Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation by Miles A. Powell (review)

When researching predator policy in Canadian national parks, I noticed that in the summer of 1940 parks administrators began referring to purportedly increased prey populations as "wildlife slums." The term struck me as a strange and even disturbing slippage between the human and the animal world. Especially when wardens soon began culling dozens, even hundreds, of elk and buffalo.

Miles Powell, author of Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation, would not have been so surprised. His book documents how the movement to protect nature in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century United States was deeply entangled with beliefs about racial decline—initially, the predicted disappearance of Indigenous Americans, and increasingly, the feared degeneration of white settler Americans. Developing a shared affinity with wildlife and coming to believe that they were both under threat by hostile forces, white elites "developed racially charged preservationist arguments that influenced the historical development of scientific racism, eugenics, immigration restrictions, and population control, and helped lay the groundwork for the modern environmental movement" (5). Nature-loving readers will find Powell's book deeply unsettling, forcing them to consider the genealogy of their own environmental beliefs; but they will be unable to deny that this is a major contribution to the histories of both environmentalism and racism in America.

The most impressive thing about Vanishing America is its exhaustive examination and rich mining of what sometimes seems the entire pantheon of American environmentalism, from mid-nineteenth-century figures such as George Catlin, Henry David Thoreau, and George Perkins Marsh, through the turn of the century's Frederick Jackson Turner, George Bird Grinnell, Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph LeConte, John Muir, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Madison Grant, into the post World War II era with Aldo Leopold and William Vogt. As might be expected, early chapters see these writers offer some of the most eye-popping connections between race and species. For example, in what could well have been the cover illustration of Powell's book, a table from Josiah Nott and George Gliddon's 1854 Types of Mankind matches up profiles of distinct racial head shapes with different kinds of animals—mixing phrenology and natural history to argue that any given environment suited only certain animals and humans both (22).

But many of the later connections are just as troubling. For example, by the late 1930s ecologist Aldo Leopold had grown concerned with overpopulation of both wildlife and human populations, and it was this that led him to become an opponent of both predator eradication and foreign aid. "When the British ameliorated the hard lot of South African natives . . . the response was more natives rather than higher standards [of living], and more strain on an overcrowded range. Feeding starving deer is a close analogy" (158). Leopold's quote, however, suggests two of the difficulties Powell faces in writing such an intellectual history. First, Leopold is somewhat unusual in so bluntly comparing natural to human societies; more often, Powell must point to his subjects' distinct statements about nature and race, and draw out how they align. Second, Leopold is known fundamentally as an environmental writer, and while he speaks in analogy here of race, it is impossible for Powell to prove that such thinking on race directly shaped his writers' thinking on environment, let alone how or whether it influenced the broader society's thinking on race. (Especially in this case, since the quote is taken from an unpublished essay.) There can be little cause-and-effect here, and Vanishing America is instead necessarily filled with reference to parallels, analogies, associations, connections, and relationships.

To my mind, the only unsuccessful element of the book is how it relates its argument to the present-day. While the author is undoubtedly correct that the historical baggage American environmental ideas carry may make some non-whites uneasy about the movement or about nature itself, his references to non-whites' contemporary...