The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State (review)

Natural environments rarely coincide with political boundaries. Instead, they tend to spill messily across them, following the courses of waterways, forests, and other natural features and the movements of wildlife, plants, pathogens, and people. In so doing, they often confound historians seeking to impose some sort of geographical limitation on their studies.

Stradling justifies his choice to write the first comprehensive environmental history of New York State in two ways. The first points to the Empire State’s uniqueness. It is, he says, a place “where critical environmental history has occurred” and where “important personalities” and noteworthy landscapes abound. As evidence, he offers Central Park (“the national model for the nineteenth-century urban landscaped park”), Adirondack Park and Niagara Falls, Levittown (a model for postwar suburban developments nationwide), Love Canal, James Fenimore Cooper, the Hudson River school of painters, and two Presidents Roosevelt—all New Yorkers of one sort or another (1). But New York is not that unique; Stradling’s second point is that its experiences—and his book—serve also as a “primer of the nation’s environmental history” (2).

Stradling begins analytically, mulling back and forth over whether New York (or any single U.S. state) merits a book-length investigation. In the end he splits his answer, arguing for the “utility of a state as a unit of study” but adding, “clearly . . . New York is not a meaningful ecological unit” (6, 8). The rest of the book, however, is primarily narrative—a “chronological telling” of the state’s environmental history (12).

Periodization and major themes follow well-established lines from environmental historiography at the national level. Thus, chapters 1 and 2—oriented around the environmental consequences of the market revolution— treat Native American societies and the impact of European settlement from Hudson’s arrival in 1609 to the construction of the Erie Canal in the early nineteenth century. Chapter 3 looks at the nineteenth-century Romantic movement as an example of cultural influence. Subsequent chapters trace the emergence of government regulation in the late nineteenth century, Progressive-era conservation, the postwar “economic boom, suburban sprawl, and environmental activism,” “the role of democracy in providing a check on big business,” and the “contributions of women and minorities to the environmental movement since the 1960s” (12). The book concludes with the author’s ruminations on recent visits to Love Canal, Manhattan’s Meatpacking district, and Woodman’s Pond near Hamilton. Stradling sees each of these as “cautionary landscapes”—places rich with lessons (some learned, others ignored) about the delicate and ever-changing balance between social and natural systems (237). The most important of these lessons, he says, is that “planning matters over the long term” (238). There has been little of this in New York’s chaotic, dynamic history; and the need for it now is greater than ever.

Stradling draws mainly on published primary sources, including newspapers, census records, and contemporary magazines and books, as well as a wide variety of more recent secondary literature on the history of New York and American environmental history. The book includes a bibliographical essay that itself serves as a good introduction to the topics covered.

Specialists will not find much here that they do not already know. However, the book excels as a text for what I imagine must be its intended audience of undergraduate and graduate students and for the educated general reader. Stradling gives evenhanded attention to a wide variety of environments—wilderness, rural-agricultural, suburban, and urban, including lively segments on Manhattan neighborhoods in earlier times. He makes abundantly clear the fundamental importance of environment and place as the bedrock of the state’s political, economic, and social development. In fact, he weaves together New York’s environmental and more general histories in such elegant fashion that one wonders how the two could ever be considered separately. This, incidentally, renders the book equally appropriate for courses on...