Once you begin studying nature historically you end up studying culture, or rather you end up studying both at the same time. This is the useful proposition and path suggested by the collection Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics edited by Marguerite S. Shaffer and Phoebe S. K. Young in the new Nature and Culture in America series, also edited by Shaffer. The series comes with considerable expectations if we still believe historian Perry Miller's epithet, that of America as “nature's nation.”

Coming largely from and addressing scholars of environmental history and American studies, the collection contains thirteen essays on a range of subjects: the Colorado river, suntanning, “decadent” deserts in the American West, the Japanese American internment camp at Manzanar, and how camping in the Occupy movement negotiated civic space and nature at the same time. In the introductory essay, the editors present Nicole Shukin's concept of “rendering” from Animal Capital (2009) as the key to probing the “naturecultures” (Donna Haraway) of American history over the last two hundred years (3). In addition, they focalize the “relational ontology” (Gregg Mitman) of nature and culture, yet curiously fail to mention Philippe Descola's seminal work on comparative ontology, Beyond Nature and Culture (2013). Throughout the book, one is struck by the repetitive incantation of being against the nature–culture divide (e.g. at 96, 192, 266) – the new exorcism, it would seem, supplanting the old demon “mind–body dualism.” Yet, with no references given, it remains unclear who really takes this position except as it could be understood in a colloquial manner – society out there. On the contrary, when we consider the decades of work within the environmental humanities, cultural geography and human–animal studies, to name but a few fields of study informing this collection, the gesture seems without critical substance. Thus most scholars working in these intersectional disciplines would strongly disagree with the editors’ claim that “there has been no broader attempt to connect and organize new interpretive approaches around the concept of nature or to hypothesize an integrated understanding of nature-in-culture” (10). The impression left here is that of travellers finding seemingly virgin lands already inhabited and thriving.

What, then, is particular about American naturecultures? The collection provides several rich cases of historical scholarship relevant for American studies. For reasons of having been treated extensively elsewhere, subjects like “the wilderness” and “the frontier” are rightly left out. Instead, newly declassified material provides insights into the Cold War, and how political interests wanted to present the Nevada test site as uninhabited and without value (chapter 8). As Connie Y. Chiang convincingly argues, the perceived threat of Japanese Americans was also a question of environmental patriotism and natural resources (chapter 11). In a chapter on animalization and slavery in Charles Ball's Slavery in the United States, Thomas G. Andrews carefully untangles the complex web of how humans became livestock; how eating meat could be humanizing; and how slaves were kept subdued by the employment of other animals like horses, dogs, cats and crows to torture, scare, and hunt.

In several chapters, the potency of visual imagery stands out as shaping emotions and politics in American perceptions of nature. Further, the ramifications of nuclear America receive due attention – the significance of the military–industrial complex should indeed provide a rich area of study concerning American naturecultures. To give one example (taken from the work of French climate historians Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher): “global climate change” was first mentioned during a meeting in the Pentagon in 1947. The topic of the discussion: what would the possible melting of the Arctic mean for USSR–USA relations?

For all its merits in other respects, Rendering Nature suffers from the absence of a solid rationale for its organization. Of three chapters each, the sections “Animals,” “Bodies,” “Places,” “Politics” at times appear arbitrarily ordered, at times even inoperative due to the inherent imprecision in frames like “politics.” With no fixed period to create resonance, the essays do not fully come together as they could. For instance, Brett Michelle's captivating chapter on the visibility of meat might surely just as well be included in the “Animals” section, and what might be the distinction behind separating “Animals” from “Bodies,” surely not that of the “human”? In brief, the sections promise a more elaborate conceptual work that might have taken us even further into the entanglements of nature–culture. Nevertheless, the collection remains a welcome addition to American studies in an environmental/animal studies key, one that both includes insightful essays and has the potential to motivate more demarcated avenues of critical inquiry.