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  • Watering Environmental History's Roots
  • Karl Boyd Brooks (bio)
Paul Charles Milazzo. Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945–1972. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2006. xii + 340 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index.

Temperate grasslands mature over time as complexity displaces simplicity until, paradoxically, equilibrium obtains. Environmental history, like natural habitats, also displays successional patterns, typified by Paul Milazzo's Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945–1972. Descended from hardy precursors in political, legal, and economic history, this book indicates environmental history has now attained sufficient equilibrium to complement the American historian's central task: studying power and its application. Showier, but more fragile, recent exotics probably led Milazzo to paste "discourse" and "narrative" labels onto political rhetoric and action (pp. 11, 91). Nevertheless, Unlikely Environmentalists' methodology, evidence, and argument owe more scholarly debts to path-breaking legal-environmental historians Paul Wallace Gates and J. Willard Hurst—who wouldn't have known a discourse from a dissertation—than to Michel Foucault and Raymond Williams.

The beholder's eye will determine the proper shelf for cataloguing this protean book. Although Milazzo classifies Unlikely Environmentalists as a product of the "new policy history," his "effort to reinsert Congress into the post-1945 political history of the United States" yields a fine environmental history of the American law of water quality (p. ix). Viewed from another angle, Milazzo's first book offers a superb legal history of the American environment's aqueous domain. On whatever shelf it rests, Unlikely Environmentalists confirms Adam Rome's 2002 judgment that "what really matters in American history" should incorporate environmental history's insights.1

Theda Skocpol's and Stephen Skowronek's works on "modernization" in the 1980s inspired Milazzo to analyze creation of the "environmental-management state," a central thread that Rome has argued runs throughout twentieth-century American history. Incited by his mentors Brian Balogh and Julian Zelizer, Milazzo has challenged policy history's reflexive, unwarranted emphasis on the executive as a motive force behind state growth.2 Unlikely Environmentalists contends instead that, because "the institutional exigencies [End Page 126] of the legislative branch often prescribed the ideas, interests, and values that informed environmental policy and law, . . . the roots of environmental policy . . . drew inspiration from more varied sources than either political or environmental historians realized" (p. x).

This fine-toothed account of Congress and the Nixon presidency crafting one of environmental law's keystones, the 1972 Clean Water Act, offers legal historians important insights into legislators' translation of constituent demands and their own sentiments into statutes. Milazzo also gratifies political historians' curiosity about not only how a bill becomes law, but then a campaign commercial. Environmental historians, seeking a fuller treatment of federal water-quality law's postwar evolution than Richard Lazarus's and Richard N. L. Andrews's somewhat cursory accounts, will relish Unlikely Environmentalists' gritty engagement with science and culture.3 And all three fields will benefit from its careful sifting of the sawdust left on Congress' floor: public committee hearing transcripts as well as the equally interesting and often more significant minutes of closed markup and conference sessions; committee and agency research papers; staff correspondence with bosses and each other; and detailed scrapbooks kept in members' offices that document changing bill drafts. Future disputes about the legislative intent behind one of the Clean Water Act's many hundred sections are likely to be resolved partly by citing Unlikely Environmentalists.

Milazzo claims the Clean Water Act complicates one of environmental history's "big stories," the emergence of citizen activism (p. 13). Unlikely Environmentalists analyzes enactment of the four major federal water-quality laws during the postwar period and detects no national passion for environmental quality pushing a reluctant Congress. In fact, for nearly the entire quarter-century, water pollution remained the preserve of technocrats, both locally and nationally. They framed the problem neither ecologically nor esthetically, but as one of supplying enough water to keep American business humming and American cities growing. "The groundbreaking 1972 statute," Milazzo maintains, "represented both the culmination of a policy process that began in the fifties and a synthesis of various discourses policymakers engaged in during that time. Although environmentalism exerted an undeniable influence on the...

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