Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West

“Americans have long celebrated progress, material wealth, and technological advancements without considering their true environmental price,” according to this edifying environmental history of the Western United States. Dant (Encyclopedia of American National Parks), a history professor at Weber State University, suggests that farming, ranching, and urban growth in the West have tested the region’s ecological limits, devastated ecosystems, destroyed Native communities, and expended resources at an unsustainable rate. The author provides an overview of how glacial retreat around 15,000 years ago left the area between the Sierra and Rocky Mountains “arid and austere” and how Indigenous populations altered the landscape west of the Great Plains with controlled burns. However, Dant trains most of her attention on the ways in which European colonizers and their descendants have ravaged Western ecosystems, telling how settlers “depleted the region’s big game populations” in the 1800s and caused the 1930s Dust Bowl by replacing “deep-rooted prairie bunchgrasses” with wheat and corn. Descriptions of humans’ failure to live in harmony with the land resonate with contemporary concerns about global warming, though Dant’s prescription for a more sustainable lifestyle (people should live “within, not in spite of, the carrying capacity of the land”) is a bit amorphous. Nonetheless, this is a penetrating take on the complicated ways that humans impact their environs. Photos. (June)