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  • Laid Waste!: The Culture of Exploitation in Early America by John Lauritz Larson
  • Camden Burd (bio)
Keywords

Environmental history, Exploitation, Environment, Industrialization

Laid Waste!: The Culture of Exploitation in Early America. By John Lauritz Larson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 312. Cloth, $39.95.)

The search for the origins of America's particularly destructive relationship with the natural world has been the underlying motive for numerous environmental historians. After several decades of scholarship, there is still no singular consensus. Some historians have pointed to the industrial revolution as the origin of environmental decline.1 Others have argued that innovations in transportation served a catalyst in the larger commodification of nature.2 One historian argued that early American settlers exhibited a destructive mastery over the natural world in order to overcome fear and hardship of an overly abundant natural world.3 More recently, scholars have turned their attention to the political and cultural aspects of the American capitalist system in order to explain the nation's toxic track record with nature.4 Despite the countless studies, the central [End Page 151] question of American environmental history still remains a motivating force of historical investigation.

Adding to the bedrock of historical research, John Lauritz Larson offers Laid Waste!: The Culture of Exploitation in Early America. This sweeping work does not refute the nuances of earlier contributions. Rather, Larson finds a common thread among the economic, political, and technological developments of the nineteenth century. He concludes that Americans by the late nineteenth century fully embraced a culture of exploitation. "In this culture of exploitation, the resources of nature, first seen as gifts from God, became mere commodities for industry, while greed, once prescribed as sin, was naturalized and elevated to a virtue" (1). For Larson, the culture of exploitation was both immersive and multifaceted.

America's penchant for exploitation did not develop from a single person or event. Rather, it sprouted from concurrent developments in ideas of commerce, religion, society, science, and race from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. Each chapter reveals one element of the transformation. "Abundance" and "Achievement" follow colonists' reactions to nature. First considered a threat by the colonists, the natural world was soon seen as an opportunity. Their survival—at the expense of Native Americans—transformed ideas of nature, colonists' place in it, and their agency to manipulate it to their ends. "Liberation" points to the rhetoric of American independence as a powerful force in creating a new language of libertarianism. This language tended to favor "freedom from government" rather than "freedom to govern well" (99). The following chapters—"Inventory," "Improvement," and "Destiny"—historicize a host of developments from pro-capitalist government polices to debates regarding the expansion of slavery; from the base desires of westward expansion to the romantic fictions of Manifest Destiny; and from the glorifi-cation of the American entrepreneur to the American obsession with natural "improvements." As Larson sees it, by the time industrialization had taken hold in the decades after the Civil War, "the culture of exploitation had come of age" (178). Throughout Laid Waste! Larson tracks an American populace enabled by the language of liberty, obsessed with the market, and encouraged by the promises of progress and improvement.

The catastrophic environmental exploitation that Americans faced at the dawn of the twentieth century could have been avoided had Americans only listened to the skeptics and romantics who grew increasingly [End Page 152] uncomfortable with the rampant materialism, commercialism, and techno-optimism of the era. In the final chapter "Prophecy," Larson examines Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, Marsh, and Roosevelt to remind readers there were Americans who had hoped to steer society off its wasteful track. Whereas Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir challenged individuals to rethink their relationship to the natural world, Marsh and Roosevelt sought to harness the power of government to enact change. All of them met their critics. The romantics were labeled kooks, elitists, or effeminate—"a stinging rebuke in the masculine, aggressive world of ruthless enterprise and cutthroat competition" (207). With the creation of the United State Forest Service and the passage of the Antiquities Act, the government reformers momentarily bucked their devotion to economic liberalism. Regardless of...

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