Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States by Mark Fiege (review)

An environmental history of the Salem witch trials; an examination of the idea of nature in the Declaration of Independence; an analysis of how America’s natural environment shaped slavery, the Civil War, and civil rights; a story about how a love of the great outdoors led to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—these are just a few of the remarkable topics in Fiege’s Republic of Nature, What is even more surprising, and refreshing, is that the likes of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir (let alone Hetch Hetchy and Earth Day) never make an appearance in the book.

This different sort of environmental history is not a textbook covering the grand sweep of America’s past. Instead, Fiege has consciously chosen nine iconic historical moments from United States history—witch accusations in colonial New England, the American Revolution, slavery, Abraham Lincoln’s political ideology, the battle of Gettysburg, the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the Manhattan Project, Brown v. Board of Education, and the 1970s oil crisis—to illustrate the central role that nature often played in American history. As a result, readers learn that a scarcity of farmland in Salem fueled cultural anxieties that resulted in witchcraft accusations, that the ecologically unstable life cycle of the cotton plant both intensified brutality by masters toward slaves and provided opportunities for slave resistance, that victory in the Civil War depended as much on mud and mules as on guns, and that scientists built the atomic bomb, in part, because they loved hiking in the mountains around Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The Republic of Nature weaves together an amazing variety of historical approaches, in part because Fiege had to master several distinct historiographies, one for each of his nine chapters spanning the colonial era through the twenty-first century. Legal and gender history, for instance, inform his analysis of the Salem witch trials; intellectual history is central to his examination of both the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s political ideology; and economic and labor history shape his critique of the building of the transcontinental railroad. Yet Fiege is also not afraid to borrow alternative methods. Like many environmental histories, The Republic of Nature combines familiar historical source materials with scientific data. The book’s chapter about the opec oil embargo of the 1970s relies on biology, geology, and physics to tell the long history of fossil fuels on planet Earth. Most interesting, however, is Fiege’s fearless “reading” of nontraditional sources. In one of the most fascinating chapters of the book, he undertakes a cultural geographical analysis of the Topeka, Kansas, landscape, including a block-by-block mapping of Linda Brown’s daily walk to her school-bus stop, to provide a convincing environmental context for the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Fiege also takes visual culture seriously. In three “galleries” inserted between chapters throughout the book, he includes short, one-paragraph essays that analyze groups of images. “Gallery No. 1,” for instance, juxtaposes photographs tracing the construction of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., with others depicting laborers in Georgia and Colorado quarrying the Memorial’s shining white marble. “Connecting the Lincoln Memorial and other shrines to their material sources,” Fiege argues, “reveals the richness, diversity, conflict, and unity at the heart of American nature—and at the heart of American history” (15). Additional gallery essays discuss colonial farm-animal illustrations; land surveys from the early republican period; sketches of technologies used in antebellum cotton production; mid-nineteenth-century photographs showing the environmental impact of the transcontinental railroad; and political cartoons, from the post-World War II era, lampooning American’s addiction to foreign oil.

The book is vulnerable to two criticisms. First, the chronology of The Republic of Nature leapfrogs over nearly the entire first half of the twentieth century. Second, Fiege’s definition of nature is extremely broad...