The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America

Traditional scholarship portrays the American conservation movement as split into two warring camps: technocratic elites such as Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, and romantic aesthetes such as John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. Not only is this one-dimensional picture a poor, even misleading, reading of Pinchot and Muir, but it is also, as Ben Minteer argues, an oversimplification of "what is in fact a complex and rich moral tradition" (2) of environmental thought and policy reform.

Minteer recovers some of that rich moral tradition by examining a "third way" within the conservation movement: the "politically grounded and civic-spirited" (4) pragmatic conservation of Liberty Hyde Bailey, Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and Aldo Leopold. Minter lauds this tradition for its "pluralistic model of environmental thought and action that accommodates both the prudent use and the preservation of nature" (4) as well as for its value in fostering "civic regeneration and social improvement" (5). In doing so Minteer aims to encourage environmental thought that is not only concerned with the natural world, but also the "revitalization of democratic citizenship, the conservation of regional culture and identity, and the constitution of the public interest" (189). Minteer succeeds admirably in this goal, having produced a compelling book that should interest scholars in a wide variety of fields.

Minteer begins with an examination of the Cornell University horticulturalist and nature study advocate Liberty Hyde Bailey. Bailey not only developed a philosophical rationale for ethical treatment of nonhuman nature—particularly in his book The Holy Earth—but he also was a staunch advocate for the cultural enrichment of rural communities. Bailey put these commitments into practice as Chair of Theodore Roosevelt's Country Life Commission and as the most important theorist of rural nature study. Even Bailey's advocacy of school gardens as a means to teach nature study "entailed a strong civic dimension" (39) because they emphasized a kind of stewardship that benefited both the child and society. Minteer demonstrates the close connections between nature study and the pragmatic, progressive education reforms advocated by John Dewey.

Liberty Hyde Bailey was not the only pragmatist Minteer examines. The regional planners Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye were deeply influenced by John Dewey (despite the heated Dewey/Mumford debate in the pages of the New Republic) and Josiah Royce, respectively. Mumford, perhaps today best remembered for his scathing critique of power and technology, The Pentagon of Power, was also a bioregional thinker active in the Regional Planning Association of America. Like his fellow regional planner MacKaye, Mumford worked toward "a decentralized, green vision for an aesthetically, politically and ecologically reconstructed urban and rural environment" (104).

This tradition continues today in the form of Natural Systems Agriculture and the ecologically-oriented community planners commonly lumped together as the New Urbanists. This reader wished Minteer had more thoroughly explored the intersection of conservation with the cultural pluralism that civic pragmatists also championed. Rather than a defect of Minteer's research, however, that criticism suggests important directions for scholarship that builds from this important and timely book.