In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xi PREFACE In the months before the first Earth Day in 1970, as an explosion of environmental activism was reconfiguring the American political landscape, Time magazine, looking for a way to explain the concept of ecological interconnection, turned for an analogy to the realm of international relations. The ecological process by which chemicals like DDT worked their way through—and up—the food chain, it wrote, mirrored the Cold War political-economic system in which an outbreak of communism in one niche of the world could spread quickly through and up the global food chain. “The ‘domino theory,’” the magazine explained, “is clearly applicable to the environment.”1 Later that year, at a rally on Earth Day, the massive series of demonstrations that signaled the arrival of the American environmental movement, a woman held up a sign based on a well-known Pogo cartoon: “I have met the enemy and he is US.” The famous line crystallized a common sentiment of the postwar environmental movement, that humans were to blame for recklessly interfering in nature. But by turning the lower-case word “us” into the uppercase initials “US” during the height of protests about the U.S. war in Vietnam, the Earth Day participant added an extra layer of meaning to her message about nature: the capital letters suggested that the enemy of the environment was not just human beings but, more particularly, the United States. Like Americans in Vietnam, human beings were arrogantly making up their own rules and deploying technological tools of horrible power to inflict massive destruction upon a defenseless enemy. Human beings were to nature as the United States was to the rest of the world. The early 1970s was not the first time that war, international relations, and ideas about America’s connections to the rest of the world had shaped environmental thought and politics in the United States. The Romantic writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond and put to paper some of the most influential words about nature an American has ever produced as the United States was headed to war with Mexico, something we know he thought deeply about because of his essay on civil disobedience. The naturalist John Muir experienced one of his most important epiphanies about nature while in Canada after fleeing the draft during the Civil War. George Perkins Marsh, whose 1864 book Man and Nature laid the intellectual foundation for the late nineteenth-century conservation movement, derived his ideas about protecting American nature by thinking about environmental problems over the previous two millennia in Europe, where he had lived for many years as a diplomat. As part of that conservation movement, Americans began to establish national parks in part to create symbols of national greatness to counter nationalistic European claims of superiority. Theodore Roosevelt saw conserving and protecting nature as crucial for both the material and moral strength of the nation in the international arena. American foreign relations and environmental politics overlapped after World War II, as well. During the Cold War, presidents and biologists alike invoked the same grand theme: interconnection. In his 1953 inaugural address, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke of the “basic law of interdependence.” Echoing him twelve years later, Lyndon Johnson pronounced: “The unity we seek cannot realize its full promise in isolation for today the state of the Union depends, in large measure, upon the state of the world.” The idea of interconnection was also a core tenet of ecology, the subset of biology that informed much of the postwar environmental movement. Ecology held that all of nature— living and nonliving, human and nonhuman—was linked together in cycles of energy and nutrient flows.2 Usually, the interconnected realm of international relations and the interconnected realm of nature seemed far removed from each other, but sometimes they explicitly overlapped. “We have learned in politics,” famed conservationist and ecological pioneer Aldo Leopold proclaimed in 1946, “that preoccupation with the nation, as distinguished from mankind, defeats its own end. We label this fallacy isolationism. Perhaps we have now to learn that preoccupation with mankind, as distinguished from the [natural] community of which man is a member, defeats its own ends.” The overlap was not just rhetorical: two years earlier, as policymakers and diplomats were busily making blueprints for a new postwar political and economic order, Leopold had warned about the environmental impact of plans to spread American industrial methods and consumption patterns around the world. Nature and international relations would overlap again twenty...

Share