cover image This Green and Growing Land: Environmental Activism in American History

This Green and Growing Land: Environmental Activism in American History

Kevin C. Armitage. Rowman & Littlefield, $37 (268p) ISBN 978-1-4422-3707-0

Armitage, professor of history at the University of Miami–Ohio, traces the long history of environmental activism in the U.S. in this comprehensive and accessible volume, highlighting the ways in which the conservation movement has evolved from the 18th century to the 21st century. Armitage describes the contamination of Philadelphia’s Dock Creek in the mid-18th century, when tanneries and slaughterhouses used the waterway “as their dump.” Benjamin Franklin and others insisted that public health and the quality of the shared environment take precedence over private business interests, a position that helped lay a foundation for government regulation and smarter resource management. In the mid-19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau celebrated the great outdoors as a precious resource that should not be commodified, and Armitage relates how such sentiment was further popularized in the early 20th century by John Muir and legitimized by Congress in 1916 with the creation of the National Park Service. Legislation in subsequent years helped to preserve more land, as did the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s. Armitage remains unfazed by climate-change skeptics and relishes the challenge they pose to the environmentally concerned; whether they pay attention to this valuable narrative is another matter. Photos. (Jan.)