This encyclopedia profiles 139 American environmentalists who lived and worked in the twentieth century, from biologists and zoologists, to park planners and museum scientists, to poets and artists. Eighty-seven scholars contributed to this volume, which, published after the deaths of both editors, stands as testament not only to the environmentalists who come to life on its pages, but also to those who devoted their lives to studying their methods and motives.
The editors hoped that Modern American Environmentalists would be a valuable reference tool for supporters of environmental causes. Its greatest value lies in its illumination of the internal lives of those whom it profiles, in particular revelations about their conversions to environmentalism. Understanding how these scientists and thinkers explain their devotion to their cause is likely to help readers articulate their own standpoints. This encyclopedia is no Rules for Radicals, but in mapping a genealogy of environmentalism's past, it makes easier imagining its future.
That genealogy includes familiar names, less familiar ones and surprising ones. Pioneers receive the attention they merit. They include Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang; Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife management, who in the eyes of a dying wolf saw what it was to ‘think like a mountain’; Rachel Carson, whose dread of ‘a small world made lifeless’ motivated her to write the profoundly influential Silent Spring, about the impact of pesticides on the environment; and David Brower, the uncompromising activist whose Friends of the Earth brought us the slogan ‘Think Globally; Act Locally.’
Surprising profiles include that of George Washington Carver, who, contributor Mark Kersey suggests, was less the Peanut Man than a scientist who understood the effects of humans' behaviour on the natural environment. Years before Silent Spring, Carver knew that the chemicals farmers used ended up in our bodies, and his advocacy for eating locally, his effort to revive underused crops, and his despair at the declining quality of farmed food were ahead of their time. Notorious eugenicist Madison Grant left us the Bronx Zoo in addition to his noxious The Passing of the Great Race. Celebrated aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, whose non-stop trans-Atlantic flight epitomized America's technological prowess, later questioned the significance of his achievements and the progress they symbolized. Late in life, he wrote, ‘If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes’.
By bringing new figures into the fold, Modern American Environmentalists highlights what may be the environmental movement's greatest challenge: its lack of cohesion. More than a few of the people profiled here would have been unlikely to describe themselves as environmentalists, and most certainly never saw themselves as members of a unified movement. Some of the most influential environmentalists profiled in this volume were philanthropists who donated vast sums of money to preserve wild areas that remain under siege by the industrial interests that gave the donors their wealth. Others write beautifully of nature, but their impact on the health of the planet is uncertain. The divide between environmentalism as a personal philosophy and environmentalism as a social movement, and the tension between the two, endures.
There is something tragic too about Modern American Environmentalists, an example of a threatened, if not endangered, medium (the encyclopedia) describing the lives of mostly dead people (of the 139 entries, just 21 profile living people). Johns Hopkins University Press reassures its readers that it uses environmentally-friendly book materials whenever possible. But the Press, with its well-earned reputation for forward-looking digital projects, might have considered online publication to improve access, both by offering the material widely and reducing the price, and to avoid printing 557 pages of paper.
Environmentalists both living and dead, though, offer their contemporary counterparts models for the kind of leadership any movement needs to produce change. At a time when environmentalism has been absorbed and co-opted by the governments and businesses which once opposed it, models of environmental leadership are never more in need.
