Kevin C. Armitage tells the story of the American environmental movement according to its activist waves: each of the nine chapters that comprise This Green and Growing Land: Environmental Activism in American History identifies key changes in American environmentalism, “highlighting the ways that environmentalism is the integration of natural and social systems thinking” (5). Arranged chronologically, the book begins in eighteenth-century America with Benjamin Franklin (chapter 1, “The Horns in Dock Creek”) and ends with contemporary global climate change (chapter 9, “Science Denial in the Age of Global Disruption”). However, as the environmental waves overlap and continue beyond their starting point, the intervening chapters likewise often take the reader further in time than where the next chapter begins.

Chapter highlights demonstrate the range of American environmental issues, contexts, and activists and their resulting impacts on American culture and policy featured in This Green and Growing Land’s comprehensive, accessible history. Chapter 2, “The Science and Nature of Empathy,” focusses on American identity's connection with the land, with a special focus on Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh. Mass extinctions give rise to the next wave, crystalized in the writings and work of John Muir and America's developing ideas and legislation related to wilderness (chapter 3, “A Wilderness Society”). Chapter 3 follows the “wilderness” wave into the 1960s and 1970s with the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, the 1975 Eastern Wilderness Act, and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. Chapter 4, “Progressive Publics and the Social Natural Order,” opens with Etta Wheeler, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the beginning of the Progressive Era. New Deal environmental politics (chapter 5, “A Green New Deal”) and Western water politics and the emergence of the radical direct-action environmental group Earth First! (chapter 6, “Damming the Arid West”) follow. “The Atomic Body Politic” (chapter 7) links DDT activism, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), and the struggle “to understand how to abate negative environmental externalities” (192). In other words, this chapter addresses how the environmental movement must increasingly address the Anthropocene's realities (195). Chapter 8, “Abundance in the Age of Ecology,” opens with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and continues with other activists, such as Ralph Nader, Walter Reuther, and Cesar Chavez, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970). This chapter ends with the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (aka Superfund), which was “the last major environmental law that has been passed in the United States” (226). The bibliography provides a narrative listing of sources and further reading for each chapter.

Armitage's history makes a perfect companion text for Bill McKibben's American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau (2008). Key figures – in addition to several listed above – in both books include Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, Jane Jacobs, Edward Abbey, Al Gore, and Janisse Ray, among others. Whether assigned or as optional companion background reading, This Green and Growing Land offers undergraduates and others new to the field the key successive and overlapping elements that define American environmentalism. Additionally, specialists in the field will appreciate the ways Armitage expands on the “burgeoning environmental movement of the early 1960s,” or American environmental activism's “official” start, back through to its colonial America roots as well as forward to the present (5). In doing so, Armitage traces America's conflicting modes of “nature hating and nature loving,” which carry across its successive waves of environmental thinking and (in)action (7).

While Armitage does not define “activist,” he does imply that individual and social action forms the heart of the “historically complex” and “contested” meaning of environmentalism (5). The nature of this history also places white male actors at its center while working to recognize erasures of others, such as recognizing Jane Addams and Mary McDowell as urban environmentalists and the fact that the “great majority of Audubon founders were women” (98). Nevertheless, more inclusion of, for example, Native American voices would highlight the terrible irony that both indigenous nations’ identities and American identity are “tied to the land” (19). We remain indebted to specialized histories like Dorceta E. Taylor's The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (2016) for a more comprehensive focus on the movement's unsung activist voices. As America feels the Anthropocene's full force and experiences, as David Purdy writes, “the end of nature” (After Nature, 2015), it remains to be seen if a shared love of American landscapes will continue to fuel, if not unite, environmental activists. Armitage offers hope that the “power inequalities that define contemporary America” – these “environmental problems … of politics and democracy” – can be remedied by what this contested history of “intertwined crises of democracy and ecology” teaches us (252). We simply need to learn to apply it.