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  • Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West by Sara Dant
  • James E. Sherow
Sara Dant, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. 221 pp. Paper, $29.95.

Sara Dant has produced a work well overdue for all students of the American West. There hasn't been a survey of the American West written in several years. For over twenty years, my students have read Richard White's It's Your Misfortune (1991). I hoped that at some point an enterprising scholar would write a more compact, updated thematic treatment of the West. Dant has provided just what the doctor ordered. And more than its value for classroom use, Dant's work is also fit for a general readership.

With laser-like focus, Dant hones in on three major themes. First is the tension between capitalistic exploitation of natural resources and the drive toward ecological sustainability. Second, she employs Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" to explain where and when people have overexploited the West's natural resources [End Page 255] and how public land policies in the West often acted as a brake on resource overuse in a land of limited resources. Her third theme is how people have attempted to create a sustainable, livable environment in the West.

Dant's work is not some polemic predicting gloom and doom for the West's inhabitants. She makes it clear that as humans, "we care about what we know" (5). In ten succinct chapters she gives an overview of this region from the last ice age to the present. Her West begins west of the one hundredth meridian, and, as John Wesley Powell, Walter Prescott Webb, and Donald Worster before her, she recognizes this region as distinct in its aridity. Within this realm, she traces the rise and fall of cultures that overextended themselves as they confronted the limitations imposed by aridity. Whether the Chacoans prior to the arrival of Europeans, the overhunting of bison by both Indians and European Americans, massive deforestation, the collapse of open range cattle grazing, or overfishing salmon in the Columbian River, the evidence of overexploitation of natural resources is indisputable.

Dant also covers both the conservation and preservation movements. There is the expected treatment of Gifford Pinchot's utilitarian policies and John Muir's work to preserve wild spaces. Yet she also details how these movements could intertwine, especially in Senator Frank Church's decades of work to pass environmental legislation. She is also not afraid to address the backlash against environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s by highlighting the "wise use movement" and its various manifestations, beginning in the Reagan era and continuing into the present with the exploits of the Bundy family.

Dant offers a thought-provoking, well-written work. My American West students thoroughly enjoyed reading Dant as they engaged the issues she raised. Moreover, they began reflecting on their own roles in shaping this place called the West. Now knowing more about the West, they started thinking about what they should do. In this, Dant fully achieved her aim. [End Page 256]

James E. Sherow
Kansas State University
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