Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America by Christopher C. Sellers (review)

Although traditional studies of suburbia focused on political balkanization, racial and ethnic exclusivity, transportation, or land development, the past decade has seen the advent of a new area of interest, environmentalism. Adam Rome's The Bulldozer in the Countryside (New York, 2001) was one the groundbreaking books to explore the intersection of these areas, and now Sellers adds another voice to this important discussion. Crabgrass Crucible demonstrates that the most interesting environmental issues occur not in wilderness areas or on elegant estates but on the edges of great cities, where the human population rubs against nature, transforming both the wildlife and fauna that was once there as well as the families who still are there.

Sellers argues that the environmental movement inspired by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (New York, 1962) fifty years ago actually had its origins even earlier in the mass-produced, unpretentious post-World War II suburbs epitomized by the first Levittown. Although developers planted trees, shrubs, and bushes, they often flattened the landscape, creating a new world to which foxes and coyotes, raccoons and squirrels, and cows and potato fields had to adapt. Such developments occurred on the outer edges of every American city at mid-century. We saw them originally only as bare landscapes of roads and ranch structures churned out by the concrete mixers and carpenters creating dream houses for the emerging middle class.

Crabgrass Crucible begins in the nineteenth century with the creation of the periodical Country Life and the many achievements of Henry Bunner, a remarkable figure who was among the first Americans to write about the fragility of his surroundings at a time when most of his compatriots were more likely to be terrified rather than enamored of forests and the critters who inhabited them. In the transformative post-1945 era, Sellers focuses on the founding of the Nature Conservancy, on the anti-road activists who fought against Robert Moses and his ribbons of pavement on Long Island, and on the initial activists who fought for the water and the air upon which all of life depends. Along the way, Crabgrass Crucible is lucid and persuasive about such topics as the contamination of the ground, the infestations of mosquitoes, the use of DDT, and the kinds of grasses that thrive in different circumstances.

Because his topic is as vast as it is discursive, Sellers concentrates on the nation's two largest metropolitan regions—New York and Los Angeles, each of which sprawls over at least 10,000 square miles and includes virtually every kind of human activity. But the East Coast megacity is essentially in a rainforest whereas theWest Coast giant is in a desert. Sellers points out obvious geological and geographical differences but focuses on how each metropolis transformed nature and how energized activists in affected communities responded to the crises that they saw before virtually anyone else. He provokes readers to address a myriad of questions about the bicoastal implications of the new environment. How was landscaping different in the West from that in the East? How did the trees and shrubs that were already present differ from those introduced by newcomers? What did the changes in the environment do to the birds and cougars, as well as to the numerous orange groves of the Los Angeles basin? How do the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains alter the ecological lineup?

Although the first chapter is pretentious and directed at a mostly academic audience, Crabgrass Crucible is artfully and impressively written; non-specialists will be intrigued by the imaginative use of case studies. Particularly effective is Sellers' use of individual experience in different communities (San Gabriel, Lakewood, and Santa Monica, for example) to make his tales of early experience and later activism make sense.

Crabgrass Crucible covers a broad and important theme with insight, imagination, and literary distinction even while demonstrating enormous...