road construction on roadless areas, with the National Park Service as a key offender.

Economic entomology emerged in the early 20th centure

as a science exploring the use of toxic chemicals to control agricultural pests.

Cycle of Indian dependency

as dependence on trade goods grew, animals populations needed to buy them declined.

The automobile and the refrigerator (and freezer) changed the nature of food marketing for post-WWII suburbs

as one symbol of these complex shifts, daily shopping using small handbaskets was replaced during this period by weekly shopping using large supermarket grocery carts, introduced in 1937.

Increasing public concern, including the founding of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in 1967

as part of a pesticide controversy on Long Island, led finally the EPA finally to ban DDT in 1972.

The Truckee-Carson project in Newlands' home state of Nevada was launched in 1905

as the first fruit of this new act, but it was plagued with problems. Boulder Dam in 1936 would carry irrigation to a whole new scale that we'll briefly survey in a later lecture.

Note in passing that the price put on fish (and other wild animals)

assigned to them by human beings in these market exchanges; the animals themselves don't get the chance to decide what their own lives are worth.

Robert ("Bob") Marshall (1901-39) trained as forester, worked for USFS & the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

becoming one of the most successful New Deal proponents arguing for setting aside wilderness areas before dying of a heart attack at age 39.

1966: Henry Dobyns

assumed a mortality rate of 90% and calculated pre-Columbian North American Indian population at 10-12 million, with the population of the entire hemisphere amounting to 90-110 million Dobyns' arguments generated much controversy and his estimates were likely too high, but they scholars today all agree that native populations in the Americas suffered terrifyingly high mortalities in the wake of being exposed to Eurasian epidemics

1520-1898

at least 35 separate recorded episodes of smallpox alone between

William Blake

attacked Newton's physics as a mechanistic empiricism that obscured the energy/spirit behind "reason."

1967: Air Quality Act passed

authored by Muskie, setting "air quality control regions" with federally designated "criteria" for air quality requisite to health. The act represented a subtle shift from the federal government as a spnosor of research and a coordinator of action at the state level to the feds becoming policymakers and preempters of local authority.

Consider, for instance, air conditioning. In the ninetheenth century, residential cooling was all achieved by making adjustments to natural seasonal shifts

awnings, curtains, porches, trees, "spring cleaning" (after shutting down coal furnace and trying to get rid of accumulated coal dust for the warm months).

Black stem rust (which colonists labeled "the blast" can serve as a metaphor for how profoundly Old World ecological relationships were being reproduced in the New:

barberry bushes growing along weedy fence rows hosted rust that blighted wheatfields growing downwind. Serious failures in wheat crops began to occur by 1660s, thus making it ever more challenging for European farmers, raising European animals behind European fencerows that provided habitat for European weeds that hosted in turn a European fungal infection, to raise a key European crop.

Marsh's core argument

based on his reading of the histories of ancient Mediterranean civilizations, was that deforestation caused by human beings had disastrous environmental consequences: erosion, watershed deterioration, decline of agricultural lands, etc.

Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852

became one of the nation's most influential "landscape gardeners" (the older term for "landscape architect"), publishing the first major overview of this subject in 1841 as Theory & Practice of Landscape Architecture, 1841. In it, he borrowed from J. C. Loudon's ideas of landscape gardening in England: constructing landscapes that expressed ideas of the "picturesque" and the "beautiful" on the gardened landscapes of rural estates and retreats.

"New towns" of the 1920s and 1930s

became opportunities to explore utopian visions for planners: Norris, Tennessee as part of TVA; Radburn, New Jersey as Clarence Stein's best known exercise in comprehensive planning. Town and communita as tabula rasa, starting from scratch, avoiding all the dysfunctional legacies of the past. Greendale, Wisconsin, southwest of Milwaukee, which opened in 1938, was an example of New Deal project of creating new "greenbelt" towns in this way:

976: Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)

became the first federal law attempting to deal with toxic waste problem.

1963: Clean Air Act passed

becoming the basis for all subsequent air pollution law. It reaffirmed local/state responsibility, but recognized a new "leadership" and financial assistance role for the federal government. In particular, feds were empowered to enter abatement process if clear threats to human health existed. (Note the consistent focus on human health in early legislation.)

William F. Cody

began career as a bison hunter supplying workers with food for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, gained nickname "Buffalo Bill" and became famous for his Wild West Show.

By the late 1950s, the Wilderness Society

began to advocate for legislative authority to give formal legal protection to designated wilderness areas in the US. The first such bill was drafted in 1956, but would undergo myriad revisions over the next seven years.

W. W. Borah and S. Cooke

begin gathering data in the 1930s and 1940s to try to estimate the scale of mortality especially in Mexico & California, and concluded that death rates were far higher than originally imagined

Frederick Law Olmsted

best known for the commission that made him famous (along with the architect Calvert Vaux): Central Park in New York City in 1857. Before then, he had dropped out of Yale College, tried to become a gentleman farmer, traveled in England, toured the American South and wrote books on the evils of slavery. With Central Park, he began the career as a landscape architect that would define the rest of his life, bringing the rural picturesque into the heart of the city, its curvilinear organic patterns standing in counterpoint to the grid of city streets, with Mount Auburn Cemetery & Downing's work serving as models.

Passenger pigeons flocked in ways that were similar to the vast herds of bison, though in some ways on an even more impressive scale:

billion birds to a single flock, with collective nesting while rearing offpsring that made mass harvest extremely easy. Travelers described flocks passing overhead as being so dense that they darkened the sky. It was easy to kill several with a single gunshot. Hunting with nets brought in millions of birds.

the toxicity of industrial substances had been a familiar feature of working-class life for long timeHawk's Nest Incident 1930-32

black lung disease among coal miners; brown lung (byssinosis) in textile mills.

Early colonists were amazed by the size of coastal oyster beds in New England and elsewhere, as we saw in Changes in the Land

but human impacts were already evident by the 18th and early 19th centuries. A fisherman's problem was emerging.

The "fisherman's problem" or "tragedy of the commons" is often described as if it were a "natural" consequence of "human nature"

but again, always be careful when you encounter such claims, since they rarely apply in all times and places in history. More often than not, they reflect particular cultural values as expressed by particular institutions and economic relationships in particular times and places.

CCC was an example of scientific management and planning applied to social and economic problems

but also, almost incidentally, a crucial labor force promoting conservation throughout nation. When you visit national, state, and local parks today, many of the older structures you'll see there were built with CCC labor.

Carson's marginal status as a female scientist limited her access to research opportunities and academic employment

but also placed her in a perfect position to serve as a translator of arcane scientific knowledge into forms that could be understood and appreciated by members of the public. Again: notice the importance of writers to the emerging political movement we're studying.

New movement called "deep ecology" provided philosophical foundations for this new, more radical environmentalism:

built on the romantic wilderness preservation tradition, it offered a biocentric vision of harmony with nature, ambivalence about the human place in nature, with an explicit critique of modernitty itself: the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1912-2009) was its best known spokesperson. Deep ecology contrasted human domination vs living in harmony with nature; infinite vs limited resources; anthropocentrism vs biocentrism; material economic growth vs living simply with appropriate technology; etc.

Seton's child Indians used fantasy to occupy a lost American landscape

but also to encounter a natural world whose meanings represent a higher source of moral value in modern society.

John Deere (1804-1886)

born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1804, moved to Illinois in 1837, produced his first steel plow there over next three years, moved to Moline, Illinois in 1846 and began large-scale manufacture.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election

broke this political deadlock in the Tennessee Valley, broadening the mandate for large-scale regional planning there. FDR derived his enthusiasm for regional planning from numerous sources: his uncle Frederick Delano, who had been active in promoting urban and regional planning in New York and the Northeast; sociologist Howard Odum's regional studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Odum's sons Eugene and Howard Jr. would go on to be among the leading ecological scientists of the post-World War II era); and general enthusiasm for state intervention in economy that was characteristic of the 1930s in countries as different as Italy, Germany, USSR, and US.

Not until 1955 did the federal government pass a law

budgeting $5 million per year for research on the causes and prevention of air pollution. The assumption was that air pollution was intrinsically a local problem, so the chief responsibility for addressing it belonged to other levels of government.

Erosion became a ruling metaphor for not just for ecological disaster, threatening the nation's agricultural future,

but equally a sign of economic and social failure, waste, and poverty.

The pastoral state seemed to be the ideal condition for Cole, akin both to republican Athens and to the (also republican) American frontier:

but like many others, he worried whether this republican virtue could survive.

The irrational consequences of the new law helped provoke backlash against it during the 1970s

by ignoring technically feasible motor vehicle pollution controls, paying little attention to chemical realities or economic trade-offs, the law almost inevitably led to tactical retreats from initial standards. Los Angeles even joined auto manufacturers in resisting standards for fear that pollution-control devices might elevate smog-creating oxides of nitrogen.

he old-growth forest debate in the Pacific Northwest during the late 1980s and early 1990s

can be seen as a symbolic of deepening of the conflict between old conservationist concern for productive resources and preservationist goal of protecting sacred land...now amplified by growing partisan divisions about environmental protection.

Winslow Homer's famous painting "(Old Mill) Morning Bell"

can serve as a symbol of this newly mechanized form of employment

Muir can be seen as the

chief 19th-century celebrator of romantic wilderness, depicting sublime landscapes that were far more beautiful than terrifying.

Growing pressure to protect sport hunting yielded increasing numbe of game regulations:

closed seasons, bag limits, ethical techniques, regulated sales, limits on transportation of game animals across state lines.

The old New Deal coalition that had sustained large Democratic majorities since 1930s eroded for many reasons:

civil rights legislation (especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, drew Southern white Democrats toward the Republican party, sustaining a "states rights" rhetoric that would increasingly be directed against other forms of federal intervention into state and local politics, eventually including environmental issues; Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade led religious voters who had previously been sympathetic to environmental concerns away from secular environmentalists who embraced abortion (which they partly saw as a means for population control) toward the new emerging conservative movement (among prominent religious leaders who made this shift were Francis Schaeffer and Richard John Neuhaus); economic concerns of lower- and middle-income Americans about 1970s inflation amid energy crisis, growing sense that environmental regulations might be adding to economic burdens, beginning of growing voter opposition to rising taxes; disaffection of many working-class Americans from radical protest politics of Vietnam and social activism; growing conservative distaste for environmentalist critique of American way of life, which at times seemed unpatriotic.

17th century pastoral painting taught how to view nature

claude lorrain

Jeremy Belknap offered a striking description of the environmental consequences resulting from reductions of beaver populations

clearing land, accumulating soil, emergence of new grazing grounds for colonial livestock.

herd immunity

collective pool of antibodies protects population as a whole from disastrous epidemics

Cf. Iroquois wars of 17th century

competition over hunting areas, efforts to control access to European traders.

How do we evaluate different possible causes of European "success," defined by Alfred Crosby as their biological expansion?

conquest ideology missionary religion both of these underpinned by racist conceptions of indigenous peoples technological advantages dynamic production systems elaborating state structures capitalist economies expanding trade networks, etc.

The construction of the Erie Canal between 1817-25

consolidated NYC's hegemony by using the corridor of the Mohawk River (only east west route across the Appalachians other than the St. Lawrence) to connect New York Harbor with Lake Erie at Buffalo--thereby opening up the Great Lakes above Niagara Falls and accelerating settlement and economic development of the Northwest Territory as far west as Illinois and Wisconsin.

Hawk's Nest Incident 1930-32

construction of water power tunnel for Union Carbide through Gauley Mountain, WV, exposed almost 5000 workers (at least 2/3 of them unemployed African Americans recruited to migrate to the site) to heavy clouds of silica dust in poorly ventilated underground conditions, with over 700 of them dying within 5 years from silicosis (lungs' inability to absorb or remove silica). Because there were no nearby cemeteries that would permit African-American burials, many of the workers were buried in an open field near the site.

Horticultural Indians living on the the Missouri River on the eastern Plains, on the other hand, (Mandans, Hidatsas, etc.)

could grow and store crops that constitute a much more reliable food base, trading with the Sioux for other goods. For them, hunting was comparatively less important.

1916: National Park Service Act

created an administrative bureaucracy to manage the parks (NPS), partly in response to Hetchy Hetchy, with Stephen Tyng Mather (1867-1930) as its first Director. Mather had made his fortune running a borax company, served as Director from 1917-1929 until his health failed. Parks increased from 14 to 21 during his tenure

1933: FDR signed into law the Tennessee Valley Authority Act

creating the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) with mandate for region-wide planning, including dams, highways, rural electrification, agricultural improvement, erosion control, managed forests, parks, etc. The original constitutional basis for federal involvement with rivers and harbors--navigation, flood control now broadened to include hydropower development regionwide, and with it planning to address rural poverty and other social interventions.

The early 1980s saw computer modeling to show the likely effects of a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR in the form of what was called a "nuclear winter,"

darkening of atmosphere so complete as to yield long-term biological failure of natural and agricultural systems alike, with devastating consequences for human civilization.

people of plenty abundance as a defining attribute of economic and agriculture

david potter

1894: "Act to Protect the Birds and Animals of Yellowstone National Park"

declared that the protection of wild game was another purpose for setting aside parks (and would ultimate lead to the wildlife refuge system of the twentieth century).

Paradox of wilderness:

defended by an urban population seeking an escape to nature (using cars and the new Interstate Highway System to get there), in conflict with its own material support system and diminishing solitude in the very act of seeking it, leading inevitably to paradoxical need for "wilderness management": Leopold's stewardship.

By the 1960s, Dr. Irving Selikoff's research

demonstrated clear links of asbestos to silicosis-like asbestosis and the rare cancer mesothelioma, the main cause of which is exposure to asbestos. This knowledge produced a growing wave of lawsuits against asbestos manufacturers.

The original inspiration for the new town movement were Ebenezer Howard's "garden cities" in England

described in his classic volume Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902) Howard's garden cities sought to combine agricultural and industrial labor in medium-sized towns where these activities wouldn't be in conflict with each other.

earliest trans-Atlantic disease migrations were non-virulent endemic illnesses

diarrheas, dysentaries, respiratory illnesses, sexually transmitted diseases--capable of surviving the voyage on board ship without burning themselves out in their European and African host populations

The last living passenger pigeon, "Martha,"

died in the Cincinnati Zoo in on September 2, 1914. Her body is stored today at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington

the antibodies of our immune systems serve as defensive tools for host populations

diseases trigger us to generate new antibodies as they reproduce themselves inside us, leading to a perennial race in which diseases seek to reproduce and transmit themselves to new hosts before the old host can generate effective antibody defenses

Marshall, MacKaye, Leopold joined Harvey Broome, Bernard Frank, and Robert Sterling Yard in 1935 to found the Wilderness Society

elite, wealthy, well-connnected, very effective in advocating for the protection of wild places on lands owned by the federal government. Initial impulse to found the organization happened when several of them met at a conference of the Society of American Foresters and visited TVA's new Norris Dam on one of the new highways being constructed, leading to a debate about whether such roads were a good idea.

Note the city's other relationships to water:

drinking, bathing, manufacturing, fire-fighting.

TVA was designed to modernize a depressed farming region of eroded hill country

ederally funded county agents educated farm families about anti-erosion contour plowing; construction of better, more modern houses; new electrical tools and appliances; business management techniques for farms; wage labor in construction; highways; links to urban areas; promotion of tourism.

The central commitment of Progressive conservation as defined by Pinchot was to

efficient use of natural resources; ending waste; technical rule by scientific experts; suspicion of corruptions that seemed to attend democratic process; intense nationalism; enthusiasm for strong centralized government.

James Watt (1938-), Secretary of Interior

emerged as a key player in the first Reagan Administration. Born and raised in Wyoming, attended University of Wyoming Law School, worked as a lobbyist and mid-level Justice Department attorney before going to work for conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation, whose declared mission was to "defend individuals and the private sector from illegal and excessive bureaucratic regulation."

These chemical properties of radioactive isotopes made them valuable in the emergence of systems ecology during the 1940s and 1950s

enabling scientists like Howard & Eugene Odum and Raymond Lindemann to study the movements of certain chemicals through the trophic levels of an ecosystem.

Also: broadening the notion of legal "standing" was suggested by Justice William O. Douglas's famous dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton:

environmental organizations could sue for standing even when not directly involved in a case. This was part of a general expansion of tort law during this period, with many environmental ramifications. (Douglas, originally appointed by FDR, had long had a national reputation as a conservationist/environmentalist.)

Reactions against 1960s-era environmentalism were appearing as early as 1970s, with conservative critics arguing that

environmental prophecies of doom were exaggerated; progress was good, not bad; excessive regulation threatened economic growth; environmentalists were portrayed as privileged elites out of sympathy with the day-to-day struggles of working-class people.

As result, there were dense sedentary villages along the Missouri River, but these more susceptible to

epidemics than the more scattered populations of the bison-hunting Sioux.

Lady Bird joined Laurance Rockefeller to organize a White House Conference on Natural Beauty in May 1965,

eventually issuing a report entitled Beauty for America. It declared that "ugliness is bitterness" threatening a crisis of the spirit that needed to be addressed

the post-war years saw the emergence of a new genre of apocalyptic environmental writing

existential threats to American way of life, human civilization, even all life on earth. Never before had human life seemed so contingent. The bomb was ironically the greatest expression of human power...with the greatest potential to destroy both the human and natural worlds. Enormous power coupled with enormous vulnerability. Much of what separated post-WWII environmentalism from the earlier conservation derived from this sense of vulnerability.

Leacock's chief intent

explain emergence of hunting territories as earlier described by the anthropologist Frank Speck, division of collective tribal space so individual families would own animal resources. The goal was to partition communal space into market territories controlled by individual families; resulting practices may or may not have conserved resources.

Remember that the Interstate Highway System came into being in 1956 with passage of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956:

explicitly a civil defense initiative to help evacuate cities in event of nuclear attack. Although these new highways originated as a Cold War project, they would have immense implications on all aspects of American life during the second half of the twentieth century:

The 1950s and 1960s saw growing concerns of this kind, though historical demographic patterns since the industrial revolution were complicated

exponential population growth during the modern era had tended to derive from falling mortality, but seemed eventually to slow when there was a comparable fall in birth rates as living conditions improved. This shift came to be labeled the "demographic transition," and became a major concern of modernization theorists looking to promote development in what was then called the "Third World" during the Cold War. (By this Cold War formula, the US and its allies were the First World, or the "Free World," whereas the USSR and its allies were the Second World.)

Horses spread throughout Spanish colonies:

export trade in tallow and hides, ranches, vaquero tradition (source of "cowboy" practices of Great Plains in North America), herding of cattle on horseback.

More northern tribes faced harsher winters

fodder ran short, so had to cut young cottonwood growth, encouraged depletion of these trees, eventually faced problems with winter starvation.

plague originated in the

foothills of Himalayas, Burma; Mongol caravans as vehicles for transporting it westward.

contrast the images of two young girls gathering berries

for a Danish dessert, or for Ahtna food, dye, medicine

The Haber-Bosch process

for nitrogen fixation converts atmospheric nitrogen (N2) to ammonia to ammonia (NH3), but requires very large amounts of energy to sustain; Fritz Haber won 1918 Nobel Prize for this. It revolutionized twentieth-century agriculture, and also the manufacture of explosives (many of which rely on the unstable chemical bonds of nitrogen compounds)

Grinnell & Teddy Roosevelt

forming the Boone & Crockett Club in 1887 with the goal of promoting manly sport and fighting to conserve game animals.

Pinchot's friendship and alliance with Theodore Roosevelt was the key to his success:

from 1901-10, acreage in the forest reserves (now renamed national forests) rose from 51 to175 million acres. Most famous episode came on March 4, 1907, when Roosevelt was forced to sign away his power to create new forest reserves without specific congressional authorization. Before he did so, he and Pinchot identified 16 million additional acres to set aside before the budget bill was signed. These were nicknamed the "midnight forests":

Steam engine evolution

from Thomas Newcomen's single cylinder in 1705 (used to pump water from Cornish tin mines in England) to James Watt's condenser in 1765, the tendency was for increasing efficiency, higher pressures, lighter devices, making steam an ever more flexible power source.

Chesapeake oyster beds began a long decline in the 1880s

from hydraulic dredging on an industrial scale, resulting in massive overfishing

All of these changes in food and diet were tied to changes in marketing

frozen and canned convenience foods were all sold in disposable packages, the printing on which became key to advertising and marketing the products inside.

American linkage of class and race means that poorest Americans--often people of color--frequently dwell in the shadow of major industrial sites where real estate values are lowest;

furthermore, there is some evidence that certain highly toxic industries have chosen sites near such neighborhoods on the assumption that there will be little effective political resistance of the kind associated with upper-middle-class white environmentalists. (Again: note the difficulty of disaggregating class and race as causal factors.)

pejorative label used to label sport hunters

game hogs

popularized "the fisherman's problem" as "tragedy of commons"

garret hardin

In 1891, the Forest Reserve Act

gave the President the power to set aside national forest reserves, administered by the Department of Interior, to protect watersheds and urban water supplies along the lines articulated in Marsh's Man and Nature.

US hydrogen bomb tests in Pacific Ocean atolls of the Marshall Islands

generated new levels of radioactive fallout, as did the commissioning of the Nevada Test Site starting in 1951, exposing growing numbers of Americans to the downwind effects of fallout.

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel (1997)

geography and fortunate biological endowments determine cultural success of different peoples world-wide.

Outer ring:

hunting, trapping, trading. Furs and skins were of high value relative to weight and bulk, so could still pay transport costs, with no land rents at all.

There was a dramatic shift in the late nineteenth century from High Victorian gardening fashions often derived from formal French models

geometric designs produced by using annual plants of uniform color in flat parterre beds -- toward rustic, more picturesque perennial plantings promoted by the English garden writers William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll, whose ideas spread to the US and in many ways still dominate.

CO2 is not remotely as easy to regulate as CFCs

given its central role in all agricultural, industrial, and physiological activity: it's no exaggeration to say that CO2 is central to the very metabolism of modernity.

Winter horse deaths meant a perennial need to replace those animals

giving rise to the cycle of raiding and trading that was typical of many Plains tribes: theft of horses from neighbors became a major activity for males, even a right of passage for boys.

In far north of Canadian Subarctic south of Hudson's Bay, persistence of trade across boreal forest/edge/grassland between Cree, Assiniboin, Plains tribes:

goods (including weapons) were traded far in advance of Europeans; Indians adapted well, integrated trade with other cultural practices.

William Vogt (1902-1968)

graduated with a BA in biology from Bard College, began his career as an assistant editor for the New York Academy of Sciences, then served as a field naturalist for the Audubon Society and as editor of Bird Lore from 1935-39. He worked in Latin America for the next decade, returning after the war with growing concerns about human-induced environmental change. The Road to Survival was the result of his reflections.

The earliest prediction of this possibility was made by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who predicated that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from coal combustion could yield a 5o C global temperature increase. He also predicted

greater warming in winter than summer; greater warming on land than over the oceans; more in the northern hemisphere than the southern; more at night than during the day; more at the poles than in mid-latitudes or on the equator.

Passenger pigeon was not alone in becoming extinct during this period of

growing transportation markets, expanding urban markets, and increasing hunting pressure. Other famous extinctions include the Carolina Parokeet, Great Auk, Dodo. The last heath hen died in 1933.

In the Lower Hudson Valley, the New Jersey Palisades and the Hudson Highlands around West Point served as a popular location for picturesque steamboat excursions

guidebooks indicated favorite views, standardizing travelers' experience to match what they had already seen in the paintings they viewed in New York galleries. Farther upstream were the Catskills (site of the famous Mountain House) and, farther still, the Adirondacks, which we'll explore later in the course.

Early pesticides, such as lead arsenate

had high acute and chronic toxicity for humans, and because they were based on heavy metals, they accumulated permanently in the environment.

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), then later the renamed Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)

had promoted nuclear power as "Atoms for Peace" in the 1950s: reactors could produce electricity "too cheap to meter" with no serious environmental or health hazards.

Niagara began to be used advertisements as early as 1830s

hair restorers, Nabisco Shredded Wheat, Hollywood's Niagara starring Marilyn Monroe.

This 1970 legislation began to introduce what would become a growing challenge in the closing decades of the twentieth century:

hard choices, ambiguous trade-offs, as well as the increasingly technical nature of policy debates that would characterize environmental politics from here on.

At same time that NPS was trying to turn the national parks into recreational playgrounds for auto-based tourists, the US Forest Service (USFS) was seeking also to sell itself as the nation's playground.

he Secretary of Agriculture began issuing vacation house permits at $10-$25 per year for lots in national forests, with widespread enthusiastic response.

President Jimmy Carter's described energy conservation as the Moral Equivalent of War (a phrase he borrowed from the philosopher William James)

he decade saw growing public fear of foreign oil power and intense resentment of oil companies' increased profits (2.6% per year 1956-72, 20.8% per year 1973-80), with widespread anxiety that the U.S. was no longer in control of own destiny.

Compare the story of yellow fever, which was transported by a mosquito vector (Aedes aegypti).

he disease was endemic in the tropics, repeatedly epidemic in more northern areas when it traveled north. It was introduced from Africa via Caribbean, thereafter triggering multiple epidemics in cities of the southern US, especially as non-immune populations immigrated. Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, all had recurring epidemics, but none more than New Orleans, which had 14 major epidemics between 1796-1878. Standard defenses--quarantine, fires, etc.--proved ineffective because the mosquito vector was not understood.

1864: the US gave Yosemite to California as a state park at the urging of Frederic Law Olmsted

he wrote a report describing how it should be managed and developed, and was responsible for laying out the first carriage roads on the floor of the valley. The uplands surrounding Yosemite Valley became a national park in 1890, and the valley itself was eventually returned to the US as a national park in 1906.

Many different forms of erosion

heet erosion, gully erosion, wind erosion, etc. Erosion was also linked in people's minds with the great floods of the 1920s (especially the 1927 Mississippi River flood), which were attributed to deforestation and erosion at the headwaters of rivers, following the thinking of George Perkins Marsh

Thomas Cole, (1810-48)

helped create a whole new genre of wilderness landscape painting, with a darker and more complicated relationship to romantic conceptions of American nature.

Revitalized scholarship on epidemics by estimating

henry dobbins

promoted new ethic of sport hunting that eventually marginalized subsistence hunter

henry william herbert / frank forrester

Standard Oil Company of John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) soon established a near monopoly of the American oil industry by cutting secret transport deals with railroad companies and controlling refinery capacity

hese eventually made him the wealthiest man in the world, a sign of how important oil was becoming to the economy. Initial center of American oil drilling was in area south of Lake Erie in western Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio, with Cleveland playing a lead role.

Bison herds on the Great Plains have been estimated to have been about 15 million animals in 1865, down from perhaps 30 million at start of century.

hey were especially vulnerable to hunting during rutting season, when animals gathered in immense herds to reproduce. (This was a general phenomenon: among species most susceptible to mass hunting/harvesting were those whose populations concentrated during certain parts of their reproductive cycles: bison, salmon, passenger pigeons all exemplified this behavior, albeit in different ways.)

Southern tobacco and cotton shifted west for soil exhaustion, but these had strong urban links too

high yield from English and northeastern markets meant capital and labor-intensive agriculture, with labor capitalized in form of slaves, non-capitalist social relations as foundation for these most commercial (hence capitalist?) of American crops.

Anna Botsford Comstock

highly influential approach still retained this search for values, but with a much greater commitment to bringing rigorous scientific investigation into the classroom. Botsford was born 1854; 1874 enrolled at Cornell; met entomologist husband J. H. Comstock as a student and became scientific illustrator for him; 1895 became involved in nature study, joined Cornell faculty, and became a leading figure of the movement for next three decades: Handbook of Nature Study first published 1911, remains in print as a classic.

Traditional story of indians

horticulturalists of the eastern Plains abandoned raising crops in order to become hunters of bison on horseback. This apparently was not true: no horticulturalists entirely gave up corn.

"biological determinism"

how much does environment as opposed to human agency determine human history? Biological determinism would incline toward the view that biological elements of human and non-human groups affected the course of history without much need to examine intervening cultural variables.

J. C. Loudon

ideas of landscape gardening in England: constructing landscapes that expressed ideas of the "picturesque" and the "beautiful" on the gardened landscapes of rural estates and retreats.

H. J. Habakkuk

in his American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century (1962), cast abundance in terms of classic factors of production as described by political economists from Adam Smith forward (land, labor, capital, each earning, respectively, rents, wages, and profits ) to argue that British-U.S. factor shares accounted for the differing adoption of technologies by the two economies. Habakkuk argued that in Britain, land was expensive and skilled labor was cheap; in US, on the other hand, land was cheap and unskilled labor was expensive.

1980, Anne Anderson organizes citizens' group (FACE, For A Cleaner Environment) in Woburn, MA

in response to childhood leukemia cases in neighborhood near industrial waste sites, files lawsuit that becomes basis for Jonathan Harr's bestselling book A Civil Action, resulting in 1986 jury decision that W. R. Grace had negligently dumped chemicals (Beatrice was acquitted); elaborate wranglings about evidence and judicial procedure continued long after the trial.

Farther away: Strontium 90 accumulated

in soil, was concentrated by cows in milk, and ultimately accumulated in the bones of children.

demersal fish

live near the bottom.

Pelagic fish

live near the top of the ocean water column

If they stayed too long, they faced the very real danger of shipwreck amid the ice floes, most famously in the 1871 disaster

in which 33 ships became trapped in the ice, their sailors having to flee on foot and await rescue by other vessels.

January 24, 1855 entry from Henry David Thoreau's famous journal

in which Thoreau reflected on his reading of William Wood's 1635 book New England's Prospect

the thalidomide scandal in Great Britain in 1961

in which pregnant women were given the drug thalidomide to treat morning sickness...and many then gave birth to infants with missing limbs and other severe birth defects. Fueled public fears of invisible harms promulgated by modern science and by experts--very different from the trust in experts that was taken for granted during the era of Progressive conservation.

Olmsted would design parks and park systems all around the country

including a redesign of the park looking out on Niagara Falls and the system of roads on the floor of Yosemite Valley. But his work also led him to ponder the design of an ideal suburb, one of which was Riverside, Illinois in 1869, with its curving streets, middle-class houses on large lots, gardens tended by well-to-do women or the gardeners they employed. The male commute between suburban home and urban workplace meant that the suburb would be shaped by (middle-class) feminine notions of beauty and well nurtured childhood.

Reconstructing past temperatures and climates is an essentially historical enterprise, albeit with "documents" different from the ones most used by traditional historians: tree rings, Greenland and Antarctica ice cores, pollen, carbon 14, etc. Computer models were key here too:

indeed, they began in subsequent years to be relied on at least as much as actual climatological data. Earliest models (produced during the period when the graphs in Limits to Growth were also being assembled) were quite crude, with very large "pixels" to model large chunks of Earth's surface, limited number of variables included in model equations. Over time, models became increasingly complex, with more and more variables, pixels covering ever smaller units of Earth's surface, and growing accuracy of fit with historic datasets.

The largest claim made by Changes in the Land is that:

inkage to distant markets encouraged a growing sense that land was a commodity bought and sold in the market. (This important argument is most fully developed in Chapter 4 of the book.)

The International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957-58 created new institutional arrangements for climatic data collection

international scientific cooperation during the Cold War, with permanent stations in Antarctica, and new efforts at climate monitoring. This was driven partly by Cold War military interest in calculating the flight paths of long-distance missiles, navigation, growing computational power, impacts of radiation from nuclear testing, etc.: all contributed to the technologies and instrumentation that made it possible to study climate change (and that produced other major discoveries in the earth sciences, especially the gathering of oceanographic data that finally demonstrated the reality of plate tectonics).

cholera symptoms

intestinal convulsions, diarrhea, vomiting, death from dehydration (modern medical discovery: simple treatment with salty water means most can survive!)

One unexpected result was the politicization of ordinary neighborhoods, many of them poor and working class, especially women with children fearful of harm to their families. Note the fear-provoking Insidiousness of the threat

invisible, striking inside homes, potentially lethal damage to one's family and loved ones without knowing what was happening until it was too late. Once again, cancer served both as a very material threat and as a symbol of microscopic damage to cells and bodies.

Exhibit Format Series can be seen as an

invocation of romantic nature as a source of secular faith a redemption in the face of the crisis of modern world: nature as way to recover spiritual values. The high cost of the book series eventually led to increasing resistance to Brower on the part Sierra Club board members.

The Sierra Club's major fight of the 1950s

involved a proposed dam at Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument. Would this be Hetchy Hetchy all over again? Brower recruited the novelist and conservationist Wallace Stegner to edit a book, heavily illustrated with landscape photography, entitled This is Dinosaur (1955) to educate members of the public about why a national monument that few of them had even heard of, let alone visited, should be protected.

Pinchot's 1910 book, The Fight for Conservation

is a key document outlining the philosophical underpinnings of Progressive Era conservation. In it, he extended Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian doctrine to declare that the goal of conservation was to serve "greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time."

model for understanding relationships between rural geographies and urban markets

isolated state

Resort hotels like Catskill Mountain House (1823) becomes romantic escapes from city

it become among the most popular of artistic subjects, itself absorbed into an icon of the sublime

Note the technological and environmental problems associated with water power

it required that all machines be powered by a limited number of drive shafts, all connected by belts to the turbines beneath the factory, encouraging a multi-story vertical form of architecture to minimize friction. Spinning shafts and whirring belts produced highly unsafe working conditions, with many injuries. Also: flood danger was omnipresent, as was also true of river towns in general.

1962: Surgeon General released first report on Motor Vehicles, Air Pollution, and Health

its findings were still tentative, but influential in suggesting that cars really were significant contributors to air pollution.

Again, one key image of colonial life: the post-and-beam timber structure symbolized by the Saugus ironmaster's much-restored wooden house from 1680s:

ixed, stolid, with ecological cycles and relations of production made to circle around this human center.

Far worse: the Great Smog in London (Dec. 5-9, 1952)

killed an estimated 4000 people (recent estimates have revised this number upward to more than 12,000) in an atmospheric inversion event that trapped high-sulphur coal smoke, made driving impossible, leading to cancellation of film screenings because people in theatres couldn't make out the screen through the smoke

Dust Bowl net result

land was no longer protected by crop cover, so lay open to the wind. Drought reduced vegetative cover still further, even on lands that hadn't recently been under the plow.

Col. Harland Sanders

launched his Kentucky Fried Chicken (later KFC) franchise in 1956

The "disaster" of deer overpopulation on the Kaibab Plateau (on the north rim of the Grand Canyon) in the early 1920s

led Leopold to reverse his position on predators, and to argue against eliminating them. (The data documenting the size of the Kaibab deer herd are problematic, and causes other than predator removal probably also contributed to changes in the deer herd: removal of livestock from the national forest as a competing grazing population, and elimination of hunting by native peoples.)

The Chernobyl accident in Ukraine on 4/26/1986

led to much more widespread and serious release of large quantities of radiation, with widespread fallout in parts of Europe, $200 billion property damage, 56 direct deaths, estimated 4000 extra cancers in exposed primary population of 600,000 people. (Russian reactor designed relied on flammable graphite to regulate nuclear reactions, unlike the water-based reactors built in the U.S.)

The 1980s and 1990s saw a growing list of toxic dumps around the country, especially in the industrial Northeast and Midwest:

legacies of earlier industrial eras.

The arrival of the tourist automobile (first reached Yellowstone in 1915) liberated travellers from railroads and their expensive hotels:

less expensive "motels" ("motor hotels") began to appear en route, along with campgrounds catering to cars.

Starting in the late 1970s, there was increasing interest in the possibility of "greenhouse warming" from growing quantities of certain trace gases in the atmosphere.

like CO2, CH4 (methane), CFCs (and water vapor, always most important).

Plague differential effects

like a childhood disease for rats, often with limited mortality; but in humans, 30%-90% mortality

Governor Percival Baxter of Maine (1876-1969)

likewise spent a small fortune over the course of his life to purchase, ultimately, 202,000 acres to preserve and give to the state of Maine the lands surrounding Mt. Ktahdin after the legislature refused to do so. These are now Baxter State Park.

Comanches of Texas

lived in grasslands on the southern Plains, with mild winters where horses reproduced easily; they became horse herders first, bison hunters second, ate horses and traded them north; Hämäläinen's classic 2009 work The Comanche Empire suggests the extraordinary extent of their influence and political power as a result.

Third ring:

livestock raising, animals grazing on undeveloped land of relatively low value; (lumbering occurred here too as an extensive crop with no replanting of harvested forest).

Destruction of habitats was one source of decline

loss of deciduous forests threatened nesting areas, affecting more than just passenger pigeons.

In 1798, Edward Jenner publishes news that

lymph from cowpox postules would vaccinate for smallpox (an insight he and others first gained by realizing that milkmaids who had handled infected udders seemed to be immune to smallpox).

1980s-1990s: the Wise Use (western U.S.) and Property Rights (eastern U.S.) movements

made systematic conservative attacks on government-based environmentalism. Wise Use argued against federal ownership and management of western lands, seeking transfer of those lands to state and local governments and/or private sector as the earlier Sagebrush Rebellion had done. The property rights movement argued that government regulation represented a legal "taking" of private property.

Robert Fulton's Clermont steamboat in 1807:

made the round trip between New York and Albany in just five days (300 round trip, 62 hours under steam at 5mph).

Von Thünen's thought experiment:

magine a city in the midst of a featureless agricultural plain, with uniform soil fertility throughout. How far goods will travel to the city depends on their price, cost of transport, and the value of the land on which they're produced (measured by the rents that land can earn).

Note the role of wildlife managers in protecting wildlife

managing wild populations for the sake of protecting the hunt, even to point of breeding certain species like pheasants (introduced from Asia in 1881, with the first official hunting season in 1892, creating a very popular game target). Hunters' licensing fees helped fund the management system, financing creation and maintenance of refuge system.

The Shack was an exercise in the private stewardship of an ecosystem

manipulating abandoned agricultural land to reproduce healthy biota, cultivating a variety of native plant species to support a mixture of game and non-game animal species. Leopold's vision was of humans as members of a biotic community with an ethical responsibility to maintain its health.

Windmills had played a small role in colonial period, and would continue to be important, especially on the Great Plains from mid-19th century forward as a way to pump ground water for livestock. Sawmills and gristmills were among the earliest businesses in frontier areas

market centers providing basic processing of wood and grain. This was an old medieval technology, but by eighteenth century was undergoing important innovations. Sawmills replaced pitsawing with human labor, gristmills replaced hand grinding and animal-powered milling.

Two key changes occurred in the 1860s-1870s:

market in buffalo hides developed with improved tanning pioneered in Philadelphia in the 1870s arrival of railroads on Great Plains shifted transportation costs to make bison more marketable. Result: bison market expanded dramatically, prices rose. Professional market hunters fed railroad workers with bison meet, selling meat and robes to the east. in 1873, 2/3 of adult male residents of Dodge City, Kansas, supported themselves at least in part as bison hunters. Scale of killing rose accordingly: 4 million animals per year killed in 1871-2.

There were important links here to underlying structural changes in American life:

mass housing communities like post-WWII Levittown made affordable housing widely available to lower-income Americans. Most were increasingly dependent on automobiles.

Anadromous fish:

mature animals eat and live in the open ocean, but swim upstream into freshwater rivers and streams in order to spawn (in part so that young fish will be subject to lower levels of predation before they're large enough to defend themselves in open ocean). Salmon are the best-known examples, susceptible to mass harvest because of this reproductive behavior.

Earlier land systems:

metes & bounds surveys that characterized the southern colonies involved more or less random without systematic property boundaries, with lots of potential for future legal conflicts; French long lots fronted on rivers, which served as the principal transportation routes of French settlements on the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers, with long parallel property boundaries also facilitating plower; New England towns favored coordinated village settlements, with a series of property divisions distributing land to individual colonists in a more systematic way.

Acid rain, which became an object of public controversy in the 1980s, is a useful example of the interregional transport of pollutants, resulting from several converging factors:

midwestern coals from Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky are naturally high in sulfur, and the energy crisis of the 1970s led to increases in their use in midwestern factories and power plants; tall smokestacks injected sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide pollutants higher into atmosphere; these combined with atmospheric moisture to form sulfuric and nitric acid; then carried by prevailing winds to be deposited as acid fog or rain on lakes and trees in the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada; areas where bedrock and soils didn't neutralize acidic deposition (granites, basalts, other igneous and metamorphic rocks as opposed to sedimentary limestones) saw a long-term decrease in pH in lakes (some Adirondack lakes especially vulnerable); increased mortalities for fish populations; damage especially to coniferous forests at high elevations.

New England factories were predicated on a largely female labor force (already skilled in needlework)

migrating from country to city (initially rural New England farm girls, eventually Irish immigrants, both making the journey from rural to urban employment).

why did they lack immunity to these disease organisms?

migration via cold northern environments of the Arctic, inhospitable to illnesses; migration in populations too small to act as self-sustaining hosts to disease organisms; brought no domesticated animals to act as additional host pool for diseases; migrated prior to periods when historic illnesses of Eurasia developed. as a result, migrating Indians shed Eurasian illnesses as they migrated (if they had ever been exposed to them), and thereby lost their historical immunity to them

women working in factories regulated by mechanized time and standardized work shifts

morning bell

Key features of ocean geography/ecology

most fertile areas of the ocean are located on the continental shelf, especially where upwelling cold currents bring nutrients from ocean floor to surface and are able to sustain large phyto- and zooplankton populations, becoming a base for the food chain and fisheries.

Romantics sought out the sublime in particular places:

mountaintop, chasm, cataract, thunderstorm, rainbow.

Astonishingly rapid and severe gully erosion in Stewart County, Georgia, became a kind of poster child for the severity of erosion problems, especially in the South

nicknamed Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon," it is now Providence Canyon State Park.

A key long-term effect was that factories became freer to concentrate in urban centers,

no longer so dependent on rivers for their locations as they had been earlier.

The horse had significant advantages compared with cattle:

not as useful for food (especially in European cultural practices), but better for human control, movement, speed, power.

Fossil fuels were at the base of virtually every aspect of 20th-century life

not just automobile transport with its attendant smog (first recorded as noticeable new problem in Los Angeles in 1943), but, more subtly, the suburb/skyscraper division of American urban geography: vertical office and commercial space of the downtown (often legacies of the railroad era) with sprawling horizontal residential suburbs, linked by increasingly energy intensive transport systems.

At the very moment that town and country were thus being tied ever more closely together, the factory town emerged as a social and iconic space separate from country

note the paradox of early pastoral images of Lowell standing in contrast to the regimentation of factory architecture, highly regulated boarding house life, with time-clock discipline.

Theory of disease shaped treatment, as Charles Rosenberg's classic account in The Cholera Years shows:

notions that bad air ("miasma") or bad morals caused disease didn't necessarily lead to appropriate prophylactic measures. Chief responses in the first half of the nineteenth century: quarantine, closing of immigration, flight from the city and other infected areas (often carrying the contagion with the fleeing migrants). Major cholera epidemics in US in 1832, 1849, 1866.

George Bird Grinnell's metaphor

of spending no more than the interest earned each year by one's capital would seem to be apt as a rule for the sustainable harvest of a hunted or fished annual population. But fishermen never seem to act this way, so that fish populations and therefore fisheries seem to have a tendency in modern history to collapse.

Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation

offered a philosophical defense of animal rights rooted in the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham that had also influence Gifford Pinchot--only now the "greatest number" for whom the "greatest good" was sought extended beyond the circle of human beings to include animals.

1958: Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat Comes Back

offered a popular comic fable with a darker subtext about proliferating contaminants in the environment.

Johann Heinrich von Thünen's The Isolated State (1826)

offers one useful way of abstracting geographical consequences of the market as an interface between city and country

Colonial whaling began in Nantucket as an offshore activity

often relying on Indians as laborers (cf the character Queequeg in Melville's classic 1851 novel Moby Dick).

During the 1980s, there were also growing criticisms directed against "mainstream" environmental organizations (a term that was coined during this period) from the environmental left as well:

older organizations were attacked for being coopted by regulators, insufficiently radical in their defense of the environment.

Women's love of gardens & flowers ranged across class boundaries: see, for instance, Elizabeth Lawrence's Gardening for Love (1986)

on "market bulletins" that served as seed/plant exchanges for southern gardeners from 1901 on. Although they were initially created by southern state governments with the goal of creating markets for farm produce that might not otherwise earn profits for farmers, they in fact fostered communities of women (and men) sharing the fruits of their labors--an early form of social media for gardeners.

George Bird Grinnell offered a striking metaphor for what we might today call "sustainable" hunting

one should harvest only the interest on the principal, by which he meant killing only the number of animals that corresponded to that year's reproductive production of the overall population.

1831, Dr. Jacob Bigelow

organized Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was intended as a rural retreat in city where one could go to contemplate human mortality amid the beauties of nature.

Vaccination manipulated the body's internal environment (its immune system) against disease

other diseases, like cholera, were most effectively combatted by manipulating external environments.

Dust Bowl Causes

overgrazing; land plowed too deep by dry-farming techniques; economic demand for grain during World War I had prompted massive investments in new land, tractors, equipment; end of war saw precipitous decline in prices, but farmers had to meet fixed mortgage payments for land and equipment, so increased production to try to maintain income; subsequent agricultural depression (which began in the 1920s before the stock market collapse of 1929) brought growing numbers of bankruptcies.​

Take Thomas Cole's "View from Mt. Holyoke...After a Thunderstorm" (1836) as our leitmotif for this lecture:

oxbow as image of eternal return, wilderness into pastoral, rise and fall of civilization: behind seemingly realistic image of nature, apocalypse & vision of sublime.

10/22/65: the Highway Beautification Act

reated a fund to purchase billboards and wall off junkyards to make American highways more beautiful. It was never as successful as Lady Bird had hoped, and actually proved to benefit billboard companies in certain ways.

Let's look at a case study in which the first of these possible solutions to the fisherman's problem seemed at least for a while to be successful:

oyster fishing on the eastern seaboard of what is today the United States.

By the 1820s

oystermen were "planting" oysters, from spawn they collected locally or from set oysters obtained elsewhere (typically the vastly larger oyster beds in Chesapeake Bay).

French artist Claude Lorraine

pastoral paintings of the 17th century were a key source of compositional conventions artists used in depicting romantic landscapes; his motifs include vegetative framing, idling foreground figures, rustic bldgs, stream or road holds foreground and middle ground together, grazing animals, etc., all of which are employed by romantic painters.

1962: the hugely influential report of Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, chaired Laurance Rockefeller

paved the way not just for creating wilderness areas, but creating national recreation areas near major urban centers; protecting wild and scenic rivers; creating a Land and Water Conservation Fund to support recreational land acquisition.

The British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar

performed a series of calculations by hand in 1938, and predicted world temperature rise, essentially as a back-of-the-envelope exercise.

Inner ring:

perishable, high-value goods (dairy, orchard, vegetables) produced with intensive agriculture on lands with high rents, able to take advantage of high urban demand for such products.

Review key themes of the lecture:

planning as intrinsically a top-down, elite phenomenon favoring birds-eye view atomic bomb had consequence of increasing people's awareness of global threats & vulnerability population as one of the most macro ways of conceiving of global environment: power & weakness analysis at global level tended to favor aggregates without much attention to distributional equity population one of first environmental concerns to be perceived on global scale... ...but its abstract birds-eye view made it hard to see individual people on the ground

Crosby's insight about the linked histories of human beings and other organisms is central to environmental history

plants, animals, and microorganisms play vital roles in human history that are often overlooked by more traditional approaches to studying the past.

Another New Deal agency, the Rural Electrifiction Authority (REA, created in 1935)

played a vital role in providing capital to extend electrical lines in rural areas where the rate of return on such investments was not high enough for private capital to risk the investments or for farmers to pay the rates that would have been necessary to incentivize those investments. Electrification became a powerful symbol of "modernization" during this period, with hydropower dams among the most visible expressions of that symbol.

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in 2006

played an influential role in focusing public attention on climate change, an issue that had been of concern to Gore for many years, earning him (and IPCC) a Nobel Prize in 2007. The film (and Gore's unpopularity among conservatives) led to large investments by oil companies and conservative groups seeking to cast doubt on climate science, with the Heartland Institute (https://www.heartland.org) playing a lead role in organizing such efforts after 2008. Promotional posters for the film showed an ominous hurricane vortex emanating from industrial smokestacks. The clear implication was that greenhouse gases were contributing to hurricane frequency and/or severity.

John Martin's "The Bard," (1817)

poet as lone prophet in sublime landscape of wilderness can stand as a symbol of this romantic role:

In Carson, the values of nature study would be

politicized and applied to toxic chemical forms of fallout, with detrimental consequences both for the natural world and for human health (in the form of cancer).

The movement culminated in 1969 with publication of Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb:

population as the single most important environmental problem. Ehrlich believed that Malthusian triage was the only solution, cutting off aid to the poor who were already doomed to starve to death

Note general trends from 1800 on:

population growth; cities grow more rapidly than countryside, urban population surpassing rural in 1920; rising mechanization in agriculture and industry; replacement of solar energy with fossil energy; increasing intensity of soil use (e.g., fertilizers); growing capital intensity and labor efficiency (100 bushels of wheat took 373 person-hours in 1800, 108 in 1900; 9 in 1970).

Potential causes of such concentrations are so numerous as to be almost impossible to analyze:

populations whose gene pools carry different susceptibilities by class, race, ethnicity; different geography of industry, uses of chemicals, features of natural environment; etc., etc. Here again the problem of statistical causality makes it challenging to identify clear linkages between geographical variations in disease incidence and their potential causes.

Coal caused pollution;

posed serious occupational hazards ranging from mining accidents to black lung disease; was dirty to burn; destroyed landscapes; was heavy and inconvenient to transport and use

1967: National Emission Standards Act

preempted all but California's local auto emission standards.

1991: First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit convened in Washington, DC,

prepared a formal statement offering 17 "Principles of Environmental Justice," including "sacredness of Mother Earth"; environmental protection "free from all discrimination or bias"; "fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples"; "cessation of the production of all toxins."

Close with story of Pilgrims robbing grave on Cape Cod of one of the earliest recorded "white Indians" of North America:

probably a shipwrecked sailor who had joined and been honored by the tribe that buried him: a very different model from more familiar stories of conflict between these groups.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)

probably the single most important figure in American romanticism, enormously influential to his contemporaries even though he's not much read today. His book Nature (1836) was manifesto of Transcendentalism, a leading American version of romanticism. Its injunction to readers was to experience universe directly, as living prophets, with a kind of mystical optimism suffusing the text.

Vogt's argument:

rising human population was increasingly impinging on global resources.

Pare Lorentz's classic 1936 documentary film, Plow That Broke the Plains

promulgated New Deal interpretation that unwise use of technology had created the Dust Bowl, but led to widespread controversy in Plains states

Leacock's thesis now appears too simplistic

property divisions and trade certainly predate Europeans, though fur trade surely amplified earlier patterns in complex ways.

There were also significant efforts at protecting wild landscapes on private land: in 1921, landscape architect Benton MacKaye

proposed the creation of a long-distance Appalachian Trail along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, leading to massive volunteer efforts. The Appalachian Trail Conference was created in 1925 and the trail was completed by 1937, much of it on private land.

In 1956, the petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert (1903-1989)

published a famous paper predicting that the U.S. would reach peak oil production in the lower 48 in 1971. Delivered at a regional meeting of the American Petroleum Institute Hubbert was effectively restating the arguments of Thomas Malthus for industrial society: arguing that energy rather than food would limit economic growth.

Note the difficulty of reaching Yellowstone and other western parks:

purchase expensive tickets to take the railroad to Montana, then travel by coach to Mammoth Hot Springs, with tours starting from there as a base camp. The provision of infrastructure--transport, lodgings, provisions--became one of the early challenges of the parks.

All of Progressive conservation came together in the image of an irrigated garden:

racial nationalism, imperial conquest, technical progress reclaiming waste, making desert bloom, nature & humanity in landscape without contradiction ... "man's partnership with God."

Power symbol: the Exxon Valdez oil tanker

ran aground off the south coast of Alaska in 3/24/89, have departed from the same port that had long ago shipped Kennecott's copper south to Tacoma. Before the disaster was contained, 11 million barrels had spilled and 1200 miles coastline were contaminated. Public outcry against corporate malfeasance produces clean-up that did further damage to the coast...all to provide gasoline for American automobiles.

old story: plague endemic to

rats and other rodents, transmitted by fleas living in rodent community movement of plague west from Burma to China to Europe infected human and rat populations

Anne Gorsuch

reduced the agency's budget and staff, seeking to end unnecessary regulation. A political scandal involving a Superfund site in California, the Stringfellow Dump, eventually led to Gorsuch's ouster in 1983.

classic virgin soil epidemics have occurred on

relatively small islands, or in isolated populations

The Plimoth military blockhouse was also its religious and poitical meetinghouse

remembering the religious mission of the settlement, the famed "errand into the wilderness" implied a view of the surrounding landscape as a Biblical wilderness with all the rich allusions implied by a Biblical wilderness: outside the village, beyond the domesticated landscape of the colonial settlements, wild nature was dangerous, savage, sinful.

Laurance Rockefeller's Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (ORRRC) report in 1962 (appointed by Eisenhower

reported to Kennedy, implemented by Johnson) recommended a remarkable array of new laws that would reshape the American landscape in myriad ways: Wilderness Act (1964); Land and Water Conservation Fund (1964); national lakeshores, seashores, and recreational areas; wild and scenic rivers, etc.. The ORRRC argued for a broad commitment to access to outdoor recreation: a very important but little-remembered commission.

Central task of colonization:

reproducing familiar landscapes in the midst of an alien world...and the features of those familiar landscapes were more often than not intimately tied to the the animals (and plants) that colonists brought with them.

Task of scheduling:

reproducing seasonal knowledge of peasant agriculture eventually involved publication of almanacs. These were based on the cycling wheel of the zodiac much like Indian subsistence, but here agricultural activity takes place in close proximity to human settlements, within fixed property boundaries marked by physical fences. Another example of the opening theme of mobility vs fixity.

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) combined these critiques with general hostility to government intervention in private sector

resulting in a systematic attack on Roosevelt/Pinchot-era conservation and the later regulatory apparatus of the 1960s and 1970s.

1518

smallpox appeared Santo Domingo (modern-day Dominican Republic), and one-third to one-half of the natives died in few months

1717

smallpox epidemic

Rise of sporting press was accompanied by a wave of new sporting organizations at the local and state level:

rod and gun clubs, with private game preserves protecting lands to give their members access to game animals.

European goods weren't just attractive technologically, but also as status goods

role of wampum in this as Indian good that also functioned as status item. use significantly expanded with the coming of the fur trade.

Marsh's arguments were used to support the preservation of Adirondack Park in upstate New York in 1892

s "forever wild" to protect water supplies for New York's rivers, cities, and, not least, the Erie Canal. Efforts to protect the Adirondacks represented a convergence of romantic sublime/picturesque values with hunting and utilitarian conservation (suggesting that the conflicts epitomized in the Muir/Pinchot dichotomy may not be in such stark tension as is sometimes suggested).

You can think of the ship as an example of a "capstone technology" embodying many of the most important differences between Indians and colonists

sawed wood, metals, textiles, ropes, navigation, guns, sails, etc.; these in turn imply outward linkages with the wider markets of the Atlantic world.

By the mid-1960s

scientists and activists were announcing "the death of Lake Erie": was it irreversible?

Nature study can be seen as another domesticated strand of the romantic sublime

secularization of (Protestant) religious values, nature as an ideal context for educating children to cultural values about the human place in nature and society.

Among its chief targets were insects, both indigenous and introduced species

see, for instance, the boll weevil's arrival in southern cotton fields starting in 1892; the spread of the gypsy moth after its introduction in 1869; as well as the mosquito vectors we've already studied as carriers of malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases.

There were massive promotional outpourings from railroads on behalf of parks along their lines

selling points included romantic sublime; recreational playgrounds; education; romance; quaintness; Indians, etc.

Seton's Birch-Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians

served as the source for the first edition of the Boy Scout Handbook, with Seton as a principal author

1957 Price-Anderson Act

set a ceiling on utilities' financial liability for reactor accidents, which had the unintended consequence of emphasizing just how serious such accidents might possibly be.

Among the most beautiful of the gendered celebrations of gardening that appeared during this period was Celia Thaxter's Island Garden (1895)

she describes her garden on the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire. In her book, we see the garden as an expression of women's role as nurturers of young life; flowers as symbols of fertility and feminine beauty; the garden as a direct sign of God's love for birth, growth, and death.

Among most important of the biological companions who accompanied Europeans in their colonizing efforts were large domesticated mammals:

sheep (meat, textiles, woolen clothing) cattle (beef, milk and dairy products, leather, labor power) pigs (labor-free meat)

In Nevada fallout from the test site in neighboring areas led to

sheep and cattle kills, elevated childhood leukemia rates.

Dust Bowl Result was aggressive government intervention typical of the New Deal:

shelterbelts of planted trees to break the wind and encourage rain (cf. Marsh's climatic theories); contour plowing to compensate for grid field boundaries; Resettlement Administration sought to relocate farms away from submarginal lands (a reversal of the frontier vision of rural settelent; 1934 Taylor Grazing Act to end homesteading on rangelands; consistent with traditions of Progressive conservation movement, heavy reliance on scientific experts to redirect the social destinies of rural people, communities, and landscapes.

t was more difficult for more virulent organisms to make their way across the ocean

since they had to keep finding new hosts throughout journey in order to reach the other side of the Atlantic

1521

smallpox aided Cortes in his conquest of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire

ndian hunting of bison had already shifted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from foot with spears and arrows to horseback with arrows and guns

so it's quite likely that bison herds and humans were out of balance as a result: increasing pressure. Bison-hunting tribes required about 5 animals per person per year, and impacts of hunting likely increased across eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with growing access to horses and guns.

Carson's career was additionally influenced by the fact that her father died in 1935, and her married sister in 1936,

so that Carson and her mother became responsible for raising her sister's two children, with Carson as the sole breadwinner for the family. Although she never married, she would ultimately be responsible for raising three children (including her great nephew Roger, son of one of the nieces she raised after his mother died).

Shellfish are more sedentary than most other ocean-dwellers,

so would seem to be more susceptible to being treated as private property than fish that are more mobile.

1890s: William T. Love

sought to construct a power canal to attract industry to his new development in Niagara Falls, NY, at a development he called Model City. It failed, leaving behind the abandoned canal site.

The United States preferred the abstract grid of Enlightenment, the Cartesian coordinate plane, codified in the great 1785 Land Ordinance:

square mile grid units (640 acres, with 36 square miles constituing a township) were imposed in the Northwest Territory by government survey to facilitate sale to settlers and speculators. This grid pattern proliferated outward to entire landscape west of Ohio River: affecting everything from rural road systems to farmers' fields to city streets. You'll see it almost everywhere when you fly over the western United States today.

Use of Federal regulatory apparatus to circumvent state regulation had occurred since the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887

standardized railroad regulation in response to the proliferation of state laws regulating railroads during the 1870s.

Ansel Adams (1902-84)

started photographing Sierra Nevada in the late 1920s, soon emerging as country's most popular landscape photographer. He joined the board of the Sierra Club in 1934, and would serve for many years. He was hugely influential not just as an advocate for park and wilderness protection, but also help popularize serious amateur photography in the US.

Federal involvement would begin to expand in early 1960s

the Kennedy administration became interested, and a Division of Air Pollution now existed in the Public Health Service as a bureaucratic home with a vested interest in pursuing. Municipalities lobbied for federal support, with a growing sense that state and local governments couldn't tackle the problem on their own.

The first state Audubon society was formed in 1886-89; the influential Massachusetts Audubon Societed started in 1896

the National Association of Audubon Societies started in 1905 to coordinate efforts at the state level.

The State of Pennsylvania stepped in after the Donora-Webster killer smog event of October 1948:

sulfur dioxide accumulated in river valleys as a result of a temperature inversion. 5910 people, 42.7% of population, complained of significant symptoms, and 20 died

The importance of such animals is suggested by the willingness of colonists to share so much space with them aboard ship: animals as...

survival tools; as signs of colonial society reproducing the production systems of the lands from which they had migrated; as symbols of wealth, signs of colonial prosperity; as goods to be sold at market and exported to wider world.

One more source of urban demand

taxidermy, which processed and sold stuffed trophy bodies and heads...which takes us finally to the growing demand for recreational sport hunting in the wake of the Civil War.

In 1902, Seton created the Woodcraft Indians

teaching rural and suburban children outdoor "Indian" skills. It went on to serve as a model for Lord Robert Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts in England in 1908

A whole series of consumer applicances, most requiring electricity, were adopted into American households over the course of the twentieth century, initially adopted only by the wealthy, but eventually working their way down the class hierarchy into middle- and working-class homes. Among the most important of these:

telephone automobile electric stove radio refrigerator clothes washer clothes dryer dishwasher television (B&W, then color) air conditioner microwave VCR computer Internet cellphone

1961

testing recommencesd.

Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" (1968) could also apply to bricks in toilets

that extra water in the tank is part of the commons, and the money we save by displacing a little bit of that water with a brick saves us just a few pennies, even if the gains to society at large might be enormous.

In response, Brower mounted a nation-wide fight against the Bureau of Reclamation's announcement

that it intended to build dams in Marble Canyon and Bridge Canyon that would result in floodwaters in the Grand Canyon that would essentially tame the wild rapids for which the Colorado River was famous.

Sustainably self-interested fishery behavior would seem to suggest

that rational fishers would harvest only a safe annual level that wouldn't threaten the long-term reproductive levels of the fish populations being harvested. Take no more than the annual number of young fish making it to adult each year.

James Lovelock argued in his influential 1979 book Gaia

that the unusual combination of highly unstable gases in Earth's oxidizing atmosphere could not possibly existence without life on the planet. In Lovelock's view, Earth's atmosphere was fundamentally a product of homeostatic biological processes.

Francis Cabot Lowell's Boston Manufacturing Co. opened its first factory at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1813:

the "Waltham System" manufactured cotton cloth, organized and managed by single corporation, with factory powered by water.

Circle back one more time to Cole's View from Mt. Holyoke

the 19th century was a turning point for American relations with landscape: America as wilderness, garden, Nature's Nation, empire, commodity.

Brower's testimony before Congress demonstrated that

the Bureau of Reclamation had miscalculated its own data regarding loss of water by evaporation from the reservoir and aquifer that would be created by the proposed dam. In 1956, Congress approved a number of dams on the Colorado River, and declared that none of them could be built within the boundaries of national park units.

1942-52

the Hooker Chemical Co. filled an abandoned canal in Niagara Falls with 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals, stored in barrels, buried 20-25 feet deep, then covered over.

December 1969

the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) passed Congress, and Nixon signed it into law as his first presidential action in January 1970.

The reproductive cycle of oysters is relevant here

the adult animals (which can switch back and forth between male and female) eject great clouds of eggs and sperm ejected. Eggs that are fertilized and manage to hatch (enormous losses at each stage of this process) become free-swimming larvae (known as "spawn"), which grow for a couple weeks until they're about 1/75" in diamter, then attach themselves to a hard surface (often another shell) and become "set," remaining fixed in place for the rest of their lives.

The 1980s would see computer modeling of environmental problems turn to a new realm

the atmosphere.

disease fundamental to environmental history

the bodies of humanings serve as the environments in which disease organisms reproduce and thrive

There were many reasons for NYC's eventual primacy, but geography was very important

the city's location at the Atlantic end of the Hudson-Mohawk river corridor provided the easiest access across the Appalachians for opening up potential markets in the interior, especially the Great Lakes. (It's again important to recognize the risks of geographical determinism: how much of this should be attributed to geography, and how much to market advantages deriving from privileged access to capital markets, political power, artificial transport networks like the railroads, etc.?)

Key shifts occurred in the marketing of foods with the rise of automobile suburbs

the coming of refrigerators cheap enough for ordinary consumers to afford allowed families to store much fresher food for longer periods, reducing the labor of cooking.

Transporting water to San Francisco in the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire led ultimately to

the confluence of political forces that authorized the construction of a dam and reservoir in Hetch Hetchy Valley, within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park.

Acid rain can thus serve as a symbol of the difficulty of solving pollution

the ease with which problems can be move elsewhere, resulting in ordinary landscapes becoming toxic in unexpected ways: what one tries to throw away often returns to haunt one in new guises. Acid rain and its impacts on Central European forests (including Germany's famed Black Forest) played significant roles in the rise of the Green Party in Germany in the 1980s.

When yellow fever appeared in New Orleans in 1905

the epidemic fought by sulphur fumigation, drainage of mosquito breeding habitats. It was effectively the last such epidemic in the US.

Bill McKibben published The End of Nature in 1989 (initially serialized in the New Yorker)

the first popular book on climate change, a national bestseller, declaring that human influences on the climate and Earth were now everywhere...and that therefore "nature" as something separate from humanity had "ended."

Leopold went on to become Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin in 1933

the first such position in country. He authored a classic textbook on Game Management that same year, and worked to systematize state efforts at regulating hunting via game wardens, license fees, wildlife refuges, raising of pheasants, etc.

1958

the first voluntary test ban.

In the early 1970s, there had been a debate over whether the supersonic passenger jet (SST) might potentially damage the Earth's ozone layer (which filters much of the sun's ultraviolent radiation so that it doesn't reach the surface of the planet)

this was soon followed by a hypothetical argument that the chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFCs) used as propellants in aerosol sprays might also damage the ozone layer.

Course of empire, sublime moutain witnesses rise and fall of european civilization

thomas cole

Conquered, retreat into nature, Direct encounter with nature unencumbered by society

thoreau

Mount Auburn

the nation's first arboretum, and became a model that would henceforth influence romantic cemeteries, arboretums, and parks across the country

Frederic Law Olmsted's Central Park in Manhattan (which had its own precursors in the rural cemetery movement exemplified by Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA):

the park as a pastoral retreat within the bounds of city, serving as the "lungs of city" by freshening air, rejuvenating the spirit, recovering lost spirit of community. The park as a place for recreation (re-creation).

1965: Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act

tied to auto companies' worries about increasing regulation of emissions at state level, especially in California, but also Pennsylvania, New York. A tangled mixture of different state standards might create nightmare for car company designs, so..

In order to feed animals throughout the seasons of the year, the landscape had to be partitioned into mowing and grazing lands, where alien European grasses and clovers were introduced:

timothy, blue grass, clover, etc. Accompanying the grazers and the grasses was an invasion of weeds: dandelions, nettles, plantain. Indians even called plantain "Englishman's Foot" because it appeared wherever the colonists settled and kept animals.

Political competition between White House and Congressional Democrats contributed to escalations of specific clauses of these laws:

the rivalry resulted in legislation that was probably stronger than any individual politician might have chosen.

Progressive conservation to some extent embodied an irreducible tension between two impulses, both with romantic roots:

the search for encounters with wild or picturesque on the one hand, and, on the other, the search for human improvement in the garden of progress.

Key generalization: romanticism was an example of, and also a reaction against,

the secularization of western European culture and religiosity that typified the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and after. Against the threat of scientific empiricism, romantics rediscovered god/spirituality in nature.

Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757):

the sublime was dark, large, awesome, terrifying, painful, whereas the beautiful, in contrast, was orderly, smooth, polished, pleasurable. The Sublime was a surrogate for God in Nature.

One important new resource issue emerged for planners in the 1930s as concerns grew in the U.S. in other parts of the world about the possibility of another international military conflict: strategic minerals.

the unequal distribution of key natural resources for industrial purposes (especially for military equipment, supplies, and armaments) gave nations differential power in the event of war.

Consider the elements that needed to be reproduced to bake in a colonial oven so simple a thing as a loaf of bread:

the wheat (originating the the region we know today as the Middle East) to grind into flour; yeast to make the bread dough rise; the honeybees that pollinate apples and other fruits for jam to spread on that toast--and who also make honey that can also be used for that purpose; trees for the firewood to heat the oven; cattle who pulled plow to till the soil where the wheat was raised; the microorganisms that help make that soil productive; the milk from those same cattle to produce butter to spread on toast; molds that grow on the bread (eventually a source of antibiotics); organisms in our stomachs and intestines that help digest the bread for us; scavenger species that decompose our own feces and bring their nutrients back into the soil.

Reverend Benjamin Chavez

then the Commission's executive (later head of the NAACP) coined phrase "environmental racism" in 1981 to describe this phenomenon.

In effect, defenders of Echo Park had compromised in accepting the principle that although national park units should remain unflooded, dams could be built elsewhere on the river

there was also an implicit acceptance that nuclear power plants would be preferable to dams at certain locations. Brower would ultimately come to regret both of these compromises.

Pawnees and other horticulturalists:

they still chose not to abandon crops. instead, they integrated horses into their older horticultural cycles. keeping horses and crops separated, and providing winter fodder by burning grasslands near villages to promote growth, with ritual integration of cropping and hunting in an annual seasonal cycle.

Assembly line factory manufacturing of food began to replace home cooking in the 1950s, with the "TV dinner" as a metaphor for modern food

this paralleled the increasing participation of women as wage workers in the economy.

In 1900, Congress passed the Lacey Act (sponsored by Iowa Representative John F. Lacey)

to provide interstate regulation of game sales for the first, asserting a federal role in conservation that we'll be watching grow from this point forward in the course.

it's not generally a successful evolutionary strategy for disease organisms

to wipe out their host populations, since they put their own ecosystem at risk if they do so

Initial responses to declining oyster populations in Long Island Sound

towns in Connecticut began to impose closed seasons, limited harvest, permitting only local residents to engage in oystering there.

Emergence of Great Plains cultures:

tribes acquired horses from the south, became skillful in their use, gradually moved farther onto Plains to become great hunters of bison on horseback.

Starvation suggests the precariousness of this horse/bison economy

tribes like Lakotas and Dakotas (Sioux) who adopted it were hunter-gatherers, not horticulturalists, who embraced horses because for them hunting and gathering were even less reliable forms of subsistence.

coyote and raven create and/or violate natural order

trickster

Clarence Birdseye (1886-1956)

tried quick freezing fish in 1923 based on his experiences in Labrador. He was able to freeze meat and vegetables by 1928, founding General Foods Co., which made frozen food widely available by the 1930s.

The economists who studied this intriguing example of market failure offered two possible solutions:

turn the resource into private property, so owners would have an interest in defending it, making sure it reproduced, and harvesting it sustainably; or impose state regulation on the harvest to make it sustainable.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960)

used his immense wealth to buy up large acreages that he deemed worthy of being protected as national parks, helping acquire or giving outright Acadia, Grand Tetons, Shenandoah, Great Smoky national parks to nation, along with the New Jersey Palisades on the Hudson River.

Patrick Tracy Jackson's associates at Lowell, Mass, (originally called East Chelmsford)

used power from Pawtucket Falls of Merrimac River combined with the Middlesex Canal to deliver power to water-powered factories. Growing number of factories all drew water from the canal, with integral linkage of town, residences, factories, along the town's proliferating canal network.

Initial colonial settlements conducted agriculture much as Indians did:

using hand tools (albeit with metal blades) planting corn (maize) as a crucial early crop. Compare also tobacco in the southern colonies as another early Indian crop brought to market within a system of increasingly forced labor: slavery.

In 1859 US census:

vegetables & milk tended to be prodcued adjacent to major cities; fruit, butter, and cheese farther out, along with hay & hops (hay for horses for transport, and hops for beer).

Complex horticultures: the household gardens tended by colonial English women contained

vegetables, herbs, flowers for dyestuffs, orchards for fruit. Men raised grain crops of maize, barley, rye, wheat while working with larger (more dangerous) animals in fields that were located at some distance from the homestead.

native american communities, unusually susceptible to epidemics

virgin soil populations

high valued in traditional indian societies, used as currency in fur trade

wampum

Henry David Thoreau, (1817-1862)

was a disciple of Emerson's who famously retreated to Walden Pond from 1845-7 to act out the romantic dream of a direct encounter with Nature, with an imagination unencumbered by society. Thoreau as a much more direct observer than Emerson, but both saw Nature as infused with Spirit.

Clements' notion of plant communities as "super-organisms"

was actually a very problematic concept, as later ecologists would demonstrate, inventing the more neutral term "ecosystem" to replace it.

Alexandre Hogue (1898-1994)

was an important regionalist/realist painter in late 1930s who specialized in dramatizing the environmental, social, and moral threat represented by erosion. The Great Plains and southwestern deserts were his chief subjects. Using overtly religious symbolism (Hogue's father was a Presbyterian minister), he depicted a crucified landscape raped by the plow

Gifford Pinchot

was born to a very wealthy family in Connecticut in 1865, unusual because his father suggested he think about forestry as a career (when few other Americans had even heard of such a profession) at an early age. He earned his BA from Yale in 1889, spent a year learning forestry at the French forestry school in Nancy, and then managed the forest lands on George Washington Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate near Asheville, North Carolina, starting in 1892, as his first practical experience managing timber lands. In 1898, Pinchot was appointed chief of the USDA Forestry Division. In 1900, he persuaded his father to found the Yale Forestry School to help train young scientists to work for this newly energized agency. In 1905, he persuaded Theodore Roosevelt to transfer federal forest reserves from Interior to USDA, creating the new US Forest Service with Pinchot as the first Chief Forester:

Wood entailed deforestation

was bulky relative to the density of calories that could be produced by burning it; not easy to mechanize; not ideally suited to large-scale industrial processes

Pelican Island in Florida

was created by Teddy Roosevelt in 1903 as the nation's first wildlife refuge. Wisconsin's Horicon Marsh was protected for this purpose in 1941.

Legendary story in Japan: Sadako

was exposed to the bomb's radiation in Hiroshima at the age of 2, contracted leukemia a decade later, tried to fulfill the old Japanese proverb that "If you fold 1000 paper cranes you will get whatever you wish"--which in her case was simply to live. She died having only completed 645 cranes, became a heroine for Japanese peace movement

Landscape architect Arthur C. Carhart (1892-1978)

was hired by USFS Denver headquarters to plan a vacation development at Trappers Lake in Colorado, but after visiting the site, he, argued that no development at all would be better. The lake was set aside in 1920

Hetch Hetchy

was paralleled (without anything like the scale of national controversy) by the drama over the fate of the Owens Valley and the Los Angeles Aqueduct: Fred Eaton, William Mulholland, and J. P. Lippincott surreptitiously set out to acquire property in Owens River valley east of the southern Sierra Nevad Mountains, overcoming valley opposition to construct an aqueduct completed in 1913. (This story served as the basis for the highly fictionalized account in the classic film Chinatown.) The aqueduct became one of the chief sources of water for Los Angeles...and essentially ended the Owens Valley as a major farming area. The dramatic increase in water supplies in southern California became the basis for accelerating urban growth, with massive boundary expansions for Los Angeles via annexation of adjacent rural territories. The delivery of water to desert areas produced rich new agricultural and suburban residential areas. Railroads and land developers promoted new settlements, and the Colorado Desert was renamed the Imperial Valley, now one of the most fertile agricultural areas in the world.

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA)

was perhaps the most important of these, at least symbolically. We'll talk about it toward the end of the lecture.

Dave Foreman's Earth First!

was probably the most visible of these activist groups, which portrayed themselves as non-violent "eco-warriors": spiking trees, vandalizing logging and construction equipment, etc. The group was modeled on the 1975 novel The Monkeywrench Gang by Edward Abbey (1927-1989), in which a group of radical environmental activists plan to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam to liberate the wild country behind it.

Gifford Pinchot

was so effective as publicist that he often self-consciously exaggerated his own role in shaping the conservation movement during the Progressive Era.

John Muir's Sierra Club

was still largely an outing club in the 1930s, but was poised to become a major player in advocating for wilderness protection.

Skyscraper services can serve as a microcosm of the modern city

water, sewage, light, heat, power. All require significant amounts of energy, especially electricity. (I explore these in greater detail in Hist/Geog/ES 469.)

Tennessee River

watershed receives some of highest amounts of rainfall in the East. Muscle Shoals in northern Alabama is second only to Niagara in the volume of water flowing over this rapids.

By the time ot the late 18th-century epidemics, Mandans and others

were declining in power while the bison-hunting Sioux were increasing, with more raiding by the latter of the former, with a gradual movement of the Sioux west toward bison herds, south toward areas where horses were being raised and traded, with generally rising population pressures on other tribes.

the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (8/6/1945) and Nagasaki (8/9/1945)

were seen after the war as "experiments" in what nuclear war might actually look...and so also served as nightmare prophecies of what a post-holocaust landscape might look like in a nuclear age.

This hunt followed a seasonal cycle:

whalers left New England in the autumn, rounded Cape Horn in in the southern summer, arrived in Hawai'i in April, reaching the Bering Sea pack ice in mid-June. There, the whalers traded with Alaskan Natives and hunted marine mammals like seals and walruses (Pribilof Islands became a major site for this ancillary harvest) until the pack ice broke up in late July. Whalers then hunted bowheads from then until the pack ice began to form again in late September.

One additional example of a fishery that experienced massive collapse until regulations were imposed on its harvest:

whaling.

Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident until March 11, 2011

when an earthquake and tsunami led to meltdowns of 3 reactors at Fukushima in Japan.

A crisis for Clements' paradigm a stable self-equilibrating climax would come in the 1930s

when extended and very serious drought on the Great Plains succeeded in destroying the supposedly "stable" climax grasslands. The Clementsian school eventually declined, moving toward the science of range management while shedding the original guiding vision of a stable climax.

May 1934 ushered in Dust Bowl

when storm on May 9 carried 350 million tons to East Coast in single storm. Massive duststorms eroded hundreds of millions tons of soil.

Beyond this ring

where no goods could pay for the journey to market: wilderness?

In 1987, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice publisheed its report on Toxic Waste and Race in the United States

which argued that people of color suffered disproportionate environmental risk, estimating that 60% of African-Americans and Latinos and 50% of Asians and Indians lived in communities with at least one uncontrolled toxic waste dump. It also declared that 40% of the nation's toxic landfill capacity was concentrated in just three counties: Emelle, Alabama, with 79% African-American population; Scotlandville, Louisiana, 93% African-American; and Kettleman City, California, 78.4% Latino.

This claim had deep roots reaching all the way back to Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

which argued that while resources increased arithmetically, population increased geometrically, creating the ever-present possibility of what has since come to be called a "Malthusian crisis." Human population growth would always tend to press against the limits of the natural environment, especially food resources.

In 1951, Carson wrote an introduction to oceanography entitled The Sea Around Us

which became a world-wide best-seller, providing Carson with financial security for the first time in her life and enabling her to retire from government employment.

TVA built on the tradition of USDA agricultural extension supported by Smith-Lever Act of 1914

which created cooperative extension services whereby land-grant universities made their knowledge widely available to rural areas.

James Mooney's Aboriginal Population of America North of Mexico (1928

which estimated that the total population of Indians in all of North America at the time Columbus made his voyage was just 1.1 million

Acid rain became a major political cause in Canada

which had taken more aggressive steps to address the problem than US, causing considerable diplomatic friction between the two countries (but note also the benefit for Quebec hydropower from increasing costs of midwestern electricity, creating incentive to transport power across the border).

This movement found political expression in Francis G. Newlands' Reclamation Act of 1902

which provided federal financial support for irrigation of homestead-scale family farms, with a revolving fund intended to finance by investments in new irrigated farms.

A conservative rejoinder came from the economist Julian Simon and the futurist Herman Kahn in a book entitled The Resourceful Earth (1983)

which refuted the Global 2000 Report point-for-point: the world was getting better, not worse, in all ways.

One key early agency was the National Resources Board

which released its first report promoting large-scale planning in 1934. Here's the key passage from the Foreword of the report that I read in lecture, which echoes many of the themes of the Progressive conservation movement while suggesting the new national scale of planning that the New Deal to which sought to apply them.

The impact of NEPA's new EIS requirement was broadened by Judge J. Skelly Wright's decision in Calvert Cliffs v. AEC (Atomic Energy Commission), 1971

which ruled that the AEC had obligation to conduct EIS on thermal pollution from reactor. This became a precedent for the much more controversial Alaskan Pipeline EIS.

Lobbying efforts in Congress were significantly benefited by the efforts of the Northern Pacific Railroad

which saw the park as a way to promote tourism (and passenger traffic) along its route. (Railroad access to the park would begin in 1883.)

Barry Goldwater in 1964 had campaigned on a libertarian critique of social programs and excessive government intrusion on private liberty

while affirming the need for a strong military during the Cold War era. Lyndon Johnson's campaign played on public fears of nuclear war, most notoriously in famous "Daisy" ad on 9/7/1964, implying that Goldwater might launch a nuclear World War III

Carhart allied with Aldo Leopold

who argued for a new "special primitive area" designation for Gila National Forest in New Mexico, saying that it should remain be roadless. His vision was that there should be primitive areas where back-country travelers could escape cars and other mechanized devices.

Carson was prompted to write about the problem of pesticides by a letter she received from her friend Olga Owens Huckins

who complained that spraying for mosquitoes was killing large numbers of birds in the preserve behind Huckins' house. (Carson had become aware of the potential negative effects of pesticides on wildlife back in the 1940s and had tried to publish an essay about this topic, but couldn't find a publisher for it.)

Among the chief visionaries advocating for the revolutionary transformations that could be achieved via irrigation in the arid West was William Ellsworth Smythe,

whose 1900 book The Conquest of Arid America was the most important tract promoting government support of irrigation.

Facilitated harvest of resources that changed location seasonally

wigwam

The 1970s also increasing use of the courts and administrative regulatory hearings to throw up obstacles to construction

with experts on both sides testifying about the safety or risks of reactor design. The result, paradoxically, was a growing reliance on the knowledge of professional experts coupled with growing suspicion of expert authority as experts were increasingly seen as far from disinterested in their advocacy. Was there no objective knowledge about such matters?

The linkage of inexpensive hydroelectricity with energy-intensive industries (nitrates, aluminum, nuclear) became common during this period

with government funding for dam construction justified as a form of military expenditure during wartime. Muscle Shoals and the Wilson Dam were boosted in the South as a source fertilizer and electricity for urban-industrial development, with the federal government providing investment capital for infrastructure.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a crucial figure

with his moment crossing the Simplon Pass in the Alps in his long autobiographical poem The Prelude serving as a paradigmatic encounter with Sublime: vast force of Nature as deity:

They were aided in this effort by the report of Ferdinand Hayden expedition in 1871

with illustrations by Thomas Moran and William Henry Jackson: landscape painter and photographer working together to create images that could be used to increase public awareness of Yellowstone and argue for its protection.

Frederick Jackson Turner's westward moving frontier can be seen as the migration of von Thünen's rings

with intensive agriculture around cities, extensive grain in the Midwest, livestock on the Great Plains. Turner's famous passage about the stages of the frontier can almost be read as an inverted description of von Thünen's map:

Oliver Evans' "Improved Mill,"

with inventions to use single drive train in grinding, sifting, lifting, sacking flour. Evans (1755-1819) grew up in the Philadelphia/Wilmington area, went to country school through age of 14, then apprenticed to a wagon maker, quickly demonstrated his mechanical genius. Published the The Young Mill-wright and Miller's Guide in 1795

1962 saw the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

with its depictions of a natural world devastated by the white powder of a different sort of fallout, chemical pesticides. In her writings, public fears about the effects of radiation came together with new fears of toxic chemicals to energize a new form of environmental politics that would soon come to be called environmentalism.

The early 1970s saw increasing hostility to nuclear power

with large public protests focused on trying to stop construction of particular plants (e.g., Seabrook in New Hampshire, Diablo Canyon in California); or stopping the transport or storage of reactor wastes (Jerusalem, New York).

In 1985, British scientists discovered an ozone "hole" over Antarctica

with resulting fears about the effects of rising levels of ultraviolent radition on plankton and marine food supplies, crop damage if ozone depletion were found in the mid latitudes of the planet, as well as potential increases in human skin cancer from UV radiation. There had in fact been a steady rise in melanoma and basal cell skin cancers since the 1930s...but this was caused as much changes in fashion--the boom in tanning and exposing bare skin to summer sunlight--as by shifts in the atmosphere.

Baden-Powell's vision of the Boy Scouts very much reflected his British imperial vision

with strong emphasis on military virtues and discipline. Seton's American version had less of this emphasis when Seton helped found the U.S. branch of Boy Scouts in 1910.

emerging immunity to one invading infection provides no protection to other such infections

with the result that repeated waves of epidemics became part of the biological population of native populations in the Americas: a classic example in the twentieth century occurred during the construction of the Alcan Highway during World War II in 1942-3

The impulse toward reducing labor costs that so often characterized the US economy occurred here too

with workers being imported from China and Latin America, as well as investments in labor-saving technologies that eliminated a number of workers from the production process.

Leopold would nonetheless later argue that people should be "Thinking Like a Mountain"

wolves as much as deer were essential to the health of ecological community, in order to prevent ungulate overpopulation that would threaten the range.

The Izaak Walton League, founded 1922,

would be play central role in promoting a national wildlife refuge system where breeding populations of wild birds could safely reproduce.

Aldo Leopold

wrote in his essay "On a Monument to a Passenger Pigeon" at the dedication of a plaque for the bird at Wyalusing State Park in Wisconsin in 1947

1976: first government investigations into possible problems at the site occurred

yielding a catalog of toxic chemicals with serious health implications. Families in the neighborhood were terrified. Property values fell precipitously, making it impossible for them to cash in the equity in their houses to move elsewhere.

trade affecting Alaska

destruction of fur-bearing mammals for fur trade; another was copper mining

Masculine sublime vs feminine beautiful

Burke

Miasma and bad morals initially believed to cause

Cholera

Horse enabled radical expansion of hunting, herding, and political power

Comanches

Johann Heinrich Von Thunen

Isolated state abstracting geographical consequeces of the market as interface between city and country city in midst of featureless agricultural plain how far goods travel depends on price, cost of transport, and value on land on which they're produced

fire represented a genuine manipulation of landscape we'd recognize as having been altered by human activity:

European beliefs in "virgin land," unaltered by human beings, in many ways promulgated a myth that ignored the role of native peoples in reshaping many ecosystems on the North American continent but for native peoples, their most important efforts at manipulation came through a universe of ritual gift-giving, honoring the mutual obligations among people, animals, and spirits: Indian communities recognized their vulnerability to fluctuation in seasons, and sought to regularize their subsistence by supplicating the spirits responsible for controlling such fluctuations

Alfred Crosby

European expansion was most "successful" in "Neo-Europes" of temperate latitudes where biological co-invaders enabled Europeans to reproduce their bio-cultural systems: US, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina, Australia. Where what Crosby calls the "co-invaders" of Europeans failed to thrive, so often did European efforts at colonization.

Lowell

Francis Cabot Lowell's Boston Manufacturing Co. opened its first factory at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1813: the "Waltham System" manufactured cotton cloth, organized and managed by single corporation, with factory powered by water. Much more extensive: Patrick Tracy Jackson's associates at Lowell, Mass, (originally called East Chelmsford) used power from Pawtucket Falls of Merrimac River combined with the Middlesex Canal to deliver power to water-powered factories. Growing number of factories all drew water from the canal, with integral linkage of town, residences, factories, along the town's proliferating canal network.

Wampum

Indian good that also functioned as status item. Its use significantly expanded with the coming of the fur trade. From this point of view, we can interpret European merchants as marketers of status goods, shuttling between wampum makers on Long Island Sound and fur hunters in the northern interior.

Isolated State

Johann Heinrich von Thünen's The Isolated State (1826) offers one useful way of abstracting geographical consequences of the market as an interface between city and country

Water power led to new industrial forms to women's work

Lowell

Henry Allen

Lt. Henry Allen's Army exploring party into Kennecott area: local vs. imported food at Kennecott, Lt. Allen brought new cultural conceptions of what copper meant: conductor for electricity, placed lower value on its decorative qualities

"Morning Bell"

New England factories were predicated on a largely female labor force (already skilled in needlework) migrating from country to city (initially rural New England farm girls, eventually Irish immigrants, both making the journey from rural to urban employment). Winslow Homer's famous painting "(Old Mill) Morning Bell" can serve as a symbol of this newly mechanized form of employment

relationship of Indians to universe of animals and plants far different from European notions of nature

No comparable monolithic category like "Nature." Instead: multiplicity of creatures and spirits in living universe filled with awareness, gifts, dangers, spiritual complexities, moral responsibilities

Henry William Herbert

One key promoter of a new ethic of sportsmanship among hunters was Henry William Herbert (1807-58). He was born in England, migrated to NYC in 1831, and wrote Field Sports in the U.S. and British Provinces of America, in 1848 under the pseudonym Frank Forester.

Petalesharo

Pawnee chief Petalesharo being told by Quaker missionary that he should stop hunting, settle down, and depend solely on "civilized" farming; Petalesharo responded that to stop hunt would mean stopping the sacrifice of bison meat to the spirits responsible for overseeing the success of the planting, which in turn would mean that corn crops would fail.

David Potter

People of Plenty (1954) argued that Turner was correct not about free land but rather about the more generalized abundance of natural resources as a defining feature of US economy and culture.

Colonial era Englishman that invented system for rationalizing land measurements

Red herring

Hunting by elite sportsman were central to ideas of masculinity, early conservation

Red herring (but could be Henry William Herbert, Grinnell, Frank Forrester

The Grid

The United States preferred the abstract grid of Enlightenment, the Cartesian coordinate plane, codified in the great 1785 Land Ordinance: square mile grid units (640 acres, with 36 square miles constituing a township) were imposed in the Northwest Territory by government survey to facilitate sale to settlers and speculators. This grid pattern proliferated outward to entire landscape west of Ohio River: affecting everything from rural road systems to farmers' fields to city streets. You'll see it almost everywhere when you fly over the western United States today.

Intensive agriculture, take place nearest to market

Von Thunen

Half-Timber Frames

Woodworking was a key technological difference between natives and colonists, and what the colonists created was very much a wooden world. Saws, axes, froes, and other tools were used for cutting and splitting wood. Construction became increasingly wood-intensive compared with England, as did burning wood for fires: wooden clapboards replaced plaster, shingles replaced thatch. Colonists ultimately abandoned the half-timbered framing of houses that was so characteristic of wood-scarce Tudor England.

death & violence everywhere

according to Indians, life lives by killing. The burden of the hunter is to take responsibility for the consequences of bringing death to conscious beings like oneself.

storage of food critical to maintaining larger populations

and control of such stored foods also helped create the material foundations for more elaborate class hierarchies except in Southwest, horticulture largely a woman's activity; mixed Mesoamerican crops of maize, squash, and beans were planted in polycultures that made optimum use of land while also yielding a harvest rich in calories and complementary proteins

Henry Dobyns

assumed a mortality rate of 90% and calculated pre-Columbian North American Indian population at 10-12 million, with the population of the entire hemisphere amounting to 90-110 million Dobyns' arguments generated much controversy and his estimates were likely too high, but they scholars today all agree that native populations in the Americas suffered terrifyingly high mortalities in the wake of being exposed to Eurasian epidemics

owners new mining company could conceive of land as capital,

because their own livelihoods did not depend on local resources, they could exploit land much more than Ahtna had done: consume the copper for profit, then abandon the mine and move on

Pawnee chief Petalesharo

being told by Quaker missionary that he should stop hunting, settle down, and depend solely on "civilized" farming; Petalesharo responded that to stop hunt would mean stopping the sacrifice of bison meat to the spirits responsible for overseeing the success of the planting, which in turn would mean that corn crops would fail.

at Kennecott, Lt. Allen

brought new cultural conceptions of what copper meant: conductor for electricity, placed lower value on its decorative qualities

horticulturalists

can be more sedentary, storing food in anticipation of hungry times when food was scarce, thereby evening out the seasonal variabilities that might otherwise yield hunger or even starvation ritual universe applies here as well: cycle of planting, weeding, harvest accompanied by ritual dances, ceremonies

questions begin with environment: catalog of features that help define place

climate, soil, vegetation, etc.

techniques for handling cedar for boats, tools, houses

complex wood-working technologies used fire before the acquisition of iron and steel in trade with traders from Europe and Asia, then rich growth of new wood-working techniques with the arrival of these metals: cultures embedded in materials of physical world

Kennecott is now perceived as a remote "wilderness," much sought after by backpackers & climbers, and that too is part of its story

conceiving of this land as "wilderness" is as much a product of this history as are the abandoned mines

at Kennecott, a human population that depended almost entirely on the local landscape was invaded bya human population that depended on local landscape almost not at all

converting copper to cash, with massive environmental and economic effects

Kennecott would not have existed without the natural mineral that called it into being, but its history was hardly determined by nature

copper could not be exploited without the discovery of electricity, growth of urban markets, rise of mining technologies

Integral to new vaccination technique that redefined human relationship to disease

cowpox

agriculture often linked to seasonal hunting activities too

cycle of planting and harvesting crops tied to cycles of hunting and gathering in complex web of ecological and spiritual interdependence

one danger of catalogs is their apparent __________

disconnectedness the task of environmental history is to find connections

trade ties people in different parts of world to ecosystems in which they do not live

distant ecological effects such linkages form new "paths out of town," and become powerful causal forces for environmental change

environmental history integrates 3 perspectives on past

ecology of people as organisms sharing universe with other organisms political economy of people as social beings reshaping nature and each other to produce collective life cultural values of people as self-reflective beings trying to find meaning of lives in world

Ahtna natives with Lt. Henry Allen's Army

exploring party into Kennecott area: local vs. imported food

sweeping generalizations seemingly about all Indians

extraordinary diversity of North America's native peoples. intimacy and intricacy of the many adaptations native peoples chose to different environments, with resulting complexity of the niches they chose to occupy

Cyrus McCormick

first developed mechanical reaper in Virginia in 1831, but didn't begin large-scale manufacture until he moved to Chicago to set up factory there in 1847. He and others produced series of innovations all designed to reduce labor costs: self-raking reapers, self-binding reapers, eventually reaper-thresher combines where market could support them.

technology helps define and draw boundaries around different human niches relative to these fish

hook/spear/net/weir/trap technologies to catch salmon

Mistassini Cree east of Hudson's Bay

hunting strategies and techniques linked to gift relationship with animals, who sacrificed themselves so that hunters may live, in return for ritual gift payments: gifts maintain cycles behind the animals: keepers of the game, spirits responsible for the well-being of game animals, who must be thanked and supplicated in exchange for success in the hunt variability of resource base (animal populations) required spreading of subsistence across numerous species, along with the maintenance of low population densities (Liebig's Law)

Ahtna

inhabited the region before Kennecott existed few boundaries between people and animals; instead, powerful` spiritual connections, gift-giving relations crucial to success or failure of hunt: luck and bad luck as signs of whether relationships between people and animals were as they should be

Cowpox

lymph from cowpox postules would vaccinate for smallpox (an insight he and others first gained by realizing that milkmaids who had handled infected udders seemed to be immune to smallpox).

George Bird Grinnell

metaphor of spending no more than the interest earned each year by one's capital would seem to be apt as a rule for the sustainable harvest of a hunted or fished annual population.

Kennecott Collapse

mineral began to give out, copper prices collapsed in depression of 1930s, mines closed in 1938; Kennecott Copper Co. would outlive its namesake to become world's largest copper producer

Stephen Birch

mining engineer, formed Alaskan Syndicate with $10 million of Guggenheim and Morgan capital from New York City, dug mines, erected mill town, and constructed railroad from Cordova on south coast

Game Hogs

o Pejorative label used to label sport hunters

how to connect people to their environment

one starting point is to ask what they eat: each article of food follows complicated pathways from ecosystem to dinner table to waste; not just physical but spiritual

Garrett Hardin

popularized this "fisherman's problem" in 1968 by relabeling it "Tragedy of the Commons" Hardin narrated it by telling a story about competitive medieval peasants selfishly adding cattle to graze a common pasture until that pasture was completely destroyed. Hardin originally framed this as an expression of "human nature", but in fact the underlying market logic is a cultural construction of a particular historical moment. In fact, medieval pastures were often ritually regulated just as native fishing areas was, so that common property resources didn't fail from over harvests. Only in a competitive market economy--the product of relatively recent history--did this problem seem to emerge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

probably the single most important figure in American romanticism, enormously influential to his contemporaries even though he's not much read today. His book Nature (1836) was manifesto of Transcendentalism, a leading American version of romanticism. Its injunction to readers was to experience universe directly, as living prophets, with a kind of mystical optimism suffusing the text.

more often than not, fire also increased game resources by via what twentieth-century ecologists called the "edge effect"

producing grassy, open landscapes favored by a number of game species

1900

prospectors discovered above Kennicott Glacier one of world's richest lodes of copper ore

Northwest Coast peoples of British Columbia, and Alaska: Tlingits, Haidas, Tsimshians, Kwakiutls, Salish, etc.

richest and most reliable source of subsistence were salmon, which each year followed their own ecological cycle of traveling far upstream from ocean to lay eggs, give young best chance of survival

Calvin Martin

spiritual argument in his controversial 1978 book: "keepers of the game" were linked in Indian cultures with disease. Indians saw hunt as gift relationship regulated by sanctions of animal death on the one hand, and human disease on the other.

Coyote (companion of Eagle)

stealing the Sun and the Moon and by so doing bringing cold and ice and winter to the world

for Kennecott copper to be mined, it had first to be owned:

systems of property ownership partitioned the landscape, turned parts of it into commodities, and made them available to be owned and sold: capital

McCarthy

the private town farther down the valley, sold entertainment and services to miners

native peoples used fire for clearing fields and many other purposes, yielding their greatest ecological effects on North American landscapes

use of fire occurred across the continent, with different effects depending on ecosystems: in Northeast, open, park-like forest in area around villages; in Midwest, the eastward extension of prairie grasslands was at least somewhat aided by native burning; in the West, drier ecosystems both limited the effects of fire and shifted species composition toward fire-tolerant species in locations where anthropogenic fire could make a difference

Kennecott, called "Camp,"

was dominated by middle-class managers and their families, subtle hierarchy of dwellings and other structures

Sublime

wordsworth