Dorceta Taylor's book aims at filling a long-standing gap in environmental history. It provides a modern reinterpretation of conservation in Progressive Era America that integrates the history of ordinary people into the story of great white men and their masculinist conservation deeds. Taylor argues that American conservation policy was controlled and shaped by a power elite, made up of well-to-do people recoiling against the city, who projected their fears and aspirations for a better America onto the countryside and the West. In the process of championing nature protection, they ignored the environmental problems that befell the denizens of cities and shaped the American environment in ways that gave short shrift to ordinary folks and especially people of colour. Often, conservation involved taking land or other resources by removing or marginalizing indigenous people or African Americans.
This class-, gender-, and caste-based thesis is persuasive so far as it goes. It incorporates and reflects the scholarship of Karl Jacoby's Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation (2001), Louis Warren's The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (1997), Mark David Spence's Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (1999), and others making social-justice environmentalism front and center in historical accounts. Taylor uses the social-justice environmental approach to good effect in attempting to reinterpret the whole of the conservation “movement.”
Her research beyond these and other monographic sources is focussed on the major digitized newspapers, where she has found a great deal of interesting material enriching the story of how struggles over the environment were also struggles over class and race discrimination. Chapter 12, which provides an account of the racial segregation issue in national parks, is particularly illuminating. More of this detail and probing of local manuscript and oral-history sources would have been extremely helpful in extending what are obviously valid points. However, much space is taken up telling readers about such contextual matters as the appalling conditions under which workers and others deemed excluded in the conventional narrative of conservation lived or laboured, without directly connecting these conditions to the broader conservation movement. These conditions could have been summarized more briefly. One can infer from the juxtaposition she offers that organized conservation was neglectful of so much that ought to have been included, but the ways conservation excluded valid conservation concerns needed theorizing. Taylor makes out a case that poor factory conditions constitute a conservation issue relevant to social justice (human health), but more needs to be done here to spell out the different kinds of conservation actually expressed by advocates at the time, articulations that actually included human health as conservation. The ways in which race and class mediate and express environmental concerns need to be further explained. Environmental distribution of resources took place through race and class relationships, rather than alongside misplaced conservation concerns. Only in the case of the exclusion of groups from hunting or use of parks is this point clear.
Though the book is framed in terms of a conservation movement, Taylor's work centers almost entirely on a conventional set of topics: conservationist attempts to regulate and prevent various well-known American incursions upon wild places and things. Thus Taylor gives valuable and extensive treatment to the bird trade, the campaigning to save the bison and similar episodes, and the growth of the national-park movement, including the Hetch Hetchy dispute. Taylor documents the many social, ethnic, and racial groups affected by this drive to preserve “nature,” from Native Americans to Korean and Japanese immigrants. She shows the well-known example of how Italians and other European immigrants from the working class were victimized and blamed for the decline in bird populations, and illustrates well the xenophobia that accompanied this campaign. The eugenic tinge to conservation is criticized appropriately (346–47), but without inquiring about its ramifications for conservation policies, such as on affected living conditions or industrial pollution. Taylor goes on to fault the conservation movement for pointing the finger at other causes of bird depletion, such as “the feline menace” (210–11), without including or acknowledging discussion of the actual damage that scientists show is done to bird populations by introduced predators, particularly feral cats.
Despite her inclusive interpretation, one does not find in this work any attempt to bring urban environmentalism to the forefront. This prominent phenomenon is not treated, except in the final, one-paragraph statement in the book reminding readers of an earlier book that deals with urban environmental issues. Nor is there any attempt to probe the international aspects of this conservation crusade, or any discussion of the conservation movement in regard to water conservation, soils, or the sociology of rural life. Conservation as critiqued here means issues of wilderness, parks, and wildlife.
Taylor's book is a very useful corrective to the common focus on a few “great” conservation heroes, such as Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt. It is also pleasing to see the role of women acknowledged in a deeper and more satisfactory way than in previous syntheses, though Taylor rightly points out the masculinist domination of much of the conservation activity she calls a “movement.” This book succeeds best as a powerful critique of conservation's ethnocentrism and class dimensions.
