The Machine in the Garden, Suburban Style

Adam Rome. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xvi + 299 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).

What did postwar Americans want in a house? They happily settled for just about any dwelling, given the housing crunch of the 1940s and the postwar baby boom. The homebuilding industry responded to this opportunity with the type of housing stock most Americans continue to inhabit today: remarkably similar tract homes on razed land filled with high-energy appliances. The 17,000-house suburb of Levittown, New York, offered only a rough blueprint for the uniform subdivisions that spread across the nation during the postwar decades. As the homebuilding industry rapidly increased housing starts and successfully marketed its version of the American Dream, homebuyers joyfully left behind the Depression and war for new beginnings in their detached, single-family dwellings. And yet how detached were these homes from the neighboring properties and surrounding landscape? Leaking septic tanks, polluted groundwater, soil erosion, and mud flows soon materialized, and these problems represented only the most conspicuous hazards to follow the bulldozers' maw on the nation's urban fringe. While suburbia grew during the 1950s and 1960s, so grew an awareness that the American home—and particularly the tract variety—impacted its environs in unforeseen and dangerous ways.

Adam Rome's The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism presents a fascinating and sometimes disturbing history of the postwar homebuilding industry and American suburbia. Rome's study moves among intellectual, political, and environmental history as it traces the industry's rising mass production and the subsequent critique of tract-house suburbia by scientists, land-use planners, and environmentalists. This critique, Rome argues, played a pivotal role in the transformation of American environmentalism because it focused new attention on those "middle landscapes" where most Americans actually lived. Indeed, it is the transitions within conservation and environmentalism that particularly interest Rome: the shifting environmental awareness of professionals and some American consumers from outdoor recreation to pollution to a broader vision of endangered landscapes and species. If America's postwar suburbia seems like an odd place to chart environmentalism's evolution, Rome convincingly shows how suburban sprawl generated both severe ecological problems and an incipient environmental consciousness.

Beyond the bulldozers and 'burbs, Rome's study speaks to two important trends in environmental history. Once a field primarily focused on landscapes of the wild and less-peopled variety—the rural, the frontier, and the problematic "wilderness"—American environmental historians have increasingly moved into the urban terrain. William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) established one approach to ecological relationships between cities and hinterlands that subsequent historians have extended, revised, or departed from entirely. Recent studies of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Las Vegas (to name only a few) have shown the possibilities for critical dialogue between urban and environmental history. ¹ One disciplinary imperative in this regard is the oft expressed desire by environmental historians to "place humans within nature," a shorthand way of saying that people exist as part of the natural world and it is highly populated landscapes that we typically inhabit. Studies of cities and their suburban belts have also allowed environmental historians to concentrate on the "environmental inequalities" (to borrow the title of Andrew Hurley's splendid study of Gary, Indiana) resulting from race, class, and gender divisions. ²

A more subtle—and yet possibly more important—disciplinary trend involves the historical connections between the production and consumption of natural resources, wastes, ideas, and even political movements. Environmental historians too often fixate on the former and neglect the latter: the production of industrial wastes rather than the consumption of products, the clearcutting of forests and not the uses of timber, the generation of scientific-ecological trends rather than the intuitive choices made by Americans. Postwar suburbia, as...