Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast by Ellen Stroud (review)

The point of Ellen Stroud's slim, beautifully written book is deceptively simple: forests and cities in the northeastern United States shaped each other, and both places intertwined into a single unified landscape. That cities and their hinterlands depended on each other has become axiomatic for urban environmental historians. But Stroud eschews the usual declensionist interpretation of urban depredations on the surrounding natural world; instead, she shows how the economic and political actions of urbanites fostered the re-wilding of the landscape. Cities created revitalized forests, down to the species that emerged in them.

Between 1890 and 1930, Stroud writes, easterners began to worry about their disappearing trees and to preserve wooded lands or reforest new ones. Historical circumstances and ecologies ensured that the forests that grew up varied somewhat in appearance and biology. Stroud focuses on four northeastern states to show the differences in reforestation. In Pennsylvania, the most urban state, clean water for cities motivated tree conservation. Mid-nineteenth-century Pennsylvanians recognized that healthy municipal water relied upon forested watersheds upriver, and scientific experts and nature lovers began to promote the protection of wooded lands. Control came through government purchases of abandoned lands, through the creation of parks, and through the replanting of cutover parcels. Awareness of the links between cities and trees made activists see the interconnectedness of regional landscapes—the beginnings of an ecological perspective. Although concern for watersheds also motivated New Hampshire residents, rural and urban concerns joined to negotiate forest preservation somewhat differently than in Pennsylvania. In New Hampshire, city people desired vacation places with wooded viewsheds, textile mills needed flood control, and lumbering interests sought dependable wood supplies; together, these groups created new forests, including the White Mountain National Forest. Vermont cultivated a pastoral image to attract summer visitors escaping urban congestion and heat. To sell the experience, Vermonters needed trees within bucolic settings. Along with forests, they also cultivated new crops that became emblematic of the state. Maple syrup and dairy farming not only supplied an urban market, they defined the Vermont country experience for weary metropolitans. Even Vermont's national forest owed its existence to the city labor of New Deal workers.

Although seemingly incompatible, farms, forests, and cities created a unique interlinked landscape. The precariousness of Maine's forests reinforces Stroud's central contention: that without the pressure of urban populations, Mainers had less motivation and authority to preserve their forests. Big companies owned almost all timberlands, and they managed their trees as commodities. Their efforts to protect their resources fromfire, theft, and trespass set off disputes over the public's access to the forests. Corporate power stymied state land purchases, and private ownership prevented effective state management of the trees. Because they exist outside of the urban-forest nexus, Maine's forests are at risk. In her final chapter, Stroud moves to the global scale. The vitality of northeastern forests and cities depends on other degraded landscapes in very distant places; just as cities and wooded hinterlands belong to a single landscape, the region belongs to larger, worldwide ecosystems.

Readers of T&C will recognize Nature Next Door as an important contribution to the growing urban environmental historiography that builds on the insights articulated by William Cronon. But it also falls squarely in the history of technology. Not accidental biospheres, forests were constructed landscapes, "artifacts of the city" (p. 47). Human needs and actions interacted with individual forest ecologies to create a "metropolitan nature" (p. 78). Although seeming to belong only to the biological world, trees became the technological extension of the urban infrastructure—water systems, electrical networks, transportation lines, and park and recreation centers. As such, Stroud's book should sit on the bookshelf next to the works of Joel Tarr, Martin Melosi, and Thomas Hughes.

Stroud writes with a clear and elegant voice. The stories of individuals that she weaves throughout her book, particularly those of numerous women, provide a warm human...