Based at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, Jeff Crane provides a new textbook on US environmental history to join works by Mark Fiege, John Opie and Carolyn Merchant, amongst others. Crane offers a lengthy (some 430 pages) text that despite the mildly misleading subtitle ‘Nature and the Formation of the United States’ offers a comprehensive overview of American environmental history that goes way beyond formation, and right up to the present day. The book is clearly targeted at the undergraduate market, and thus includes a wide range of illustrations, primary documents and seminar questions.

Lamenting contemporary bookstore trends and the absence of environmental history texts on bestseller shelves, Crane argues that ‘environmental history is one of the most important areas of study today and certainly of more relevance than another book on Stonewall Jackson or about the Special Forces’ (p. xii). Crane certainly comes across as a campaigner for the discipline. He hopes for his work to help new readers understand the role of nature in the development of the nation. The thirteen chapters cover huge ground, from Indian land use, through colonial conquest, to the fur trade, the railroad and the rise of Westward expansion, to modern twentieth-century problems of atomic fallout, pesticides and oil spills. The work impresses in its breadth. A chapter on the Civil War is particularly well thought out, attending to issues of hygiene, infection and disease, and provides a useful guide for students tackling that period. Crane's welcome attention to the role of wildlife in the USA, as well as crops, diet and food resources, also marks this book out, and is truly refreshing.

Employing the ‘ideology of abundance’ (p. xiii) as a key reference point, the author capably depicts the centrality of capitalism in the American environmental endeavour. The clash between the myth of abundance and the reality of environmental limits is usefully explored throughout. In the epilogue, Crane observes how ‘the intersection of economy and nature is still a busy and dangerous place’ in twenty-first-century America, with core issues still painfully unresolved, and Crane ends by calling for a balance between ‘ecological and economic health’ (p. 429). For some readers, however, Crane's safe conclusions and predictable coverage will come across as all too familiar, especially when compared to more distinctive takes on the topic (see, for example, Ted Steinberg's Down to Earth (2000)). Given the huge scope and ambition of the project, there are inevitably gaps, for example the environmental disaster of Hurricane Katrina goes unmentioned, and the role of science and technology remains mostly in the background. While providing a useful introduction to the topic, some students may desire greater reference to scholarly debate and theoretical argument. Crane thus provides a conventional take (and textbook) on an unconventional topic, competently assembled and with much merit, and a sound introduction.