The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism And Environmental Thought in America

by Ben A. Minteer

In The Landscape of Reform Ben Minteer offers a fresh and provocative reading of the intellectual foundations of American environmentalism, focusing on the work and legacy of four important conservation and planning thinkers in the first half of the twentieth Liberty Hyde Bailey, a forgotten figure in the Progressive conservation movement; urban and regional planning theorist Lewis Mumford; Benton MacKaye, the forester and conservationist who proposed the Appalachian Trail in the 1920s; and Aldo Leopold, author of the environmentalist classic A Sand County Almanac . Minteer argues that these writers blazed a significant "third way" in environmental ethics and practice, a more pragmatic approach that offers a counterpoint to the anthropocentrism-versus-ecocentrism—use-versus-preservation—narrative that has long dominated discussions of the development of American environmental thought.

Minteer shows that the environmentalism of Bailey, Mumford, MacKaye, and Leopold was also part of a larger moral and political program, one that included efforts to revitalize democratic citizenship, conserve regional culture and community identity, and reclaim a broader understanding of the public interest that went beyond economics and materialism. Their environmental thought was an attempt to critique and at the same time reform American society and political culture. Minteer explores the work of these four environmental reformers and considers two present-day manifestations of an environmental third Natural Systems Agriculture, an alternative to chemical and energy-intensive industrial agriculture; and New Urbanism, an attempt to combat the negative effects of suburban sprawl. By rediscovering the pragmatic roots of American environmentalism, writes Minteer, we can help bring about a new, civic-minded environmentalism today.

Hardcover

First published March 7, 2006

About the author

Ben A. Minteer writes about conservation, the wild, zoos, and the evolution of American environmental thought. His current work explores the wilderness idea and its expression in landscape photography, from Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams to the present day.

Ben is a professor of environmental ethics and conservation in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University in Tempe, where he also holds the Arizona Zoological Society Endowed Chair. At ASU, he teaches a set of undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of conservation.

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Minteer is pushing back on the simplistic assumption of environmentalism as a defense of nature against human interests by foregrounding 4 reformers who blending approaches to conservationism with specific kinds of progressive, applicable ideologies, a less romantic treatment of some of the same figures featured in Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind. By conducting close readings of their work against the larger pragmatic and environmental philosophies of the era, he is reminding us that environmental thought has not always been a romantic gesture of preserving the "natural" or "wild" in opposition to the human, but rather that environmental reformers have always sought pragmatic, practical approaches to engaging both the political and economic interests of those in power and the broader engagement of the public and citizenry. In particular Minteer's chapter on Bailey is fascinating for its focus on Bailey's belief in the civic ethics of conservation in rural environments, a way to make citizenry more engaged and more connected to farm communities (and a pathway to stemming the exodus to urban centers.) By using a broader love of nature to create a greater system of support for nature is essential to being able to preserve and protect the natural world--this is the essence of the environmental movement, yet rarely remarked upon in historical overviews of the intellectual foundations of environmental thought. (That he starts with Roosevelt's Country Life Movement of 1908 and moves through to initiatives of the 1980s-90s shows the long scope of the work.) The thing that is generally missing from this text is an incorporation of more Indigenous/land rights perspective as well as an argument for the resistive politics of the era; how can we think about the rise of industrial agriculture as concupiscent with the work of these philosophers? Still, an important way of rethinking the value of the work of four key figures in the history of environmentalism.