An Anxious Pursuit: Racial Privilege and the Origins of American Conservation

In his ambitious and insightful Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation, Miles A. Powell calls attention to some of the more troubling currents coursing through America's environmentalist thought as it coalesced into a discrete movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, he joins a historiographic debate touched off more than two decades ago by William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness" (1995), which indicted America's conservation tradition for fostering a narrow-minded focus on preserving wilderness that perpetuated an ahistorical division between nature and culture. Cronon worried that this preoccupation with wilderness left little room for people to appreciate the places in which they actually lived and worked, and suggested that the logic undergirding it—rooted as it was in a pernicious dualism that set a pristine nature over and against human activities—could readily prove misanthropic. Moreover, Cronon argued, insofar as the historical development of a wilderness ethic had been driven by elites, it had proven exclusionary from the start—both in shaping access to (and the kinds of activities permitted in) the wilderness areas themselves and in shaping the concerns of an environmentalist agenda that too often overlooked issues of environmental justice. In the ensuing years, a number of compelling case studies developed that argument. Underscoring the disruptions in rural subsistence practices and the forcible removal of indigenous groups from national parks, Louis Warren, Mark Spence, Karl Jacoby, Rebecca Solnit, and others reinterpreted some of the signature accomplishments of the early conservation movement. By 2013, when Paul Sutter penned his state-of-the-field essay for the Journal of American History's roundtable on environmental history, he could rightly note that few environmental historians "would have the field return to writing triumphalist environmental histories" that uncritically celebrated the rise of modern environmentalism or overlooked the ways in which environmentalists had "often proven less than progressive."¹

Powell's book is one of several recent studies to build on these foundational works in highlighting the degree to which America's environmental movement has drawn on and perpetuated social inequities. Environmental sociologist Dorceta E. Taylor's The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (2016), for instance, offers a handy reference (complete with subheads) that distills much of the literature focused on the ways in which social privilege framed the discourses and concerns of the nascent environmental movement. But if Vanishing America treads familiar ground in some respects, it nevertheless pushes beyond its predecessors in important ways. Seeking to unite "two fields that typically receive separate treatment, the history of environmental thought and the history of racial attitudes," Powell traces the shifting connections between racial anxieties and the efforts to preserve wilderness and wildlife (p. 6). He begins in the mid-nineteenth century, when many Americans saw wilderness and whiteness as antithetical. Convinced of their racial superiority, white Americans could comfortably draw on evolutionary theories that naturalized the extinction of certain species and races that proved incapable of domestication, a category into which they lumped America's indigenous inhabitants, conveniently justifying U.S. appropriation of native lands in the process.

Over the course of the 1870s, Powell maintains, the same logic led a growing number of old-stock Americans to worry that urbanization and industrialization had begun to sap white racial vigor, making them soft, over-civilized, even neurasthenic. The closing of the frontier cobbled onto this concern, and created a shift in the dominant thinking about both the natural world and the nation's indigenous inhabitants. Rather than impediments to American expansion destined to fall before a superior race, wilderness, wildlife, and Native Americans alike became relics of America's frontier past, a last connection to the very process that had democratized the nation and elevated the "Nordic" race to unprecedented heights. As a consequence, the "preservationist impulse drew strength from an increasing belief that the retention of...