How the West Was Worked Over
An environmental history of the United States.
By Jonathan Taylor
Nature's Bounty: Historical and Modern Environmental Perspectives by
Anthony N. Penna (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York, 300 pages, $66.95 hardcover,
$26.95 paperback)
It's discomforting for American environmentalists when a Brazilian state
governor defends the degradation of the Amazon rain forest by asking, "The
United States grew in the nineteenth century by exploiting its resources,
why can't we?" For those who seek to know how we came to exploit our
natural resources so thoroughly, history professor Anthony Penna has written
a four-essay primer on our country's environmental wealth and its nearly
uniform diminishment.
Nature's Bounty traverses 400 years, the full continent, and the domains
of timber, wildlife, water, and air. Penna's histories begin with awe-the
awe of Europeans arriving from a relatively denuded, congested, and polluted
continent to one of apparently boundless resources and beauty. Invariably,
the essays conclude with pollution, overconsumption, or extinction.
One of the ironies of the American expansion is that belief in the infinite
supply of natural resources speeded their depletion and forestalled any
adequate policy response. Thus the seemingly infinite capacity of the atmosphere
to absorb smoke was overwhelmed by pollution created by inefficient technologies.
Yet not until seventeen people died in Donora, Pennsylvania, in a calamitous
smog in 1949 did Congress seriously propose any clean- air legislation.
The billions of passenger pigeons crossing the country seemed inexhaustible
to market hunters who netted and clubbed them. Yet the last pigeon died
in the Cincinnati zoo in 1914. The formerly unfathomable abundance of the
Colorado River has now been so tapped that only a trickle enters Mexico
in some years.
Penna's book introduces the events that created these ironies. He uses
several examples in each essay to illustrate broad historical patterns
that seem to be repeated. The decimation of beaver populations to satisfy
the conceits of eighteenth-century European fashion parallels the slaughter
of plumage birds for Gilded Age hats. The ever-widening search for reservoirs
to supplant eighteenth-century Boston's contaminated wells and cisterns
presages the twentieth-century appetite of Los Angeles for water rights
in the distant Owens Valley.
While relating these repeating patterns, Penna also details the gradually
more effective policy responses implemented to break them. Throughout the
text he offers a useful lexicon of the environmental field, and with each
essay he also includes a small collection of primary-source excerpts ranging
from Colonial observations to Aldo Leopold's classic tract, Round River.
These features render the book a useful tutorial for the undergraduate
or novice environmentalist.
Initiated readers, however, will lament the opportunities missed by
Penna's recounting. His histories beg for analysis. For instance, he notes
that the Franklin stove was a superb wood-burning technology and laments
that it was too costly to manufacture for a century, yet he does not identify
any policies that might have slowed the consumption of cordwood.
More problematic still is Penna's failure to note beneficial developments
afforded by technical change or by collective action in response to resource
overuse. The platform frame houses most of us live in today are much more
efficient in their use of wood, labor, and energy and are much more fire-safe
than the balloon frame houses built in San Francisco during the Gold Rush.
Balloon frame houses, in turn, were much more efficient than the post-and-beam
houses of Colonial Boston, which in turn were more efficient than the log
cabins of the settlers. Not only have we become more efficient at extracting
resources, we've become more efficient at using them.
Moreover, American communities from the beginning adapted numerous ways
of curtailing overconsumption, yet Penna does not acknowledge the early
successes. From the informal norms that controlled the common fields of
eighteenth-century Massachusetts to the riparian rights regimes constraining
upstream water use for the benefit of downstream use, American communities
have long had the incentive and the ingenuity to solve "common-pool"
resource problems. Penna largely omits these, undermining the value of
the book as a historical analysis and reinforcing his decidedly green tone.
The really interesting unanswered question raised by Nature's Bounty
is this: could we have managed our resources more effectively, using techniques
and resources available contemporaneously? At virtually every stage of
our country's development except the earliest, voices were raised against
the environmental degradation taking place, yet somehow public thinking
was not ripe for the message to take hold or policy tools were not robust
enough for the tasks at hand.
For example, the biological notion of an ecosystem's web of interrelationships
did not emerge until the mid-twentieth century, yet silviculture as a discipline
had developed in Europe a century earlier. In nineteenth-century Oregon,
were the techniques of European silviculture inadequate, unpopular, blocked
by special interests, or simply inaccessible? In the field of public policy,
the regulation of consumer safety was born of riverboat boiler explosions
of the mid-nineteenth century. Is it reasonable to assume that nineteenth-century
legislators seeking to control smelters, bird hunters, or water wasters
had tools at their disposal to regulate, monitor, and enforce better than
they did? Penna's essays raise these questions without engaging them. They
are not just of academic interest.
Today, it appears that in setting modern environmental priorities, democracy
works-but does not always get the science right. Public opinion prioritizes
waste dumps, incinerators, groundwater pollution, and other local cancer
risks, and Congress spends accordingly. However, scientists point to much
higher risks in global warming and ozone depletion. Likewise, in preserving
endangered species a disproportionate amount is expended on behalf of "charismatic
megafauna"-large, photogenic animals such as wolves and whales-to
the detriment of less-appealing keystone species on which whole ecosystems
may depend.
The conundrum for policy makers involves leading the public to see the
contrary scientific positions in a democracy that does not take kindly
to government paternalism. As Penna shows, this is a long-standing difficulty
in American environmental discourse. Unfortunately, he does not engage
its origins in a way that would allow us to give a satisfying and nonpaternalistic
answer to the governor of a Brazilian rain forest state.
Jonathan Taylor is a senior consultant in the Cambridge office
of Lexecon, an economics consulting firm.
The Dolphins Are Back: A Successful Quality
Model for Healing the Environment
By Phillip M. Scanlan
Productivity Press, 1998
By the late 1980s, the New Jersey coast had become one of the most polluted
in the country, with dead and dying dolphins washing ashore by the hundreds.
Phillip Scanlan, E'66, ME'74, a vice president in AT&T's quality office,
headed a public-private group seeking to apply total quality management
(TQM) methods to the pollution problems facing the beaches. The group succeeded
where others had given up, and dolphins soon returned. In recounting two
experiences with TQM-at AT&T and on the Jersey shore-Scanlan demonstrates
that the quality methodology is a powerful approach for solving many kinds
of complex problems.
The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental
Justice Movements in the United States
Edited by Daniel Faber
Guilford Press, 1998
Daniel Faber, an assistant professor of sociology, brings together scholars
and activists to provide an "ecosocialist" perspective on environmentalism.
Twelve essays explore the links between capitalism's exploitation of nature
and of working people and demonstrate the parallels between the fight for
a healthy environment and the historical struggles for civil rights and
social justice. In so doing, the book illustrates the goals, strategies,
and accomplishments of the so-called environmental justice movement and
the principles of the emerging philosophy of ecological democracy. Faber,
a longtime social and environmental activist, is a founder of the Boston
Editorial Group of the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
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