Environment and the State: New Views in American History

Historians Otis Graham and Ian Tyrrell, and historical sociologist Jess Gilbert, collectively have provided powerful new contributions to help scholars understand the role of the State in U.S. environmental policy-making. Although that goal sounds like the stuff of political science (and assuredly it is), these authors team up here to give historical nuance, background, and analysis to the topic. Common themes of the books include natural resource use and conservation, agricultural, and environmental policy in U.S. government, and the shifting role of the State in legislating, enforcing, and disseminating to the public such policy. “Reform” and “progressive politics” may come to mind as possible ideological guideposts for presidents and policymakers in these types of policy studies, and the authors here deal with those concepts in different ways; but in the end, readers will likely make their own conclusions on just how reform-minded and effective or not different administrations were.

A word about comparative scale and scope of each work: Graham’s Presidents and the American Environmentthinks big! Moving smoothly from the administrations of Benjamin Harrison to Barack Obama, Graham covers the conservation and environmental policies of every president in the time frame of 1891 to 2015. It is impressive coverage, with critical and sound analysis of every administration in those 124 years; although the fact that he did not draw from Tarla Rai Peterson’s Green Talk in the White House: The Rhetorical Presidency Encounters Ecology(2004) is surprising and is a big omission. Graham’s title should have reflected that time period, however. The author or press should have insisted on a subtitle suggesting something like “From B. Harrison to B. Obama, 1891-2015”—without it, the book seems like it would be about the environmental record of everypresident. Even the press flyer for the book boldly asserts, “The First Narrative Account of Each President’s Environmental Policy,” which is inaccurate and misleading. I am not suggesting that this book should have dealt with every administration since Washington’s, but the focus in Graham’s book makes it sound as if there was no legislation that could be considered “environmental” in the first hundred years of U.S. history. Certainly there were important land and natural resource issues in the early Republic years—the frontier experience and westward expansion—and during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Mark Fiege, in his important work The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States(2012), asked us to consider many actions of government and society in environmental terms, even if not so identified at the time. Lisa Brady reminded us of the same for the Civil War. In her comprehensive War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War(2012), Brady analyzed environmental change resulting from wartime policies. Thus a different title, or adding a subtitle, to Graham’s book would have precluded all this criticism.

While Graham’s Presidents and the American Environmentcould certainly be useful in an environmental history course (and I would recommend it for such), it definitely deals more with policy and the interworking of politics, statecraft, and presidential biography than it does with environmental history per se. I would not argue against this focus, but it risks making the book more attractive to political scientists than to historians. That would be unfortunate, for this book adds mightily to the historical understanding of presidential administrations, their beliefs and actions towards the natural environment (or lack thereof), and the resulting consequences. So why doesGraham begin with Benjamin Harrison? He argues that environmental...