Arcadian America is an ambitious work that defies categorization: part meditative historiography, part social activism, part environmental history, and part memoir. Sachs unveils how a handful of nineteenth-century scholars, landscape architects, and artists—“environmental prophets”—composed an enduring environmental vision with deeply personal resonance. He mimics the writing style of these prophets who, in Thoreau's words, appreciated “formal experimentation” and a “radical combination of inward searching and social critique” (81–82).

Sachs's goal is to resuscitate the classical idea of Arcadia—a picturesque non-commodified space for reflection—and explain how Americans adapted this notion to confront personal and social limits in changing circumstances. The American Arcadian tradition emphasized the work of “middle landscapes”: not thoroughly stylized spaces, not therapeutic escapes from cities, but material attempts to come to grips with cycles of death and resilience. Sachs argues that a cohort of writers and planners sought out and created spaces for “repose” (pause, reflection, eternal rest) as the antidote for the destruction of “progress” (urbanization, market revolution, capitalist excesses). Thus, American Arcadians saw social value in spaces that were humanized but not commodified, where wildness was integrated into everyday life. Sachs finds this vision of a more ecological life compelling in our age of global warming.

This lengthy book is organized into seven chapters. The first offers a case study of Mount Auburn, America's first cemetery (est. 1831), which reflected the belief that death was part of the cycle of life. Park cemeteries provided ambling paths, seasonal changes, and elements of wildness where the wanderer could consider the rhythms of nature. Each chapter is modeled on these meandering paths and the thoughts they engender: the reader encounters the author's memories of family and youth, reflections on the resilience of those who emerged from the depths of despair, and admiration for intellectual ancestors who endeavored to improve society by cultivating relationships with the environment. This narrative style can feel jumpy, but the reader would do well to surrender to the journey and leave behind expectations of a straight path.

Each subsequent chapter focuses on a particular set of Arcadian thinkers. Chapter 2 follows feminist transcendentalist Margaret Fuller's quest for social and natural harmony on the Great Lakes frontier. Long before twentieth-century environmental scholars questioned the perceived divide between nature and culture, Fuller advocated for maintaining wild edges of settlement as everyday reminders of humans' connection to nature.Footnote ¹ Chapter 3 picked up this ethos in the 1840s career of Andrew Jackson Downing, a landscape designer who integrated nature into urban planning as a purposeful alternative to a grid system. Chapter 4, cleverly titled “Stumps,” focuses on Americans' parallel sense of disorientation in the face of death and dismemberment in the Civil War and the environmental destruction wrought by industrialization.

The three chapters that follow illustrate yearning for a sense of home and connection to the earth as American life trended toward commodification, privatization, and urbanization. Sachs finds, in the writings of Ignatius Donnelly and Hamlin Garland, that Arcadia simultaneously faded and persisted as Americans fostered an “old-fashioned attachment to land and an escapist restlessness” (211). He also focuses on Henry George, who critiqued the U.S. land system as inherently antidemocratic and asserted that citizens deserved environmental rights. Sachs connects George's critical view of progress to the work of H.W.S. Cleveland, a landscape architect whose crowning achievement was the chain of greenways integrated into the urban plans of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Cleveland created public commons as healthful spaces for industrial workers to check the ravages of capitalism and the power of the wealthy over urban planning. Cleveland's vision of the interpenetration of nature and humanity was radical, especially when compared to planning the West, which Sachs argues “went awry” after the Civil War. Sachs explains the gridlines and paucity of public greenspace in western cities as an expression of cultural trauma: “the unwillingness of Americans to adapt to nature's contours ran rigidly parallel to their unwillingness to confront mortality” (251).

Arcadian America challenges the oft-repeated narrative of Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind that American environmental awareness increased over the nineteenth century as resources dwindled.Footnote ² Sachs argues that antebellum thinkers developed a radical environmental ethos that could not survive the catastrophe of the Civil War, and consequently the “edginess of environmental thought may have actually faded” over the century (4). Like Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, Sachs considers the Civil War a watershed moment.Footnote ³ Most Americans sought comfort in its aftermath by denying death and limits. Dominant environmental thought in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era reproduced this denial by considering wilderness as remote, a place where Americans would not have to face the realities of industrial destruction and historical traumas. Glimmers of the Arcadian tradition survived the popular faith in progress in the 1870s through the 1890s. Even as capitalism privatized space and drove people indoors and as environmentalism trended toward utilitarian efficiency and valorized remote monumental landscapes, the Arcadian ethos never died “because Americans remain undecided about modernity and about its tendency to wipe the slate clean and plow under the past” (350).

Arcadian America is more than a historiography of nineteenth-century environmental thought. Sachs critiques the modern environmental movement for focusing too narrowly on a bleak future and advocates for a hopeful vision that can generate relationships between people and environments. How might dwelling on death lead to hope? Sachs believes that acknowledging limits cultivates empathy, kinship, and humility; his book reveals his vulnerabilities and personal struggles to come to terms with death and his own sometimes elitist and escapist relationship to environments. His memoirs remind the reader that we are all human: imperfect, on our own journeys, and grappling with limits. Arcadian America feels like a letter from a friend and colleague. This, not coincidentally, was the tone early Arcadian writers struck in their writings. Such personal reflections risk becoming self-indulgent—the very charge leveled against antebellum environmental thinkers—but Sachs hits the right notes, adding depth and relevance to his larger scholarly and activist project. The cumulative effect of this narrative structure is that the reader can see the power of this environmental tradition in action.