Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (review)

In his acknowledgments, Steinberg describes this book as a textbook in American environmental history. It will make a curious textbook: It has a sustained argument, a firm point of view, lively—even witty—prose, and makes no attempt at full coverage. Its scope is the United States, mainly from 1800 onward. It concentrates on what use Americans have made of their environment, how those uses have changed ecosystems, and, to a lesser extent, how Americans have reacted intellectually and politically to these matters. The explicit argument is that U.S. environmental history features three turning points: seventeenth-century European settlement and its aftermath; the surveying of the United States after the Land Ordnance of 1785; and the rise of consumer society during the late nineteenth century. Moreover, these three shifts came about because of a long-standing habit of Americans, the commodification of nature, whereby everything from passenger pigeons to pine trees has a price put on it, a price that is set in a market and does not recognize the role of pigeons or pine trees in ecological communities. Of his three turning points, the third receives by far the most emphasis. Implicitly, but consistently, Steinberg also argues that commodification was, and is, unfortunate for the environment and for many people, especially poor Americans. His book is firmly in the "declensionist" tradition of environmental history, in which things are normally getting worse.

Steinberg's method is mainly that of the good-sized vignette. Each chapter tells three or four stories and offers a brief conclusion. For example, the chapter on the American West takes up the California Gold Rush, the near extinction of the bison, the impact of cattle on the Great Plains, and the dust bowls. This method obliged Steinberg to leave out many things that others might well include (such as mining), but, on the whole, his choices are good. Treating fewer subjects carefully is no worse (although unusual in textbooks) than treating more subjects briefly. Most of the chapters are national in scope rather than regional, although the South, the West, and California get a chapter or two each.

The book, like all environmental history, is interdisciplinary, concerning subjects that mainstream historians usually ignore and drawing upon literature from a dozen scholarly disciplines. Steinberg relies mainly on U.S. environmental historians, rather than on scholars in other disciplines, but he has read widely and is thoroughly up to date in his chosen field.

The book's weaknesses are largely those of the field that it intends to present. Like most U.S. environmental historians, indeed most historians of the United States in general, Steinberg has little to say about Mexico and less about Canada. In environmental history, this national perspective seems especially awkward, given that environmental processes take no account of political borders. Aside from brief comments about nuclear weapons and the role of the U.S. Army in killing bison, the book makes almost no mention of the military. Although this silence is standard in the field of environmental history, especially among the many authors who emphasize the role of markets, it is regrettable.