At the end of this fascinating and tightly argued book, Matthew Lambert makes a case for the urgency and relevance of his study of environmentalist thought in Depression-era literature to intellectual discussion of the various planetary crises we currently face. He notes, “Our current historical moment eerily echoes the environmental, economic, and political ‘crises of authority’ of the 1930s and ’40s” (170). When writing this, he was referring specifically to the “Green New Deal” introduced to Senate in February 2019, and its echoes of Roosevelt's New Deal. Fast-forward a couple of years, and the relevance and urgency of this book have taken on another layering of eery significance. Its careful detailing and examination of issues of “environmental justice” in books (and films) of the crisis-ridden Depression era adds something powerful to our thinking about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Thus Lambert's closing speculation about the birth of modern environmentalist thinking in the crises of the Depression years – “how else might depression-era political and environmental thought influence our response to … current forms of economic, racial and gender inequality?” (171) – offers some suggestive – and ecological – food for thought as we face the current global crisis.

The pointed relevance of The Green Depression to our current situation stems from the book's emphasis on how its literary examples of environmentalist thought in the face of global crisis are underpinned by issues of social justice and equality. This, in turn, delivers a book that challenges some of the models and assumptions we have about the Depression era, and – especially – about its literature. In its first chapter, for example, familiar Depression-era writers Faulkner and Hemingway are analysed alongside readings of hunting and wilderness in Aldo Leopold's writings, the “indigenous-informed understanding of the frontier's environmental legacy” (23) in D'Arcy McNickle, and – polemically – the 1942 Disney classic Bambi. And this sort of boldness in the reach and significance of the connections that the book seeks to establish between texts is supported by its superbly clear and organized argument and structure. Moving on from the investigation of “wilderness” (a common trope of recent ecological thinking) in its first chapter, the book's three remaining chapters trace the era's environmental thinking in rural and urban environments (chapters 2 and 3) and in tension with science, technology and the atom bomb (chapter 4).

The discussion in chapter 2 of Zora Neale Hurston's use of folk mythology as a counterecology to that of southern agrarianism and the “plantation pastoralism” of the 1939 film Gone with the Wind is both provocative and a powerful means of introducing issues of racial (and gender) justice into the book's developing argument. Likewise, chapter 3's examination of the “postpastoral” city (adopting Terry Gifford's useful term) juxtaposes readings of the importance of urban parks, waste dumps and vacant lots across a provocative and energizing group of writers not normally written about together. Richard Wright and Tillie Olsen are thus read alongside James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren and Mike Gold. Not only does this provide new connections and relationships across and between these writers; it also demonstrates how ecological thinking is, itself, about connectedness, about not separating out the political, social and literary environments we inhabit.

In its final chapter, the book interrogates how the “technological sublime” plays out in a number of “depression-era filmmakers and authors, particularly science-fiction authors of the 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s” (132). It starts with a brilliant reading of the 1939 New York World's Fair, and its exposure of Lewis Mumford's “uncritical, idealist notions of progress” (133). Going on to trace the growing environmental awareness of “industrial and militaristic appropriations of science and technology” (165) in the period, the chapter then shows neatly and convincingly how the thinking of later ecological activists – Rachel Carson, especially – has roots in such growing scepticism about unfettered technological and scientific “progress.” Again, the argument is carried out across a range of writers both well known and more obscure, from the depiction of the Valley of Ashes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to the sci-fi of Ray Bradbury and Judith Merril, and ending in an examination of George Schuyler's depiction of technology as a means of white enslavement of black people across the world.

The book, then, is hugely ambitious and covers much ground. And it is highly successful in its aim of highlighting the importance, and extent, of ecoliterary thinking in the Depression era. At times I would have liked more detail in the close readings of the various texts, and perhaps a little more suggestive looseness in the connections it makes between the many texts it discusses (the tightness of the argument, a strength in terms of the book's clarity and organization, sometimes feels a little restrictive). As I observed at the start of this review, though, the book itself suggests there is much more to be said on this topic, on environmental justice in the 1930s and 1940s, and on its contemporary relevance. And I guess leaving us wanting more is no bad thing; it is, indeed, a strong recommendation of the fascinating and compelling territory explored so interestingly in this book.