The moniker “Gilded Age” invokes questions of wealth, class, and political economy. When paired with a subsequent “Progressive Era,” as in the name of this journal and the society that sponsors it, the implication is that economic developments after the Civil War gave rise to pressing questions of workplace safety, income distribution, monopoly, and the like, which reform and protest movements rightly sought to rectify. Whether to invoke the Gilded Age to describe the current era of U.S. history also centers on such questions: it makes sense to say that we are living in a Second Gilded Age, Thomas Piketty and others have argued, because inequalities of wealth and the rise of corporate power echo those of the 1880s and 1890s; or, respond skeptics like Heath Carter, it is not a helpful comparison because the cultural and organizational forces contesting inequality are so much weaker now.Footnote ¹

What are we to make of the apparent parallels between now and then that are perhaps related to questions of economic power and inequality, but not centered on or contained by them? Can the idea of a Second Gilded Age help us understand such questions as white supremacy, the perils and prospects of new mass media, or changes in gender roles and sexual mores? In the case of environmental change and environmental politics, there are indeed striking parallels between now and the late nineteenth century. In both periods, the industrial market economy played the central role in transforming the nonhuman world, causing environmental destruction, and conditioning the responses to such environmental change. Accordingly, this essay argues that deploying the notion of a Second Gilded Age can help scholars to craft histories of environmental change and environmental politics that might inform contemporary environmentalism.Footnote ² To invoke a Second Gilded Age is to reach for a usable past and a history capable of speaking to the present moment.

Perhaps a good place to begin is with journalist and political economist Henry George. George's Progress and Poverty (1879) was one of the seminal warnings of the ways in which post-Reconstruction economic development immiserated many people and undermined political democracy even as it built up some enormous fortunes and aggregate economic production. The “association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times,” he wrote, “the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy grapple in vain … It is the riddle which the Sphinx of fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.”Footnote ³ George's observation fits easily into familiar understandings of the Gilded Age, as does his proposed remedy of a “single tax” on the unearned increase in land values that went to the unworthy few. Less well known are the deep environmental strains of his writing, in which industrial metropolises appear not only as embodiments of inequality, but as places of spiritual and material alienation from nature, and in which modern slaughterhouses effected the removal of “elements of fertility” from the soil rather than their productive return to it in diverse farms.Footnote ⁴

George is not remembered as a conservationist or environmental thinker. He did not emphasize the exhaustion of natural resources that so preoccupied foresters and other conservationists in the following decades. Yet his concern with the unequal ownership of land, the psychic alienation from nature, and the tensions between political democracy and economic inequality marked environmental reform from the 1880s to the 1910s, and suggest how deeply the environmental politics of the period were tied to questions of class and political economy.Footnote ⁵

What were the causes of environmental problems like deforestation, the destruction of such species as the passenger pigeon and the near death of others like the bison, the alienation of urbanites from the psychic and material benefits of nature, or what many assumed to be looming scarcity of resources? Each issue had its own particular dynamics. But Progressive Era environmental activists such as Gifford Pinchot, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Madison Grant, Harriet Monroe, John Muir, and Myra Lloyd Dock, who disagreed about a great many subjects, all rooted their calls for environmental reform in the belief that the scope and power of industrial market economies had given humanity an unprecedented power to transform—and destroy—nature. Even the environmental leaders most comfortable with the period's racial and class hierarchies drank from this well. For example, nativist William Hornaday, the director of the Bronx Zoo who focused public attention on the vanishing American bison, sounded like George in his insistence that “[t]he industrial development of the United States has wrought so many sweeping changes from conditions of the past that the American people are fairly compelled to adjust their minds in conformity with the new conditions.”Footnote ⁶ Nature writer and Sierra Club founder John Muir, the most influential prophetic voice within fin de siècle environmental circles, avoided social questions as much as possible (starting with the Civil War, during which nothing important enough was at stake for him to break off his studies and travels). Yet his validation of wilderness relied for its power on the contrast with the living conditions and social relations of industrial capitalism. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity,” wrote Muir in 1901.Footnote ⁷

The connections between environmental destruction and the social crises of late nineteenth-century capitalism help explain the fear of apocalypse that haunted so many American imaginations. Vivid depictions of the destruction of American civilization, perhaps the most widely read of which were Ignatius Donnelley's Caesar's Column (1890) and Jack London's Iron Heel (1907), centered on the yawning economic divide. But many of these writers saw social and environmental calamity as two sides of the same coin, as indeed Donnelly implied in his depiction of an environmental paradise lost in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), and as George Perkins Marsh and a host of more obscure writers warned might lie in store for the United States should it continue its profligate ways.Footnote ⁸

The belief that state power was needed to address environmental problems was the corollary of the belief that industrial market economies had caused them. Conservationists wanted to protect natural resources from the voracious appetite of the market by restricting or banning some hunting, fishing, and harvesting, by bringing large stretches of forests under the permanent control of federal bureaucracies, and by establishing parks. Environmental activists who differed on numerous other counts supported the use of state power to check markets and serve environmental ends. John Muir closed his long love song to forests in his otherwise apolitical Our National Parks (1901) with this stark call:

Gifford Pinchot, whose more materialistic focus on natural resource use and economic development led to a bitter struggle with Muir over whether California's Hetch Hetchy Valley should be used as a reservoir or preserved in its wild state, picked up where Muir left off. Pinchot went further than any other figure in making a case for conservation that was rooted in the larger Progressive critique of monopoly capitalism and concentrated wealth. In his most influential public articulation of conservation, the state control over natural resources appeared as a key aspect of a larger fight for “industrial freedom” aimed at combating the “unholy alliance between business and politics” that had become “the most dangerous fact in our political life.”Footnote ¹⁰ Pinchot's insistence that environmental protection was part of a larger struggle for a democracy besieged by the power of wealth was a note struck by numerous other activists, especially those like Dana Bartlett or Mira Lloyd Dock, who sought to make a place for natural spaces in cities given over to real estate speculation and the private sector.Footnote ¹¹

The wariness of markets and embrace of state power that characterized conservation also tied its political fortunes to progressivism as a whole. Conservation as a political program, with such agencies as the United States Bureau of Reclamation, the United States Forest Service, and National Park Service, came into being only after the rise of the larger Progressive movement against laissez-faire. In the 1912 presidential election, Theodore Roosevelt (running as a Progressive) was joined by Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Socialist Eugene V. Debs in putting forth platforms that endorsed state ownership and management of key natural resources. The foes of conservation recognized this linkage, attacking not only the specifically environmental assumptions about natural resource scarcity and an imperiled nature made by conservationists, but also the statism inherent to the project. “We have turned forests into villages, mines into ships and skyscrapers, scenery into work,” proclaimed journalist George L. Knapp. “Our success in doing the things already accomplished has been exactly proportioned to our freedom from governmental ‘guidance.’” Republicans and conservative Democrats who opposed the creation of the Forest Service invoked similar arguments against the Progressive state. Some referred to district foresters as “carpetbaggers,” seeking to associate conservation with what they saw as the abuses of federal power during Reconstruction. One Texas congressman attacked President Theodore Roosevelt's environmental program as an unconstitutional and illegitimate expansion of state power and evidence that he was one of “a trio of the foremost enemies of free government in America to-day,” along with populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Wisconsin Socialist Victor Berger.”Footnote ¹²

Conservation was similarly of a piece with the white supremacist politics of the early twentieth-century United States. To be sure, not all conservationists were white. “My work is that of Conservation,” agronomist George Washington Carver once declared, arguing that African American farmers could benefit from recognizing and enhancing the “organic unity” of nature's fertility. Other writers, like Chicago Defender columnist A. Wilberforce Williams, invoked the Murian strains of romantic conservation in their entreaties that black Americans “commune with the running brooks, trees, and singing birds.”Footnote ¹³ Yet proposals for systematic bureaucratic regulation of uses of nature were powerful tools to reinforce racial hierarchies. Game laws allowed the personnel of agencies like the Forest Service to arrest indigenous, Mexican American, and immigrant hunters, criminalizing subsistence economies and often forcing their victims into poverty or immiserating wage labor on the economy's lowest rungs. The validation of untrammeled wilderness that constituted such a powerful cultural legacy of this period made it easy to justify removing Indian peoples from parks and forests, and indeed the Yosemite, Havasupai, Blackfoot, and many others found themselves expelled from their homelands in the name of environmental protection.Footnote ¹⁴ Eugenicists such as Madison Grant—a founder of the Save-the-Redwoods League and, alongside Pinchot and Roosevelt, a member of the Boone and Crocket Club—saw the scientific “improvement” of the human inheritance as a logical extension of conservation to human reproduction.Footnote ¹⁵

The similarities between environmental crisis and environmental politics now and in the First Gilded Age are striking. The web of industrial capitalism that caught the attention of so many observers in the late nineteenth century now encompasses virtually all of planet earth. A world market for such species as shrimp, salmon, and tuna and the application of industrial trawling measures drive the collapse of fisheries. Habitat destruction, especially land clearing for market agriculture and livestock grazing, contributes to what many biologists are calling the “Sixth Great Extinction,” much as the disappearance of the passenger pigeon and the near destruction of North American bison stunned scientists and the public alike. Economic development in the Global South, especially in India and China, means that even more of the world's population adds to the load of greenhouse gasses already created by the world's wealthiest societies. The threat to coastal cities of more frequent and more intense storms, coupled with rising sea levels, and of higher temperatures and less rainfall elsewhere, make the scenarios of catastrophic urban destruction contemplated in the First Gilded Age seem increasingly plausible. Will Miami and Phoenix be with us a century from now? Filmmakers, novelists, and other artists again contemplate a post-catastrophe world, perhaps even one without humans.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite clear differences between now and then, contemporary environmental thinkers and activists are also revisiting prominent issues of the First Gilded Age. Urban planning scholars have resurrected Henry George, seeing in his proposed tax on the unearned increase in land values a powerful tool to address economic inequality and to supplant urban sprawl, which fosters energy-hungry housing and transit, with denser cityscapes more amenable to pedestrian life and mass transit.Footnote ¹⁷ An increasing number of environmental writers point to the untrammeled market as the main driver of environmental destruction. To be sure, theories of how markets might be harnessed to ensure environmental quality are much better developed, in tandem with the modern discipline of economics.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet just as Gifford Pinchot framed conservation as a part of the larger struggle for “industrial freedom,” prominent environmental writers Naomi Klein and Gustave Speth argue that the politics of environmentalism must be part of a quest to humanize capitalism or replace it with a system in which profit is a less important motive for human action and in which the wealthy wield less political power. As Klein puts it, “climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change . . . the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence … to invest in starving public infrastructures.”Footnote ¹⁹ The proposals for a “Green New Deal” promulgated by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others invoke a past more recent than either the Gilded Age or Progressive Era, but similarly link environmental reform to a more comprehensive sea change in political economy.Footnote ²⁰

The racial politics of contemporary environmentalism also echo century-old themes. One the one hand, the rise of a self-conscious environmental justice movement in the 1990s has injected questions of representation and racial justice into the highest levels of even elite white environmentalism like the Sierra Club; on the other hand, white supremacy finds new articulation in anti-immigration politics and warnings of the dangers of overpopulation that ignore the role of wealthy societies in global warming and resource consumption. The foes of environmentalism also rehash arguments against the conservation state. Market fundamentalism and corporate power make even the acknowledgment of the reality of anthropogenic climate change anathema to the national leadership of the Republican Party, much as the foes of the conservation state saw a threat to laissez-faire in Progressive Era environmental reform. The Dakota Access Pipeline looks to its supporters like a commonsense way of bringing a valuable commodity to market, and to its foes like the continuation of centuries of dispossession of Indian peoples.Footnote ²¹

Of course, any comparison of one era to another risks simplifying and flattening the complexities of both periods. Christopher Sellers has criticized me and other scholars of Progressive Era environmental politics of “ignoring any historical differences” between different eras and “assuming that conservation was nearly identical to later movements on behalf of ‘the environment.’”Footnote ²² Historians must insist that the past does not repeat itself, that Walmart and Amazon are not the same as Standard Oil and Wannamakers, that the Muslim ban is not identical to Chinese Exclusion any more than Donald J. Trump is the second coming of J. P. Morgan. There are important differences between environmental change and environmental politics now and in the late nineteenth century, just as there were important differences between the evangelical revivals of the 1730s through 1740s and those of the early nineteenth century, both of which came to be labeled “great awakenings.” The toxic effects of chemicals produced in modern manufacturing has been a leading issue of environmentalism since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, for example, but as Sellers rightly insists, were marginal at best to Progressive Era conservation.Footnote ²³ The pressing contemporary urgency of anthropogenic climate change as a global environmental problem, requiring a global as well as national and local response, has no precedent in the early twentieth century. Most Progressive Era conservationists harbored enormous confidence in the ability of technical knowledge to control and shape nature to human ends through such measures as the suppression of wildfires, the construction of large-scale irrigation systems, and the elimination of predators. Modesty and a pained awareness of unintended consequences and the limits of human knowledge and power are more characteristic of today's environmentalist circles. Surely no contemporary environmental leader would echo Gifford Pinchot's declaration that “[t]he first duty of the human race is to control the earth it lives upon.”Footnote ²⁴

Yet there is insight to be gained by lumping as well as splitting, by pointing to the echoes and resonances between periods while acknowledging the differences. Contemporary global capitalism has generated a new era of global market integration, rising inequality, what may soon become runaway climate changes, and a sixth great extinction. It is also spawning environmental and labor movements across the world. As a quote often attributed to Mark Twain puts it, “history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.”