SAVING THE PLANET
The American Response to the Environment in the Twentieth Century
by Hal K. Rothman
Rothman (Devil’s Bargains, not reviewed) examines the factors that have influenced Americans’ perceptions of their natural
world over the last 100 years and explains how those factors have shaped and reshaped our national environmental consciousness. During the 20th century, Rothman argues, there grew an American sensibility that moved beyond the rhapsodizings and pleadings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Marsh to an active and protective embrace of nature, sometimes communally, if more often for individual motives. He charts that shift in outlook starting with the turn-of-the-century revulsion from the inequities wrought by industrialization: the skewed distribution of wealth and, particularly, the plunder of resources. Such disgust paved the way for Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressivism and Gifford Pinchot’s call to conservation. But this was a politics of bounty, contends Rothman, and when the economy faltered, we were happy to pillage nature anew to get things back on track: Witness Teapot Dome and the damming of the Colorado. In FDR’s environmental ministerings—including the WPA and CCC as well as the TVA—Rothman sees the eastern elitist approach, which, buttressed again by a boom economy, held sway into the coming decades. While he nods in passing to the zeitgeist, he too often ascribes the sparks that lit the countercultural environmental movement to prosperity and entitlement (call it "full-stomach environmentalism") and gives short shrift to ethical dimensions, ignoring the influential likes of Barry Commoner and Murray Bookchin. Better is his detailing of the effects of earlier defining moments—Echo Park Dam, Silent Spring—and the later local and grassroots efforts of such groups as the Love Canal Homeowners Association to establish a balanced approach to economic development and preservation and manifest a sense of decency and responsibility. A thoughtful tracking of the American environmental sympathies during this century that suffers only from its urge to grant
the economy an imperious, overarching role.