Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History
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DOWN TO EARTH
ALSO BY TED STEINBERG
ACTS OF GOD: THE UNNATURAL HISTORY OF
NATURAL DISASTER IN AMERICA
SLIDE MOUNTAIN, OR THE FOLLY OF
OWNING NATURE
NATURE INCORPORATED: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND THE
WATERS OF NEW ENGLAND
DOWN TO EARTH
NATURE’S ROLE IN AMERICAN HISTORY
TED STEINBERG
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2002 by Ted Steinberg
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Text design by Cathleen Bennett
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steinberg, Theodore, 1961–
Down to earth : nature’s role in American history / Ted Steinberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-514009-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Human ecology—United States—History. 2. Philosophy of nature—United
States—History. 3. Human beings—Effect of environment on—United States—History.
4. United States—Environmental conditions. I. Title.
GF27.S85 2002
333.7′13′0973—dc21
2001047600
Printing number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
TO DONALD WORSTER
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE Rocks and History
PART 1 Chaos to Simplicity
1 Wilderness under Fire
2 A Truly New World
3 Reflections from a Woodlot
PART 2 Rationalization and Its Discontents
4 A World of Commodities
5 King Climate in Dixie
6 The Great Food Fight
7 Extracting the New South
8 The Unforgiving West
9 Conservation Reconsidered
10 Death of the Organic City
PART 3 Consuming Nature
11 Moveable Feast
12 The Secret History of Meat
13 America in Black and Green
14 Throwaway Society
15 Shades of Green
16 Planet U.S.A.
CONCLUSION Disney Takes on the Animal Kingdom
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
This book will try to change the way you think about American history. It deals with some familiar topics—colonization, the industrial revolution, slavery, the Civil War, consumerism—and some not so well-known—the Little Ice Age, horse manure, pig sties, fast food, lawns, SUVs, and garbage. I will argue that the natural world—defined here as plants and animals, climate and weather, soil and water—has profoundly shaped the American past.
Historians of course have not completely overlooked nature. Virtually every U.S. history textbook, for instance, has an obligatory section on Theodore Roosevelt and the conservation movement. Sometimes there is also a brief discussion of the environmental reforms that began in the 1960s. Nature as politics—that has long been the main concern. You are unlikely to learn anything about the role of climate or soil fertility in history. Little about how Americans and Native Americans before them went about the task of feeding themselves. Virtually nothing about pigs, chickens, cows, and corn—or hamburgers, despite the fact that McDonald’s plays a major role in the lives of so many people. Nothing about global warming or cooling. Not a word about volcanic eruptions across the world that led to hunger in America.
For most members of the profession and, almost by definition, for most Americans, history unfolds against a stable environmental backdrop. Nature is taken for granted and passed over in the rush to discuss what really mattered—wars, elections, and the other mainstays of political and intellectual history. Social history, pioneered during the 1960s and centered on exploring the lives of ordinary people, has proved no more receptive to the idea of nature as a dynamic force. Practicing history “from the bottom up,” as some of the new social historians put it, meant digging down into the nitty-gritty of everyday existence, into work, family life, sexual orientation, gender relations, and race. But by and large, the social historians put away their shovels when they reached the land and soil itself.
And yet a shift as important as the industrial revolution, for example, did not take place in a setting from which nature was somehow magically excluded. Industrialization never would have unfolded in the way that it did were New England not blessed with the ample precipitation and water resources required to power the cotton mills—water that had to be controlled with dams, which in turn put an end to spring fish runs and ultimately brought factory owners into conflict with distant rural farmers for whom salmon and shad represented their next meal. Even a political and military event like the Civil War was shaped by ecological factors. Soldiers and horses needed to be fed, and for that to happen both the Union and the Confederacy had to turn to the land. Robert E. Lee may have been a brilliant military strategist, but between battles he was reduced to finding ample forage for the horses his troops depended on to fight. Likewise, the growth of modern auto-centered suburbs hardly liberated people from nature. Natural forces impinged on suburban life, at times dramatically, as homeowners confronted landslides, floods, fires, and outbreaks of insects and weeds. Nature was not nearly as passive and unchanging as historians may have led us to believe.
Writing history “from the ground up” means rethinking the time periods that have thus far defined how we approach the past. Three turning points, corresponding to the parts of this book, are worth our attention. Many people think of peaceful Plymouth Rock as the start of our nation’s history. In fact, the European arrival in North America brought ecological tumult galore as two landmasses isolated for millions of years suddenly came into contact with one another. Disease, blight, cold, hunger, rats, weeds, and wolves, among other threats, confronted the Europeans in the first two centuries of settlement. It took time and plenty of hard work for them to make order out of the chaos, to transform the forests to meet their agricultural ambitions. But by 1800, they had created a world of fields planted with European grains and cash crops, of fences that shouted “Keep Out,” a simplified landscape largely devoid of wolves, bears, and deer, where the woods, if they existed at all in the wake of the colonist’s ax, were a good deal quieter than before.
The next turning point after the arrival of the Europeans occurred in the late eighteenth century. Thomas Jefferson was its architect. Well known as one of the nation’s founding fathers, Jefferson spent a great deal of time thinking about the relationship between land and democracy. How should the land be allotted to give every farmer enough to pursue a life of economic independence
? Jefferson turned to the Cartesian logic of the grid for an answer. In the Land Ordinance of 1785, surveyors gained authorization from the government to divide the land into perfectly square six-by-six-mile townships. The township itself was then laid out into 36 boxes, which when divided into quarters, yielded democracy’s building block: 160 acres of land, an amount Jefferson and subsequent political leaders believed would ensure freedom for the American farmer.
The grid was to the rationalization of nature what the Declaration of Independence was to freedom. It allowed the land to be bundled up and sold in one of the most sweeping attempts on record to put nature up for sale, the legacy of which is still visible today as one flies across the nation’s midsection. The grid, however, was just the opening stage in a century-long quest to bring nature into the world of exchange, as a price was put on everything from water and birds to trees and even buffalo bones, a vast transformation that left no region of the country—North, South, or West—untouched.
Turning point number three came with the rise of consumerism in the late nineteenth century with its automobiles and brand name foods such as Sunkist oranges and Sun-Maid raisins. Under this new economic order, production and consumption became physically divorced from each other. Nowhere was this clearer than in the way Americans went about feeding themselves. With fruits, vegetables, and meat no longer produced locally but on distant factory farms in such places as California, Arkansas, and North Carolina, where labor was cheap and sun abundant, people often failed to realize where their food came from, how it was made, and even who made it.
Nor, for that matter, did they realize the true costs of owning an automobile, perhaps the greatest symbol of the new consumer lifestyle. The profusion of cars in the 1920s and especially in the years following World War II resulted in a major transformation of the American landscape. With food coming from faraway factory farms, the land once planted with hay and crops gave way to roads and freeways paid for largely by the federal government. Ribbons of new asphalt and concrete brought in their wake the ubiquitous suburban development. Builders cleared the land of trees only to fill it with cookie-cutter tract housing and patches of lawn. A massive redistribution of financial resources from the city to the country was under way—a shift that had enormous ecological and social consequences.
The grid and the automobile may not have the drama of such political milestones as the American Revolution or the Civil War, but in terms of their impact on nature, not to mention people’s daily lives, they were just as important. The trends bound up in these two symbols cut to the core of human existence, to how we go about feeding and sheltering ourselves, getting from one place to another, getting rid of what we no longer need—seemingly mundane issues that historians have for too long ignored.
Many historians dismiss the field of environmental history as made up of people who assume what they need to prove: that America’s ecological health has been severely compromised. The question of what environmental well-being means is complicated. Even ecologists cannot agree on it. I consider a culture out of balance with the natural world if it is either undermining its present ability to sustain itself or foreclosing on its capacity to respond to future change. That is admittedly a very anthropocentric view. The loss of a plant or animal species may well be lamentable in its own right, regardless of its consequences for humankind. But since all cultures transform nature to some degree to survive, it is those maladaptive patterns that pose a threat to the very existence or future of a society itself that concern me most.
My intent is not to simply replace the triumphal view of history (as one march onward and upward) with a story of the environmental decline and fall of the American republic. Accounting for ecological change, not judging it, remains the main task of this book. What was the driving force behind the significant shifts in species diversity, soil fertility, and atmospheric conditions? Was it population growth? New technologies? My argument is that the transformation of nature—land, water, pine trees, pigeons, cows—into a commodity (a thing that can be traded for profit) was the most important single force behind these shifts. It was not the only factor, of course, but it was and remains the most important one. Putting a price tag on the natural world and drawing it into the web of commerce led to sweeping changes in ecosystems throughout the nation.
Commodities have a kind of magical quality about them. When people conceive of something as simple as an orange or a piece of lumber, they tend to view its very essence as bound up in its price. Monetary value, in other words, is seen as being intrinsic to the commodity in question, ingrained within the object itself. Commodities thus often obscure from view the human labor—the work—that produced them in the first place. Karl Marx called attention to this phenomenon back in the nineteenth century. In this book I will show that more than simply social relationships between workers and owners became masked in the process of commodification. Human relations with nature—the logging of forests, damming of rivers, plowing of grasslands, and other attempts to significantly transform ecosystems—suffered a similar fate. The benefits of modern living, from fast food to flush toilets, for all their virtues, have come at the price of ecological amnesia.
What follows is an attempt to penetrate the mystifying forces at work in our economic culture. Environmental history centers on the examination of various relationships—how natural forces shape history, how humankind affects nature, and how those ecological changes then turn around to influence human life once again in a reciprocating pattern. The field’s practitioners are thus well equipped to examine the ramifying effects and hidden costs of development, bringing previously obscure relationships into sharp relief in the process. Investigating the California Gold Rush, for example, we discover how it helped to trigger an ecological crisis far away on the Great Plains. Exploring the conservation of tourist-friendly animals in national parks, we can see its damaging effects on the survival strategies of poor whites and Indians. Examining an activity as mundane as eating a steak brings to light its drain on the West’s underground water supply. Environmental history is full of many such surprises.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began one day in 1999 when Bruce Borland, a freelance acquisitions editor working for Oxford University Press, called to ask whether I would be willing to write an environmental history textbook. My first answer was no. The thought of writing a comprehensive book largely devoid of argument made me shudder. Borland, I should say, is not your average textbook representative. He is a man with vision on a mission to see that college students receive books that convey the real excitement of learning. Here was an opportunity to introduce students to my field of expertise, a chance to shape how they thought about history and its place in the world today. What could be more important? I was sold. I thank Bruce for the education he gave me.
Douglas Sackman read a very early draft of the manuscript, slogging through the often dull and ungrammatical prose, pointing me in new directions and sending me back to the library time and again. His comments on the manuscript reflect not simply his intellectual breadth, but his commitment to first-rate teaching.
Jim O’Brien is not just my best critic and a dear friend, but the only person on earth willing to read three drafts of my work. Long live the Imperial Diner and its “boiled hamburger steak.”
Michael Black and Bob Hannigan have, between them, two of the best pairs of eyes in the business. I can’t thank them enough for their efforts. My thanks also to Tim Beal, Bruce Borland, David Morris, Helen Steinberg, and Joel Tarr for combing through the manuscript, in whole or in part, and showing me the path to clarity.
Peter Ginna at Oxford stepped in and placed a few chips on me. He is everything and more that an author could ask for in an editor. My thanks to Peter and his colleagues Peter Coveney and Gioia Stevens for believing and giving the book a shot with a larger trade audience. My gratitude too goes out to the terrific panel of anonymous and not so anonymous reviewers, including William Cronon and Adam Rome, who pou
red a great deal of time and energy into critiquing the manuscript. I know the book is better because of their trenchant criticism. It is also better because of the hard work put in by Oxford’s Christine D’Antonio, Furaha Norton, and Robert Tempio.
My agent Michele Rubin, with her keen sense of fairness, taught me that there is in fact such a thing as a free lunch. My Case Western history colleagues, ever faithful and supportive, passed along information and commented on an early chapter draft. Jonathan Sadowsky offered his usual challenging read and many great laughs along the way. Peter Whiting and Norman Robbins contributed some critical information at various points. And Peter McCall patiently explained numerous ecological principles and lent me some very large books that I’m still not sure I fully understand. No one could ask for a better research assistant than Julie Digianantonio. And as for Elsie Finley of the Kelvin Smith Library, may she never retire.
A Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies financed a year’s leave that was absolutely indispensable to the successful completion of this project. My thanks to Alan Taylor, James Boyd White, and Donald Worster for writing letters in support of my application. The College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Law at Case Western Reserve pitched in financially during the book’s final stages.
I thank Nathan Steinberg for his work of art, “The Old Days, 200–1931,” a constant source of inspiration, and Harry Steinberg for that gorgeous smile. And Salvatore, too, a man of the people who fought the good fight and gave us Maria. I loved him for all that.
Long ago a high school teacher named Fred Harrison taught me that history could really matter in life. It has taken me more than two decades to thank him. I hope he can forgive me. In the early 1980s, Bob Hannigan picked up where Fred left off. I’ll never forget the kindness he has shown me over the years. Then there was Donald Worster, who led me to see both the forest and the trees, who made even gritty Waltham, Massachusetts, and its Charles River come alive in ways I never before imagined. This book is for him.