Stoll's work grounds itself in a tremendous amount and depth of research on the biographies of prominent figures in American environmentalism. With the sheer volume and enumeration of family histories, centering on denominational affiliation and its intensity, Stoll provides a rich, impressionistic portrait of environmentalism in full sectarian color. With a steady and increasingly rapid drumbeat of biographical detail, Stoll amasses evidence for his argument: Congregationalists and then Presbyterians stood at the center of American environmentalism from its roots in the eighteenth century up through the beginning of the twentieth century (at which time the picture gets more complicated). Where the figures in this history were not themselves particularly active in their churches, Stoll digs to show the church history in their family background. In this way, Stoll extends the reach of his argument into the “lapsed” category and even, eventually, into the broader category of the secular. For the depth and volume of family narratives—in engaging and accessible prose—Stoll's work stands as a valuable resource for those who would engage with American religious and environmental history through a denominational lens.

While Stoll purports to overlay “standard” American environmental history over “standard” American religious history, the structure and content of his work does not really do this. He spends the first half of the book linking theology, landscape painting, architecture, and urban geography through a treatment of a fairly restricted set of figures (Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, Ansel Adams, and Frank Lloyd Wright). The second half of the work is much more conventional and broad in its selection of figures (John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, David Brower, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, John Burroughs, Henry David Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Edward Osborne Wilson, and numerous others) and focuses more directly on conservation advocacy, legislation, and land management policy. Stoll's work does follow a classical approach to American religious history that highlights the influence of certain mainline Protestant denominations in the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries followed by religious diversification in the late twentieth into the twenty-first. He designates his innovations or discoveries as: (1) the near-monopoly of New England Congregationalists and Presbyterians up until the mid-twentieth century, (2) the relative lack of influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the biographies of prominent contemporaries, and (3) the absence of denominational correlates with respect to wilderness preservation specifically.

Stoll's work convinces in asserting a particular form of Protestant hegemony. Stoll's further ambition is less convincing: to link Reformed theology—and a broadly Calvinist view of nature—to the content of approaches to nature in prominent cultural expressions. If one recognizes conservation as a system of power (i.e., a certain orientation to land management), then one must consider a fact that Stoll recognizes but downplays: denominations were political and economic clubs as much as communities of belief. For example, Stoll writes that “Connecticut Congregationalism's quiet cultural hegemony” (63) kept non-Congregationalists out of Connecticut and, later, out of political power from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. One would be hard-pressed to explain the exclusion of non-Congregationalists from conservation leadership as the result of differing views of God's sovereignty over nature and the desire to build an orderly, just society. Congregationalists simply were not going to let a Baptist, let alone a Catholic, guide any significant initiatives in land management no matter what doctrine that Baptist or Catholic professed—unless that profession resulted in a denominational switch to Congregationalism. Recognition of this dimension of denominational hegemony—a self-reinforcing feedback loop arising out of historically contingent circumstance—should lead one to a much broader analysis of power than the theological lens provides.

If theology did not motivate, one might nevertheless expect it to give shape to this particular form of Protestant hegemony. But the specificity of Stoll's argument struggles to read Calvinism into his evidence. Stoll's chapter on Thomas Cole's The Oxbow is illustrative, with only a single source suggesting a direct link between Cole and Calvinism: reverence for wilderness, pure of human taint, as the direct revelation of God (16–17). The sources presented in the rest of the chapter evoke religion and Christianity, with a particularly strong reading of the Christian symbolism of The Oxbow, but without specific links to Calvinism. When Stoll inserts into the chapter a history of Calvinism in New England, he admits to stretching the connection to Cole's words and work: “With the scope and concept of associations beyond any that Cole might have intended or his viewers have known, this history and these Puritans tell the tale of the unfolding of Calvinist doctrines of God, nature, and humanity in American ways of seeing nature in spirituality, art, science, and landscape. These expanded associations embellish and elaborate The Oxbow’s tale into a virtual Genesis of American conservation and environmentalism” (19). Stoll's argument for Calvinistic influence hangs by a number of thin threads: “associations” beyond intention that “embellish” to create a “virtual” foundation for American environmentalism. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of Calvinism in the historical environment from which The Oxbow sprang. But without more systematic analysis of the other traditions and social features in that historical environment, and without more rigorously argued links to evidence, one is hard-pressed to accept Stoll's promotion of Calvinism except by force of convention.

With his concern for theological specificity, Stoll misses fascinating and potentially enlightening connections between the character of Protestant hegemony and the rise of the secular. The protagonists of Stoll's narrative articulated their leadership in general and universalistic terms: preservation of nature as God's creation for the good of all. By generalizing and diluting theology in their self-articulation, Congregationalists and Presbyterians claimed the mantle of leadership over a multidenominational society. Did the claim to exercise power in the service of universal and rational principles lead to the decline of these denominations? Stoll's work gives a portrait of such decline but without sustained analysis of it. Future scholarship could build on Stoll's work to better understand the rise of the secular within American environmentalism.