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

historian miles a. powell examines how white manhood informed conceptions of nature in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. In clear prose, Powell asks modern environmentalism to reflect on its origins in scientific racism, eugenics, immigration restriction, and human population control. According to Powell, in the late nineteenth century, white conservationists and preservationists identified the fate of the continent's wilderness with the fate of white Americans and "contributed to an enduring association between wilderness and whiteness that helps explain why many of the nation's non-white citizens continue to feel uncomfortable in parks and other sites of outdoor recreation today" (81). He urges white environmentalists to confront the movement's racist origins and work toward building a more inclusive environment.

A cultural and intellectual history of white men who had the means to shape racial and environmental policies, Vanishing America is structured by two key moments: the rise of a US conservation movement in the mid-nineteenth century and the emergence of post–World War II environmentalism. Powell begins with prominent mid-nineteenth-century thinkers such as Lewis Henry Morgan, Henry David Thoreau, Josiah C. Nott, and Peter Burnett, who agreed that American progress led to the extinction of "wild people" and "wild land." They disagreed over who would survive. Nott and Burnett believed that Indigenous peoples and species who resisted domestication would necessarily disappear to make way for white Americans. Morgan and Thoreau did not see vanishing people and vanishing nature as inevitable. They advocated for the preservation of Indigenous people and nature when most Americans cast settler colonial erasure as beneficial. In the late nineteenth century, a shift occurred in white racial thought. White men began to see themselves as a threatened race amid industrialization and mass migration. They worried that "rugged immigrant hordes" polluted the nation and unchecked industrial expansion destroyed the nation's evolutionary heritage. Gilded Age reformers such as George Bird Grinnell, Theodore Roosevelt, and Joseph LeConte argued that an "untamed frontier" was necessary for white male virility and worked to protect game animals from extinction and land from resource extraction. They laid the foundation for a new generation of environmental reformers, who advocated for immigration restrictions, eugenics legislation, and wildlife preservation to protect the nation from degeneracy. By the early twentieth century, "death of nature" narratives evoked nostalgia for a preindustrial past. White Americans turned vanishing Indians and dying species into spectacles and sites of national catharsis. They eulogized Ishi (the last wild Indian), Martha (the last passenger pigeon), and Booming Ben (the last heath hen) as regrettable casualties of modernity. Soothing white guilt, they "played Indian" in fraternal societies and asserted that wilderness made healthy boys and men. By midcentury, long-standing racist discourses about an imperiled and vanishing white race remained entrenched, shaping Aldo Leopold's and William Vogt's ideas of overpopulation and ecological balance.

Powell tells a fascinating history of friendships, alliances, disputes, and intellectual exchange between several generations of elite white men who jockeyed to protect an exclusionary notion of "wilderness" from frontier spaces to bounded parks. His study complements Gail Bederman's work on white manhood and Mark Spence's and Karl Jacoby's works on colonial violence and American conservation. NAIS scholars will find the text lacking in its engagement with our field and critical race scholarship. For instance, Powell's fourth chapter, "The Last of Her Tribe," examines the similarity of "lasting" narratives about Native people and animals but does not engage or cite Jean O'Brien's Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Had he done so, he could have better connected this literary tradition to how white environmental writers and thinkers constructed Native people as out of place and time in their own lands and inserted themselves as protectors of "wild people" and "wild land." Powell mentions throughout the book that the racist undertones of American environmentalism affected how nonwhite people experienced...