Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (review)

Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. By Karl Jacoby (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001) 305 pp. $39.95

Modern-day environmentalists may live in a universe of moral absolutes, but Jacoby's new award-winning study recounts the unpleasant past that lurks behind their certitude. Crimes against Nature upends the usual tale of park building and wilderness saving. Drawing upon theoretical insights from subaltern, peasant, and labor studies, Jacoby recasts the story of American conservation from the bottom up, unearthing the hidden histories of rural communities to rethink the premises of American environmental history. As he argues in his introduction, turn-of-the-century conservationists asked themselves "how the interlocking human and natural communities of a given society were to be organized" (5). Reinforcing inequality was as central to their understanding of conservation as saving resources. So goes the argument that makes Crimes against Nature one of the important new titles of environmental history.

Jacoby's narrative unfolds in three separate accounts, moving from east to west. In upstate New York, decades of intensive logging and rural settlement had created a hybrid landscape and society that was neither wilderness nor settlement, neither market-based nor subsistence farming. When urban conservationists downstate established Adirondack State Park in 1892, they failed to appreciate the problems of inventing a preserve in a place that housed nearly 16,000 residents within its boundaries. Subsequent battles over property, logging, and hunting pitted locals against outsiders, as well as locals against locals. Indigenous forms of social pressure against over-hunting and excessive logging clashed with state policies and the rising power of the market economy. Jacoby skillfully recounts how some Adirondackers torched the forest or poached game in protest, while others accommodated themselves to the new regime by working as hunting guides or collaborating with park rangers. Leaning heavily upon studies of peasant rebellion and state resource management, Jacoby concludes that, for some Adirondackers, the forest that had once been their home had become the instrument of their oppression.¹

The next piece on Yellowstone is a variation upon this theme. Following the creation of the park in 1872, conservationists such as John Wesley Powell and George Bird Grinnell concluded that Indian burning and poaching posed dire threats to forests and wildlife. With the help of the U.S. Army, government agents forcibly removed Bannocks, Shoshones, and Sheepeaters to nearby reservations, but they soon found that dividing the landscape into ethnic enclaves was easier to proclaim than implement. The "shadow landscape of poachers and other wrongdoers" never fully disappeared (108). Indians slipped past reservation agents to hunt elk, and white laborers from nearby towns routinely supplemented their wages with ill-gotten deer. Traditional distinctions between rural subsistence and commercial behavior eroded, and, like the Adirondacks, the mountains and valleys of Yellowstone soon resembled an armed encampment, a condition that would last long after the National Park Service assumed control in 1916.

Jacoby's investigation of the "Havasupai problem" in Arizona's Grand Canyon country represents both the promises and shortcomings of his book. Unlike at Yellowstone, government officials did not remove the Havasupai Indians. Instead, federal officials enclosed the reservation, first within the forest reserve, then inside the national park that followed. Enclosure, however, proved disastrous for the Havasupai, as grazing and logging by Anglo operators diminished game populations and firewood. Many turned to poaching to augment their livelihoods or, eventually, worked for the Park Service, instead. Jacoby ably demonstrates how conservation policy drove the Havasupai into dependency, but his analysis falters as he explains what drove them into the arms of the state. Unlike the working-class poachers and squatters in the Adirondacks and Yellowstone, the Havasupai had to negotiate not one but two state bureaucracies—the Park Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs—trying to uproot their subsistence economy. Jacoby gives...