Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America by Ian Tyrrell (review)

In this provocative work, Ian Tyrrell interprets Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive conservation movement as not merely a US-based reform movement, but also a set of ideas and goals promulgated by like-minded members of an international political and intellectual elite. Crisis of the Wasteful Nation is thus one rightful successor to Samuel Hays’ Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, 1959). Tyrrell presents with fluid writing and careful detail a set of ideas, institutions, conferences, informal networks, non-governmental organizations, and broad overlapping ideologies that brought together two visions: geopolitical leadership and imperial ambition in remaking the modern world in the agrarian and industrial image of the United States; and natural resource conservation in the interest of a habitable planet for future generations.

At its heart this book argues that toward the end of his presidency and in his years of international conservation leadership thereafter, Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and a host of like-minded reformers, academics, engineers, missionaries, and politicians around the world debated the two central ethical and economic quandaries of resource exploitation: international equity (between rich developed Western countries and those less so) and intergenerational equity (between the present and the future). Would the United States and other industrial powers consume the world’s timber, coal, and oil resources and grow powerful to the detriment of all others? And would those same powers leave an impoverished, damaged world for their children? In confronting such questions, Tyrrell posits, conservationists anticipated current discourse of sustainable resource use: Roosevelt and company articulated a proto-sustainability that envisioned “the recycling of basic resources within the space of a single generation,” on a worldwide scale (213). Rational global resource management, in this vision, could re-make not only the United States but also the world in a vision of future-minded, rational, efficient resource use. “The audacity of his plans as they took shape in the last few years of his tenure,” Tyrrell writes of T.R., “only makes full sense in the context of a struggle over what kind of empire the United States should become: one that provided international leadership on resource conservation or one that sought perpetual and global extension of its resource-based abundance” (261). We know what happened there.

To find that struggle amongst Theodore Roosevelt and his ilk is provocative and compelling. Tyrrell quotes T.R.’s last Secretary of State Robert Bacon in 1909 asserting that “the ‘peoples of today’ held ‘the earth in trust for the peoples to come after them”’ (213). Tyrrell sees in such writings “the recycling of energy as Roosevelt’s hope for the future” (261). The author somewhat balances these findings with detailed analysis of the “dark side” of conservation: eugenics; white supremacy; imperialism; ethnocentrism; displacement of Indigenous peoples. Yet the book remains positive and even hopeful, even as it presents a narrative of powerful white men, what they thought of their world, and their plans to conserve it for their (white) children. Tyrrell certainly recognizes this. He writes that “this ‘internationalist’ initiative [for a World Conservation Congress] was still arguably a form of imperialism aimed at strengthening the United States and Western civilization. This would be a resource-based imperialism led by developed nations” (211).

In that vein, Tyrrell’s historiography of conservation, while impressively broad given his transnational story, could have drawn more fully from post-1990 work on US conservation with its attention to inequalities. Largely unmentioned here (some are referenced in notes) are more focused US-based works on how race, gender, class, modernity, politics, unanticipated environmental complexities, and paternalism shaped Progressive conservation, including those by Louis Warren, Karl Jacoby, Jenny Price, Joseph E. Taylor III, Nancy Langston, and Mark Fiege. Though not transnational, such work does pay close attention to the underlying inequalities and ideologies inherent in Progressive conservation.

None of those...