• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

There has been a shift away from conceptions of nature as a realm of chaos and savagery, and away from conceptions of nature as a cornucopia of resources, and toward conceptions of nature as a universal, life-sustaining “environment” or ecosystem. The new conception is that of a natural system with planet-wide interdependencies, encompassing Homo sapiens and providing most fundamental sustenance for this species. This redefinition of nature, championed by scientists and environmental activists, facilitated the striking level of world mobilization that has emerged.21

By the 1970s a common belief system emerged. Environmentalists would have agreed with statements like “We are severely abusing the environment” and “There are limits to growth beyond which our industrialized society cannot expand.” They would have disagreed with the idea that “humans have the right to modify the natural environment for our own ends.”22 In the energy world, the environmental movement promoted “soft” technologies like wind and solar. Hard technologies like hydroelectric facilities as well as coal and nuclear plants were anathema. And, of course, environmentalists were identified with hippies.

This story of the environmental movement is tidy and coherent, and it possesses a good kernel of truth. But like most creation stories, it hides some things and emphasizes others. The raw material of what happened has been pounded into new and useful forms by political groups and their enemies.“Even though we use the phrase ‘the environmental movement,’ it’s bullshit,” said Adam Rome, a Penn State professor who is probably the world’s scholarly authority on the genesis and origins of environmentalism in America.23 It’s simply not an accurate depiction of the incredible variety of people who wanted to reconfigure our relationship with the nonhuman world. Not all of them were primarily interested in protecting biodiversity, and many of them were just fine with modifying the natural environment for human ends. Historian Andrew Kirk wrote,

One of the popular misconceptions about environmental advocacy in American history stems from the desire to celebrate the few individuals who advocated the preservation of nature where humans weren’t, while often ignoring those who worked to use their technological enthusiasm to benefit nature. Historical actors in the drama of twentieth-century environmental advocacy are often rated on a sliding scale according to the purity of their wilderness vision.24

There is an alternate vision, though, that this book has tried to highlight and that historians like Rome and Kirk have begun to excavate. From the late 1950s onward, traditional Democratic liberals—the FDR type, not the eco type—had a pretty coherent program for making the country better: Boost public spending on the social goods that private enterprise seemed to neglect, including environmental protection to provide “qualitatively” better lives for a large middle class that had it all. The impulse would eventually underpin Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs as well as Nixon’s environmental program.

The most-quoted passage from the economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 best-selling book The Affluent Society described the sorts of problems that American society began to encounter in the years after World War II. In it, increasingly nice private goods shuttle and protect Americans from a deteriorating public environment. Galbraith thundered,

The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered, and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires.... They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of