In The Nature Study Movement: The Forgotten Popularizer of America's Conservation Ethic Kevin C. Armitage traces the intellectual development and cultural influence of the eponymous movement in the US, arguing for recognition of it as a precursor of contemporary American environmentalism. Armitage identifies the movement's scholastic genesis in the pedagogical theories of Louis Agassiz, who exhorted his student teachers during the inauguration of the Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island, Massachusetts in July 1873 to learn from the direct observation of nature rather than from books. Agassiz's Anderson School of Natural History scarcely outlasted its founding professor, closing after just two years. However, Armitage asserts that its influence on American education was profound and lasting. As Agassiz's students began to introduce the methods learned on Penikese Island to schoolchildren, the nature study movement was formed.

Armitage does a sound job in this book of examining the fundamental issue that plagued the nature study movement throughout its existence, namely how to resolve the dichotomy between the disciplines of “highly specialized, quantifiable, and reproducible laboratory science” (22) and the spirit which early advocates believed was being threatened in an increasingly industrialized America of urban dwellers. He introduces readers to the intellectual ideas that influenced, surrounded and opposed nature study with laudable clarity, putting up a spirited defence of the movement against Leo Marx's characterization of advocates of nature study as “moral idiots” (13).

In his aim to “place nature study in its historical context” (13), Armitage largely succeeds, going some way towards rectifying neglect of this culturally and pedagogically influential movement's history. He also identifies under-studied conservationists Anna Botsford Comstock, Ernest Thompson Seton, Mable Osgood Wright, Liberty Hyde Bailey and Gene Stratton Porter as important contributors to its development whilst acknowledging the contributions of more prominent educators such as John Dewey and Booker T. Washington.

The conclusion to The Nature Study Movement attempts to demonstrate its legacy to contemporary American environmentalism, ecology and pedagogy. This was left too late and could have been examined in greater depth in earlier chapters without undermining the broadly chronological historical trajectory of the book, which concludes with the movement's decline after World War I. Armitage's examination of gender politics in the context of nature study and science would benefit from expansion. While his argument about the cultural influence of the movement is convincing, his call for recognition of the nature study movement as an influence on contemporary American environmental thought from Rachel Carson to the Deep Ecology movement deserves further, more specific attention.

The Nature Study Movement, as billed on its cover, does present “the first comprehensive history of the nature study movement.” It also contains much that is apposite to the resurgence in environmentalism, localism and hands-on pedagogy that is emerging in a twenty-first century that is as haunted by peak oil and climate change as the twentieth century was by industrialization and urbanization.