The American Environment Revisited: Environmental Historical Geographies of the United States ed. by Geoffrey L. Buckley and Yolonda Youngs

The field shared by historical geographers and environmental historians has changed substantially in the quarter century since publication of Craig E. Colten and Lary M. Dilsaver's influential collection, The American Environment: Interpretations of Past Geographies. To mark that volume's twenty-fifth anniversary is this new book, The American Environment Revisited, a monumental collection of twenty essays that captures the methodological diversity of an academic grove left to grow wild while also revealing the roots and branches of the orchard's original plantings.

It is a testament to the intellectual vision of its editors, Geoffrey L. Buckley and Yolanda Youngs, that they accomplished their task without pruning back the branches or pulling up the vines that help distinguish the heterogeneous fruits of environmental historical geography from the predictably smooth tomatoes of scholarship in other disciplines. The result is a book that largely recapitulates what Buckley and Youngs determine to be one of the heirloom strengths of environmental historical geography: the ability to "describe the world in detail" (xix). Opening with a preface written by Colten and Dilsaver, and concluding with an afterword written by William K. Wyckoff—another of the field's leading scholars for more than three decades—The American Environment Revisited provides readers with a thick narration of environmental historical geography's transformations from the past into the present. Working well in conjunction with the book's useful introduction, these pieces suggest several key characteristics of environmental historical geography that have remained consistent to the field's sensibilities over the last quarter century. First, the field's commitment to narrative specificity over abstraction puts research methodologies into the service of storytelling, rather than the other way around. Second, the stories told by environmental historical geographers fundamentally recognize the blended ways that nature and society constitute one another, and provide evocative historical starting points for reassessing our own current environmental issues. Third, and perhaps most definitively, environmental historical geographers can craft these stories on a complete spectrum of spatial scales, ranging from the synoptic migrations of plants and animals to the microgeographies of the souvenir shop, a range literally spanned in this volume by its first and last chapters.

Despite the book's emphasis on foregrounding the importance of the material environment in environmental historical geography, the influence of cultural theory still plays a welcome and significant role throughout many of the essays. The individual contributions of Buckley and Young, for instance, both attend to the broader understandings of "nature" that have guided, respectively, public perceptions of state forestry and public perceptions of the dangers and risks posed to tourists in national parks. Martin Melosi's chapter on the lives and afterlives of Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill likewise emphasizes the complex relationships between environmental transformations and public discourses of consumption and waste. Maria Lane's chapter about the early twentieth-century construction of the railroad extension to Key West, Florida, reveals how relatively local alterations to routes of transportation can result in much wider transformations in popular conceptions of geography and social identity. Derek Alderman and Bob Wilson both write with characteristic keenness on the blended cultural and physical worlds inhabited by kudzu and white-tailed deer, and Gareth Hoskins's chapter on the "oblique ecologies" of hydraulic mining similarly probes the roles played by nonhuman actors in the production of American landscapes. Dawn Biehler focuses her discussion of the history of do-it-yourself insecticides on the deeper cultural discourses that shaped the inner geography of the home and its relationships with external producers and consumers. It is clear from these chapters that much of the best work in environmental historical geography remains heavily influenced by the critical sensibilities of cultural studies.

A trio of chapters at the end of the volume further mark the field's deep imbrications with cultural geography—suggesting, to me at least, that environmental historical geography may bear its closest relationship not to environmental history but to the classic critical landscape studies that foregrounded the perception of place as the very condition for the possibility of historical plot narration. Each of these intriguing essays, written by Finis Dunaway, Steven Hoelscher, and Dydia DeLyser, make an additional move in their critical discussions of environmental imaginings by treating images not merely as representations but as objects with historical and geographical lives of their own, as agents that exert their own forces on the world.

Other chapters travel off in a variety of other provocative directions. Annie Gilbert Coleman's consideration of the role of GoPro cameras in mediating outdoor recreational activities offers a model for addressing our concerns with the material considerations of environmental transformation through the intimate and detailed viewpoints of anthropology and ethnography. William E. O'Brien's contribution brings the environmental historical geography of twentieth-century segregation out of the South's cities and towns and into its state parks systems, while a chapter by Katie Algeo and Collins Eke employs statistical tools to consider and map the disruptions of communities displaced by the creation of Mammoth Cave National Park. Chapters written by Christopher Meindl and by Abigail M. York and Christopher G. Boone consider the environmental and social impacts of public policies in Florida's springs country and in metropolitan Phoenix, and demonstrate the affinity of environmental historical geography with political ecology. And a detailed and informative chapter written by Terence Young explores municipal environmental politics in the nineteenth century, focusing on the city of San Francisco's decision to build its massive Golden Gate Park instead of a decentralized park system planned by Frederick Law Olmstead that would have been more appropriate to the peninsula's dry and sandy soils.

Taken as a whole, this collection of essays offers a representative assortment of the diverse forms of research that constitute environmental historical geography in its present state. However, readers are left to wonder what exactly is "American" about this environment. For a book premised around the study of place, the editors are surprising silent on how they conceive of an "American environment." Is it simply the lands circumscribed by the boundaries of the present nation-state? Is it associated with a particular methodological or theoretical framing? And for a book that is primarily concerned with the environmental transformations wrought by the historical forces of settler colonialism, there is little between its covers that engages the geographical lives and imaginations of America's Native communities.

There are still about twenty-four years remaining to rectify these missed opportunities, though, so I look forward to reading the sequel, The American Environment Revisited: Again, in 2043.