The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection

This book was a very good read and dives deep into our history with inequalities of race, gender, and class and how these were prominent in times of environmental conflicts. Not only was it a great history book, it challenges many perspectives that occurred in the 19th and 20th century.

This is a great book a must read to better understand why we have the disparity in recreation use of our public lands today and the myth of public lands as a grass roots movement. Al public federal land managers should read this.

I was really excited to read this book and really disappointed when I finished it. An academic history of environmentalism from the mid-19th century to the early decades of the 20th that takes into account issues of race, class, and gender is long overdue. Individual environmental historians have been addressing these issues on more narrow topics for decades, but a comprehensive history of the movement from these perspectives had not been written. And it still hasn't. Taylor's book is a confusing, poorly focused rehashing of what previous scholars have said. Huge chunks of the book don't seem to deal with her ostensible subject at all. Much of the first chapter is a history of racial and gender oppression in the US, with little reference to the environmental implications of these injustices. She discusses Native Americans without mentioning William Cronon's important work on Native American environmental attitudes. Later we get a rehashing of the often-told Hetch-Hetchy controversy, without much/any discussion of how race, class, or gender shaped that debate. Most of her points are unsupported, and when she does quote a source to illustrate her points, the source is frequently from an earlier period--the 1600s or 1700s. Her documentation consists of a parenthetical reference at the end of the paragraph listing one or more sources--as a result, it's difficult to determine what, if anything, is original about Taylor's analysis (judging from the sections where I was familiar with her sources, I get the sense that very little is original). The style is frustrating as well--frequent promises that a subject will be addressed in a later chapter, confusing paragraph organization, and lots of typos. What baffles me is that this book was published by Duke University Press. Where were the reviewers/editors?

It is empowering to read this history from the perspective of an Black lens. Her entire framework is done through an environmental justice lens and explains in the introduction that this book is part of a series in which she dives deeper in the EJ implications in the "Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility" book. I loved the way she framed the narrative of Native American environmental attitudes, as a POC, its refreshing that Native and POC voices are finally visible. POC need agency in writing this narrative to correct the how exclusive white folks have been with their narrative. The analysis she makes in this book is so important to addressing serious issues in the environmental movement and for empowering POC of the true history of environmental conservation, I found the book to be invaluable. She draws upon historical inequities to get at ways in which to correct the problematic white environmental lens.