Abstract
Described as the second in a three book series – bracketed by The Environment and the People in American Cities: 1600s–1900s and Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution and Residential Mobility – Dorceta Taylor’s most recent work, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection provides a nuanced and intersectional look at the development of conservation discourse and action in the United States. Taylor’s close attention to the interplay between U.S. conservation activities and earlier forms of activism provides readers with a deeper understanding of the social movement dynamics that shaped the development of U.S. conservation. Additionally, through a combination of sweeping history and sociological analysis, this book serves as a powerful corrective to the unfortunate tendency toward thinking of and writing about U.S. environmental movements without adequate attention to the race, class, and gender politics that fundamentally shape U.S. conservation.
While today’s environmentalists may imagine themselves as the inheritors of a popular grassroots struggle, pitting rugged nature lovers against wealthy business elites, Taylor’s work provides detailed insight into the way ruling class preferences for European gentility and conceptions of the sublime shaped conservation practices in the United States. Focusing primarily on the intellectual and political developments of the 19th century, this book compellingly demonstrates how elite tastes and interests shaped enduring American notions of the land’s appropriate uses, meanings, and value. Rather than contend that urban development prompted an exodus from urban spaces, and an increased valuation of the natural world among early conservationists, Taylor’s work shows how urban life contributed to the development of elite ideologies and conservation practices. While anxieties about urban health, sanitation, and exclusivity certainly influenced the early conservation movement, most elites could not afford to permanently retreat from the urban centers that were the basis of their economic power. These anxieties did, however, prompt the construction of expansive country estates, and the movements for urban parks fit to rival the best Europe had to offer.
Urban retreats in rural spaces increased the force urban conservationists exerted over rural places and peoples. For many elites, the countryside was shabby and did not live up to their Arcadian expectations. Taylor writes “[a]s more elites vacationed or lived in the countryside, they became frustrated with the unkempt farms, scruffy front yards, littered roadsides, and drab towns.” These frustrations spurned numerous rural beautification projects. In her attention to these projects, Taylor demonstrates the central role elites played in shaping ventures aimed at increasing the aesthetic quality of rural places. Such efforts resulted in a number of “improvements” which are now taken for granted as part of rural life; park benches, tree-lined thoroughfares, well-tended cemeteries, open public spaces, shrubbery, and streets named after regional trees.
Other familiar aspects of U.S. environmental life, such as the construction and maintenance of national parks and various forms of wildlife protection, are also the result of elite lobbying. Taylor offers her readers riveting examples of how race and gender were mobilized in these efforts. For example, while tropes of masculine identity and the crisis of masculinity figured prominently in the push for game preserves and increased access to wilderness for sport and recreation, elitist conceptions of sportsmanlike conduct in hunting also shaped early efforts to conserve game. In the case of hunting, race, class and gender are closely connected. During the Gilded Age, the hunting practices of immigrants, poor people, and even the nouveau riche were blamed for the decline of both game and non-game species.
In the case of birds in particular, conservation rhetoric of the time initially asserted that women, and their taste for bird-bedecked finery, were the main culprits in the decline of avian species. The wearing of feathers was repeatedly linked with savagery and immorality on the part of women who participated in the trend. Interestingly, bird conservation was an area in which elite women were especially active, yet this in no way diminished the intensity of the attacks on feather-wearing women as barbarous and criminal. The only thing that did diminish attacks on women was a shift in focus that harnessed rampant anti-immigrant sentiment to the cause of avian conservation. In the West, Japanese immigrants were accused of hunting song birds with blowguns, while in the East, Italians were vilified as invading “hordes” posing a “growing menace to America’s woods and fields.” Attempts to suppress immigrant hunters led to several violent episodes and the ultimate passage of the Alien Gun Law forbidding non-U.S. born residents from owning rifles or killing wildlife.
While picturesque parks, debates over land-use, and species protection laws are all strikingly familiar aspects of contemporary U.S. environmentalism, few Americans today are aware of the multifaceted social and political activism which drove the proliferation of urban elite tastes deep into rural spaces, nor have they likely considered how social inequalities are exacerbated by concern over issues like pastoral aesthetics, songbird populations, or access to game animals.
Overall, this book is filled with fascinating historical specifics about the conservation movement which are seldom brought to light in either academic or activist circles. I was especially pleased by Taylor’s attention to settler-colonialism, though I would have enjoyed more focus on this relatively under-examined concept in U.S. sociology. I look forward to any future projects which might examine this particular facet of American conservation more closely. Although this text is conceptually complex and richly detailed, Taylor employs highly readable prose to tell the story of the American conservation movement. This book has something to offer for a diverse range of scholars, and could make a fine addition to reading lists for both graduate and undergraduate courses in environmental social science, sociology of race, class, and gender, historical sociology, or social movements.