BiblioVault - Books about American Environmentalism

The City Natural

Garden and Forest Magazine and the Rise of American Environmentalism

Shen Hou

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013

The weekly magazine Garden and Forest existed for only nine years (1888–1897). Yet, in that brief span, it brought to light many of the issues that would influence the future of American environmentalism. In The City Natural, Shen Hou presents the first “biography” of this important but largely overlooked vehicle for individuals with the common goal of preserving nature in American civilization.

As Hou’s study reveals, Garden and Forest was instrumental in redefining the fields of botany and horticulture, while also helping to shape the fledgling professions of landscape architecture and forestry. The publication actively called for reform in government policy, urban design, and future planning for the preservation and inclusion of nature in cities. It also attempted to shape public opinion on these issues through a democratic ideal that every citizen had the right (and need) to access nature. These notions would anticipate the conservation and “city beautiful” movements that followed in the early twentieth century.

Hou explains the social and environmental conditions that led to the rise of reform efforts, organizations, and publications such as Garden and Forest. She reveals the intellectual core and vision of the magazine as a proponent of the city natural movement that sought to relate nature and civilization through the arts and sciences. Garden and Forest was a staunch advocate of urban living made better through careful planning and design. As Hou shows, the publication also promoted forest management and preservation, not only as a natural resource but as an economic one. She also profiles the editors and contributors who set the magazine’s tone and follows their efforts to expand America’s environmental expertise.

Through the pages of Garden and Forest, the early period of environmentalism was especially fruitful and optimistic; many individuals joined forces for the benefit of humankind and helped lay the foundation for a coherent national movement. Shen Hou’s study gives Garden and Forest its due and adds an important new chapter to the early history of American environmentalism.

[more]

Earth Rising

American Environmentalism In The 21St Century

Philip Shabecoff

Island Press, 2001

"The mission of environmentalism is to mobilize society at all levels to confront the danger and disorder into which human activity has propelled us and guide us to a safer, saner way of living on the planet.... Environmentalism has never been about catastrophe. It is about alternatives, about changing course, about transforming the future." --Philip Shabecoff, from Earth Rising Philip Shabecoff, America's preeminent environmental journalist, has spent more than two decades thinking and writing about the environment and related subjects, as a reporter for The New York Times, as publisher of Greenwire, and as the author of two books, including the critically acclaimed A Fierce Green Fire. In Earth Rising, he draws on that experience to offer a pointed and thought-provoking critique of the current state and future prospects of the American environmental movement.Based on extensive interviews with a wide range of individuals both within and outside of the movement, Shabecoff elucidates the issues and problems confronting today's environmentalists and analyzes the movement's strengths and weaknesses. Viewing environmental threats as symptoms of flaws in our society and its systems, he considers the urgent need for a broader, more inclusive environmentalism, and examines the role environmentalists can -- and must -- play in: reforming the education system taming the global economy and making it an instrument of human needs working for political reform, including reducing the influence of corporate spending on the electoral process directing the course of the scientific enterprise as well as making use of its results helping develop a new moral center for people throughout the nation and the world Throughout, Shabecoff emphasizes the need for national organizations to link together with grassroots groups and to become more responsive to local concerns, and argues that the environmental movement has not yet adequately prepared itself to meet current and coming challenges. He makes a compelling case that another wave of environmentalism is needed -- more powerful, diverse and sophisticated, visionary and flexible. Earth Rising offers a detailed road map that can guide environmentalists toward that new and reenergized place in society.

[more]

The Malthusian Moment

Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism

Robertson, Thomas

Rutgers University Press, 2012

Although Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is often cited as the founding text of the U.S. environmental movement, in The Malthusian Moment Thomas Robertson locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in twentieth-century adaptations of Thomas Malthus’s concerns about population growth. For many environmentalists, managing population growth became the key to unlocking the most intractable problems facing Americans after World War II—everything from war and the spread of communism overseas to poverty, race riots, and suburban sprawl at home.

Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian thinking in the United States from World War I to Earth Day 1970, then traces the just-as-surprising decline in concern beginning in the mid-1970s. In addition to offering an unconventional look at World War II and the Cold War through a balanced study of the environmental movement’s most contentious theory, the book sheds new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the rise of consumption, the growth of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the civil rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”

[more]