Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History
by Ted Steinberg
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ted SteinbergEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-25
ISBN: 0195331826
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History
Book Review: Important Topic; Trivial Treatment
Summary: 1 Stars
In Down to Earth, environmental historian Ted Steinberg struggles to establish nature as a profound force in the general narrative of American history. The book is rife with interesting facts and fascinating events, but unfortunately it does not consistently build upon the notion that the American past has been shaped by man's interaction with the environment. Steinberg offers some anecdotal evidence early in the text, but he seems to lose track of the book's purpose after the first few chapters. The last half of Down to Earth, in particular, leaves the reader wondering if there existed any sort of positive man/nature interaction after World War Two. Still, several far more troubling problems emerge from the book.
Too often Steinberg's assumptions pass for evidence, and the author frequently reveals his own ideological biases. Down to Earth also neglects many major themes in environmental history, and seminal works by George Perkins Marsh, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Leo Marx do not even show up in the bibliography.
Down to Earth offers a good deal of trivia, and some breezy reading, but in order to really understand environmental history, erudite individuals should turn to works by William Cronon, Richard White, Donald Worster, and Martin Melosi.
Summary of Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History
In this ambitious and provocative text, environmental historian Ted Steinberg offers a sweeping history of the United States--a history that, for the first time, places the environment at the very center of the narrative. Now in a new edition, Down to Earth reenvisions the story of America "from the ground up." It reveals how focusing on plants, animals, climate, and other ecological factors can radically change the way that we think about the past. Examining such familiar topics as colonization, the industrial revolution, slavery, the Civil War, and the emergence of consumer culture, Steinberg recounts how the natural world influenced the course of human history. From the colonists' attempts to impose order on the land to modern efforts to sell the wilderness as a consumer good, he reminds readers that many critical episodes in U.S. history were, in fact, environmental events. The text highlights the ways in which Americans have attempted to reshape and control nature, from Thomas Jefferson's surveying plan, which divided the national landscape into a grid, to the transformation of animals, crops, and even water into commodities.In the second edition, Steinberg has thoroughly revised and updated the section on the twentieth century. He also introduces a timely new theme--the rise of the corporation. By addressing the ways in which nature functions in the world of big business, as well as the efforts by environmentalists to combat corporate power, Steinberg provides a richer understanding of consumerism.
Down to Earth is ideal for courses in environmental history, environmental studies, urban studies, economic history, and American history. Passionately argued and thought provoking, this powerful text retells our nation's history with nature in the foreground--a perspective that will challenge our view of everything from Jamestown to McDonald's.
"This book will try to change the way you think about American history," writes Ted Steinberg in the opening line of Down to Earth. That's an ambitious claim, but not far off the mark. His fascinating book is essentially an environmental history of the United States, with the author paying particular attention to how elements of nature became commodities and thereby isolated Americans from the natural world. Readers don't have to subscribe to this neo-Marxist concept in order to appreciate Steinberg's observations about everything from the old-time urban problem of horse excrement ("the nineteenth-century equivalent of auto pollution") to the massive amounts of garbage produced by fast-food chains (McDonald's, he says, requires "an area equivalent in size to more than 450,000 football fields" to supply its paper needs). He also tells what may be the first-ever natural history of the Civil War. This may sound idiosyncratic, and to some extent it is, yet Steinberg weaves it all together and makes the underappreciated point that "it is quite simply wrong to view the natural world as an unchanging backdrop to the past." It changes all the time, he writes, and it has shaped Americans in ways that few of them understand. --John Miller
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