Accounts of the history of American environmental thought typically characterize it as riven by a divide between a utilitarian preoccupation with “use” and a more romantic focus on “preservation.” Many contemporary environmental philosophers have fixated upon a similar debate between “anthropocentrism” and “ecocentrism.”

Ben Minteer argues that these dualisms must be overcome if the contemporary environmental movement is to find its voice. Like Kerry Whiteside in Divided Natures (2002), Minteer introduces the reader to thinkers who offer an alternate way of conceptualizing the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world. Where Whiteside turns away from Anglo-American thought in favor of French theorists, however, Minteer finds his inspiration closer to home. Like Robert Gottlieb in Forcing the Spring (1993), Minteer expands our sense of both who counts as an “environmentalist” and what counts as “environmentalism” in the United States.

Minteer devotes chapters to four thinkers from the first half of the twentieth century. He presents each as exemplary: Liberty Hyde Bailey, Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and Aldo Leopold. With the clear exception of Leopold, they have received scant attention within environmentalist circles. In all four cases, Minteer's aim is to offer a “useable past” (p. 195) that will help us delineate what he terms a “third way”: “a pragmatic alternative running between the zealous ‘humans first!’ and ‘nature first!’ camps” (p. 2). He then seeks to identify manifestations of this in present-day initiatives, focusing upon both “New Urbanism” and Wes Jackson's “Natural Systems Agriculture.”

Minteer's most distinctive and compelling argument is that his environmental intellectuals all articulate their concerns within a broader civic framework. This framework is defined by concern for democratic engagement, communal obligation, and social justice. The payoff for many political theorists and political scientists also can be found here: Minteer does not simply argue that his thinkers inflect their environmental ideas with a public philosophy, but that they model the conviction that political and environmental thinking are inextricably linked. The book's subtitle is explained by his contention that this approach was directly or indirectly (it is not quite clear) influenced by philosophical pragmatism, particularly the ideas of John Dewey.

I am very sympathetic to Minteer's project in this clearly written book. He is right that debates between anthropocentrists and ecocentrists often generate more heat than light. The recovery of American intellectual forebears who eschew such debates can offer a constructive alternative; Mumford is an especially rich and underappreciated source of insight. And Minteer's attention to philosophical pragmatism is salient, both for its critique of the “quest for certainty” and its attention to civic engagement and democratic community. To be sure, however, the book is not without faults. The most notable are tied to these same attractive qualities.

First, an important part of Minteer's criticism is directed against the quest for intellectual purity and absolute foundations, an argument that he repeats throughout the book. He does so because he takes this quest to be central for both academic environmental philosophers and environmental activists (e.g., pp. 184–86). Yet he makes little effort to demonstrate its ubiquity among the latter. Certainly, a bias toward wilderness can be found among both. Yet it would seem easy to characterize the ideas of, say, many Sierra Club or Greenpeace members in the same approving terms that Minteer applies to Wes Jackson: “an interesting and idiosyncratic hodgepodge of normative principles and arguments” (p. 166).

Second, the author has a tendency to be overly generous in his readings, thereby failing to address the limitations of his chosen thinkers. This is problematic because those he looks to as models often failed to achieve their own ambitions for social and environmental change. By more often excusing than critically examining these failures, he limits our ability to learn from them. For example, in his chapter on horticulturist and rural reformer Liberty Hyde Bailey, Minteer offers an extended and enthusiastic account of Bailey's role in the progressive-era Country Life Commission devoted to “rural uplift” (p. 20). Yet the commission's recommendations fell on deaf ears in Washington. In the final sentences of the section, Minteer cites—without comment—a historian who attributes the commission's failures to “their fundamental inability to understand the values and needs of rural people … [who] were actively resistant to the changes” (p. 26). It is to the author's credit that he included this comment, yet there is little indication that he has integrated such troubling criticism into his analysis.

Third, the role played by philosophical pragmatism in Minteer's intellectual history seems less direct than he often suggests. Certainly his thinkers evoke a pragmatic sensibility, and he joins a growing number who argue for the value of this sensibility to contemporary environmental thinking. But he often tries to go further, discussing John Dewey and others at some length, suggesting that they were key influences. Here the connections appear tenuous. Moreover, it is not clear that they are necessary. The value of the ideas of Bailey, Mumford, MacKaye, and Leopold ultimately must stand—or fall—on their own. Working to establish a pedigree that links them to Dewey and others seems, well … not very pragmatic.

To environmentalists, as Minteer notes, Leopold is by far the most familiar of his four. He is also commonly associated with the anthropocentric–ecocentric divide. Thus, Minteer's normative argument rests heavily upon his ability to offer a fresh interpretation of this pivotal thinker. To a significant degree, he succeeds. Leopold emerges not as a one-note defender of the intrinsic value of nature but as a public intellectual with a well-stocked rhetorical toolbox, willing to draw upon diverse arguments to encourage needed behavioral changes. As the author puts it, Leopold acted upon a belief that “what were properly seen as moral ends (e.g., the intrinsic value of nature) could also be employed as critical means to realize further goals, such as land health, that serve a range of human and nonhuman needs” (p. 144).

In sum, Minteer has successfully excavated several thinkers who deserve greater consideration by environmentalists. He has also added his well-informed voice to the growing chorus urging what he calls a “third way.” Yet his account may suggest more than he explicitly acknowledges here. For if he is right that even Leopold—the “father of environmental ethics” (p. 115)—does not fit the historical role in which he is frequently cast, perhaps the “first” and “second” ways are more a product of contemporary imagination than a coherent intellectual heritage. If so, then the civic environmentalism that Minteer advances would not be a third way, but the recovery of a valuable but neglected insight already integral to environmental thought.