Mark Fiege's The Republic of Nature has an ambitious intellectual agenda to demonstrate the stated premise of environmental history: that nature is central to the human experience. The book aims to champion the field of environmental history by applying an environmental perspective to understand historical events that may not have an obvious connection to the environment. Thus, rather than focus on traditional environmental topics, each of the book's nine chapters discuss a central role for the environment in understanding nine episodes in American history: the Salem Witch Trials, the American Revolution, Cotton and Southern Slavery, the life of Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg and the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Manhattan Project, Brown v. Board of Education, and the 1970s Oil Shock.

The book encourages an exploration of the role of the environment in economic history and economics more broadly, though I am not persuaded to adopt an environmental history perspective. In this book, people choose actions among a range of possibilities that are determined by the environment and, thus, nature is the final determinant of human history. This view obscures the role of a society's knowledge, both as technology and embedded in human or physical capital. Socially constructed institutions also shape the economic environment. The physical environment can influence the development of knowledge and institutions, but so can knowledge and institutions change the physical environment or its impact.

Construction of the national railroad network consumed a great deal of natural resources and the exact locations of lines were based on surveys of local terrain (Chapter 6). Fundamentally, however, the railroads replaced the waterway system that formed nature's transportation network. The natural environment is critical to understanding the impact of railroads, but mainly because the railroads most affected places that did not have access to the existing waterway network. Natural terrain was also influential throughout the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg (Chapter 5), but the well-known landscape around Gettysburg should not obscure the larger factors determining the course of the war. The segregation of physical space was struck down by the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (Chapter 8), yet the decision rejected an emphasis on physical facilities and geographic proximity to focus instead on intangible factors and the integration of social space and economic opportunity.

Settlement of the Southern United States was influenced substantially by its environmental suitability for the production of cotton (Chapter 3). Cotton production was mainly confined to long-staple varieties in some coastal areas, however, until the cotton gin enabled large-scale production of short-staple cotton throughout the South. In this way, the influence of environmental crop suitability depends on the available technologies and other factors of production. Environmental opportunities attracted settlers to the New World and geographic distance encouraged independence (Chapter 2), yet the impact of these environmental resources was determined more by their relationship to the world economy than their inherent characteristics. The 1970s oil shock reflected shortages of a natural resource (Chapter 9), but was caused more by political decisions than any natural scarcity. The impact of oil shocks will also vary according to consumers’ fixed investments and scope for adaptation.

The environment may also shape how people think. The Salem witch trials occurred during a period of disease and scarcity, and this unstable environment created conditions for appeals to witchcraft (Chapter 1). The Salem witch trials were a far more unique occurrence than the environmental conditions within Colonial New England, however, suggesting a more nuanced interaction between the environment, religion, and social customs. Abraham Lincoln was personally influenced by his childhood labor in the natural environment (Chapter 6); however, his empathy for slaves is described in the book as arising less from his hard labor than from his father's exploitation of his labor. Manhattan Project scientists may have appreciated nature and been motivated by a desire to understand natural laws of physics (Chapter 7), yet their harnessing of nuclear forces only fulfilled destructive or creative potential within the context of war or energy policy. Even if one is willing to reduce all of science to its role in understanding the natural environment, scientific discoveries take on meaning within their social and economic context.

Overall, this book illustrates the importance of the environment in understanding history. The book aims to expand the scope of environmental history and, in pushing this intellectual agenda, reaches to hold up the environment as the central explanatory factor across a myriad of historical episodes. Analyzing the environment within the lens of economic history, and economics more broadly, might instead explore how nature and society interact to shape the human experience.