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At odds with progress: Americans and conservation
REVIEWS
353
breathed with a life much like their own”. Cronon ruefully concludes that, in the case of meatpacking, “nature did not have much to do with it”. The cornmodification of meat followed that of grain. Farmers had once poured their harvested wheat or corn into sacks and that made it possible to identify the product of one farm in the grain consumed by some miller in a distant city. Railroads and grain elevators made the use of sacks obsolete and thus the physical link between producer and consumer vanished. To Cronon such developments undermined the role of both nature and geography. Production and consumption may have become “functional abstractions on organizational charts” as Cronon argues, but their relationship with nature was scarcely diminished. The westward spread of meatpacking, including its disappearance from Chicago (“nothing more than simple justice”) was, if anything, even more dependent on both nature and geography during the twentieth century. That Sioux City and Omaha, then Garden City and Amarillo, could cause the giant packinghouses of Chicago to be erased from the map was precisely due to such functional-geographical abstraction as weight-loss ratios in transportation costs, crop-yield increases aided by irrigation, and population shifts. If Chicago was not nature’s metropolis one might try to make the case for what Cronon (following Marx) calls “second nature”, the artificial nature represented by capital, as a force behind Chicago’s growth. But the city’s steam-powered grain elevators were modeled after Buffalo’s, the hog disassembly line was a Cincinnati invention, chemical refrigeration came from Europe, and McCormick invented his reaper in the Shennandoah Valley. Had Cronon gone on to define a third nature he might have included under that heading what really caused Chicago to pull away from its rivals. It was the breathtaking nerve of its merchant entrepreneurs, including their not infrequent dishonesty, which allowed them to set ruinously low or high prices, get their way with freight pools and rebates, comer grain markets, and demonstrate indifference toward the quality of their products. Chicagoans did more than cornmodify the products of farm and forest by translating physical quantities into abstract grades: they cornmodified the prices attached to those products and learned to manipulate prices to their own advantage. Cronon omits none of this from his brilliantly crafted story that recounts the deeds of Swifts and Armours, the stinginess of lumber barons, and the drama of Board of Trade pits. Yet for him not to see that 19th century Chicago was unmistakably an entrepreneur’s metropolis is as if he missed the punch line of his own story. Northwestern University JOHN C. HUDSON
BRET WALLACH, At Odds with Progress: Americans and Conservation (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 255. $24.95)
This book has a novel strategy of trying to penetrate the mind of the American conservation movement by traipsing across the country, looking for out-of-the way, marginal places, examining there what Americans have been doing with the land. In those scattered landscapes the author finds a pattern of doubts expressed about the pace of economic progress, though as often as not the doubts are his own. It is not the strategy followed by the well-known historians of conservation; their work does not even appear anywhere in this book, and such history of conservation thinking as we get in these pages is about as disjointed as the author’s travels. What he is looking for are not only doubts expressed about progress but doubts expressed in the landscape. I never quite figured out what that means, or how one reads them in contrast to reading what people have actually said, but I liked this book and its author immensely and would love to go beating through the underbrush with him sometime. As a storyteller about how people have lived in assorted places, he is superb. The book opens with two chapters on the north country of Maine, which apparently is where a depressed job market once took the author and where, as luck would have it, he
REVIEWS
found a sense of security available nowhere else. He lived near the Canadian border in an old house covered with green asbestos tile and among careful, old-fashioned potato farmers and not-so-careful corporate loggers. He describes with wonderful detail the rural folk who have been left behind by the westward march of the potato business to Idaho, people who stayed put, husbanding their soil, making little profit, free of grandiose ambitions. Wallach himself, however, moved on. His travels took him to the southern Appalachians, the San Joaquin Valley, the Little Missouri badlands of North Dakota, the Green River country of southwestern Wyoming, the Columbian plateau, and the southern plains. Those places are all, like Maine, on the margins of the good earth, or soon will be when their resources run out, and many of them have been acquired to some degree by the federal government under the name of “conservation”. For example, the submarginal land purchase project of the 1930s which Wallach calls “the best model we have in this country for seeing what an enlightened national land policy looks like”, recreated a grassland in Dakota out of what had been desperately poor 160-acre homesteads. What is it that draws him to all those unspectacular places? None of them could make any great claims to success. They are all places where Americans have known failure by overreaching themselves or being passed by. Some are landscapes of abuse and degradation. Some are where people followed dreams bigger than reality. All of them are “lands in the nation’s attic”, discarded and yet full of memories, full of love. We put our Yellowstones and Yosemites down in the parlor and make precious shrines of them, but these less glamorous lands are worthy of some attention too. That point I got readily enough and assented to completely. When the author goes on, however, to criticize environmentalists for being slightly dishonest in their rhetoric and public motives, I become less happy. His main argument in the book is that conservationism has been a movement that has tried to hide its true motives-viz., a moral concern for the welfare of the earth, a hostility toward progress-behind phony disguises: the masks of efficiency, social welfare, and ecology. Conservation is not really about making the country more rational, practical, or efficient in using resources, he argues, nor in helping poor people improve their lives, nor in promoting a more scientific understanding of the environment. Conservation is less rational, more emotional than all that; it is a movement to hang onto the past and a vanishing morality in the face of ruthless economic logic. I believe that is too simple a view of conservation, and too narrow a notion of rationality and progress. Conservationists have been debating for more than a hundred years about where they stand on matters of efficiency vs. aesthetics, progress vs. preservation, equity vs. self-interest; and their debates have revealed vital, complicated moral differences. They have raised doubts not only about progress, but about the social irrationality of corporate greed, about the blindness of much of traditional ethics, about our failure to understand how the world of nature really functions. If we accepted Wallach’s advice, then much of the political thunder would go out of the movement and it would shuffle off to the margins of American life, like those potato farmers of Maine. Despite my disagreement with the author’s main argument and my admonition that he read more thoroughly the history of the conservation movement, I want to praise his achievement. Throughout these wonderful, engagingly personal descriptions of the places he’s been, the author sounds a lot like his mentor, Carl Sauer, who wrote about the landscape with a high moral purpose and a critical eye. Sauer would be pleased that those qualities are still alive in this field. University of Kansas
DONALD
WORSTER
353
breathed with a life much like their own”. Cronon ruefully concludes that, in the case of meatpacking, “nature did not have much to do with it”. The cornmodification of meat followed that of grain. Farmers had once poured their harvested wheat or corn into sacks and that made it possible to identify the product of one farm in the grain consumed by some miller in a distant city. Railroads and grain elevators made the use of sacks obsolete and thus the physical link between producer and consumer vanished. To Cronon such developments undermined the role of both nature and geography. Production and consumption may have become “functional abstractions on organizational charts” as Cronon argues, but their relationship with nature was scarcely diminished. The westward spread of meatpacking, including its disappearance from Chicago (“nothing more than simple justice”) was, if anything, even more dependent on both nature and geography during the twentieth century. That Sioux City and Omaha, then Garden City and Amarillo, could cause the giant packinghouses of Chicago to be erased from the map was precisely due to such functional-geographical abstraction as weight-loss ratios in transportation costs, crop-yield increases aided by irrigation, and population shifts. If Chicago was not nature’s metropolis one might try to make the case for what Cronon (following Marx) calls “second nature”, the artificial nature represented by capital, as a force behind Chicago’s growth. But the city’s steam-powered grain elevators were modeled after Buffalo’s, the hog disassembly line was a Cincinnati invention, chemical refrigeration came from Europe, and McCormick invented his reaper in the Shennandoah Valley. Had Cronon gone on to define a third nature he might have included under that heading what really caused Chicago to pull away from its rivals. It was the breathtaking nerve of its merchant entrepreneurs, including their not infrequent dishonesty, which allowed them to set ruinously low or high prices, get their way with freight pools and rebates, comer grain markets, and demonstrate indifference toward the quality of their products. Chicagoans did more than cornmodify the products of farm and forest by translating physical quantities into abstract grades: they cornmodified the prices attached to those products and learned to manipulate prices to their own advantage. Cronon omits none of this from his brilliantly crafted story that recounts the deeds of Swifts and Armours, the stinginess of lumber barons, and the drama of Board of Trade pits. Yet for him not to see that 19th century Chicago was unmistakably an entrepreneur’s metropolis is as if he missed the punch line of his own story. Northwestern University JOHN C. HUDSON
BRET WALLACH, At Odds with Progress: Americans and Conservation (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 255. $24.95)
This book has a novel strategy of trying to penetrate the mind of the American conservation movement by traipsing across the country, looking for out-of-the way, marginal places, examining there what Americans have been doing with the land. In those scattered landscapes the author finds a pattern of doubts expressed about the pace of economic progress, though as often as not the doubts are his own. It is not the strategy followed by the well-known historians of conservation; their work does not even appear anywhere in this book, and such history of conservation thinking as we get in these pages is about as disjointed as the author’s travels. What he is looking for are not only doubts expressed about progress but doubts expressed in the landscape. I never quite figured out what that means, or how one reads them in contrast to reading what people have actually said, but I liked this book and its author immensely and would love to go beating through the underbrush with him sometime. As a storyteller about how people have lived in assorted places, he is superb. The book opens with two chapters on the north country of Maine, which apparently is where a depressed job market once took the author and where, as luck would have it, he
REVIEWS
found a sense of security available nowhere else. He lived near the Canadian border in an old house covered with green asbestos tile and among careful, old-fashioned potato farmers and not-so-careful corporate loggers. He describes with wonderful detail the rural folk who have been left behind by the westward march of the potato business to Idaho, people who stayed put, husbanding their soil, making little profit, free of grandiose ambitions. Wallach himself, however, moved on. His travels took him to the southern Appalachians, the San Joaquin Valley, the Little Missouri badlands of North Dakota, the Green River country of southwestern Wyoming, the Columbian plateau, and the southern plains. Those places are all, like Maine, on the margins of the good earth, or soon will be when their resources run out, and many of them have been acquired to some degree by the federal government under the name of “conservation”. For example, the submarginal land purchase project of the 1930s which Wallach calls “the best model we have in this country for seeing what an enlightened national land policy looks like”, recreated a grassland in Dakota out of what had been desperately poor 160-acre homesteads. What is it that draws him to all those unspectacular places? None of them could make any great claims to success. They are all places where Americans have known failure by overreaching themselves or being passed by. Some are landscapes of abuse and degradation. Some are where people followed dreams bigger than reality. All of them are “lands in the nation’s attic”, discarded and yet full of memories, full of love. We put our Yellowstones and Yosemites down in the parlor and make precious shrines of them, but these less glamorous lands are worthy of some attention too. That point I got readily enough and assented to completely. When the author goes on, however, to criticize environmentalists for being slightly dishonest in their rhetoric and public motives, I become less happy. His main argument in the book is that conservationism has been a movement that has tried to hide its true motives-viz., a moral concern for the welfare of the earth, a hostility toward progress-behind phony disguises: the masks of efficiency, social welfare, and ecology. Conservation is not really about making the country more rational, practical, or efficient in using resources, he argues, nor in helping poor people improve their lives, nor in promoting a more scientific understanding of the environment. Conservation is less rational, more emotional than all that; it is a movement to hang onto the past and a vanishing morality in the face of ruthless economic logic. I believe that is too simple a view of conservation, and too narrow a notion of rationality and progress. Conservationists have been debating for more than a hundred years about where they stand on matters of efficiency vs. aesthetics, progress vs. preservation, equity vs. self-interest; and their debates have revealed vital, complicated moral differences. They have raised doubts not only about progress, but about the social irrationality of corporate greed, about the blindness of much of traditional ethics, about our failure to understand how the world of nature really functions. If we accepted Wallach’s advice, then much of the political thunder would go out of the movement and it would shuffle off to the margins of American life, like those potato farmers of Maine. Despite my disagreement with the author’s main argument and my admonition that he read more thoroughly the history of the conservation movement, I want to praise his achievement. Throughout these wonderful, engagingly personal descriptions of the places he’s been, the author sounds a lot like his mentor, Carl Sauer, who wrote about the landscape with a high moral purpose and a critical eye. Sauer would be pleased that those qualities are still alive in this field. University of Kansas
DONALD
WORSTER