The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740–1840 (review)

In his earlier work, Judd broadened our understanding of the origins of conservation in the United States by focusing on the interests and actions of the common people of rural New England, not simply those of elite sportsmen and intellectuals. In The Untilled Garden, he has opened the tent still wider. If scores of now-forgotten amateur naturalists did not start the conservation movement, Judd argues, they prepared the ground for its acceptance by creating a proto-ecological body of thought about nature and a concern for the environmental consequences of progress. George Perkins Marsh—usually the starting point in the history of American conservation—does not appear in this volume until the last chapter.

The three parts of the book—each with three chapters—unfold the general trajectory of the argument. The first part charts the coalescence of an American tradition of natural history and scientific inquiry, a tradition unified by an emerging national identity that valued American nature for both its beauty and its commercial importance. The second section describes the natural world as these early scientists saw it. Judd pays particular attention to their view of nature as a set of interdependent parts—a surprisingly modern, almost proto-ecological perspective. In Part III, Judd explores how this view of nature changed to accommodate the ever-more-obvious transformations of the landscape wrought by settlement, allowing these early scientists to lay the groundwork for both the critique of resource use that matured into conservation and the aesthetic appreciation for nature that fueled the American Romantic movement.

To support this argument, Judd relies on the words of dozens of naturalists, crafting what he calls their “collective intellectual biography” (11). Some of these naturalists are familiar, such as John James Audubon or Alexander Von Humboldt, whereas others are relatively unknown, long ignored because of their pre-Darwinian and incomplete understanding of the world around them. Judd does an admirable job of untangling the theological, literary, and historical influences that informed early nineteenth-century science. These forgotten sources anchor the book’s strong argument and allow Judd to delve deeply into the origins of conservation and American Romantic thought. Yet Judd’s devotion to these works sometimes obscures this argument. The long passages describing the lives and labors of the naturalists could have been shortened significantly, resulting in a slimmer, more easily read volume.

The level of detail with which Judd discusses his subject earmarks this book for specialists. Nonetheless, The Untilled Garden is a significant contribution to the literature, of interest to those seeking to understand the historical, philosophical, and scientific roots of American environmental thought. As Judd suggests, the ideas of these nearly forgotten naturalists remain “the philosophic grounding for the spirit of conservation in America” (311).