Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History

By Ted Steinberg

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195331826
• ISBN13: 9780195331820
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.1" x 1.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

I had to read this for a class--it was great!

I had to read this book for my Enviornmental History class, and it was totally interesting. I was far less interested in the other book we had to read for the same class.I had no trouble reading the assigned chapters, and often kept reading past the assigned pages. Steinberg has an interesting 'take' on history. My favorite chapter was #10, Death of the Organic City, which was about the role of human "waste" in the cities in the ecology of outlier farming, and how the advent of piped sewage insured (unintentional) pollution of rivers & other waterways. At the time, it was believed that running water cleaned up filth-- which it would have, in smaller amounts.I had never considered that the clean-up of human waste in the cities had a downside. As well, the role of pigs as waste recyclers was intriquing and illuminating, as well as being the mainstay of most poor families. Steinbergers version of the Civil War was also very intriquing. According to Steinberg, the South would have won the war but for nature's vagaries.My review is lame compared to the book, but I do highly recommend it.

a real environmental history

Since environmental history staked its claim to status as an independent subfield of history, environmental historians have clamored for the acknowledgment of the rest of the profession. While many environmental historians have won awards and been honored by the profession at large, injecting the substance of the discipline into mainstream historical scholarship and teaching has been a harder task. The field has come a long way since Donald Worster was asked by his graduate school mates how he would present history from the bear's point of view, but it has long been too easy to consign environmental history to the ghetto of disciplinary subfields. American historians have embraced the idea that the U.S. was and saw itself as "nature's nation," but explored that idea no farther. For the longest time, no one truly attempted to understand what that particular relationship meant in the nation's history.Some of the blame for this circumstance falls on the discipline. For the better part of a generation, synthesis was beyond the reach of environmental history. The field produced brilliant monographs, but little that appealed beyond the boundaries of a growing field to main vein of American history, wrapped up as it was and is in the topics of race, class, and gender. Only in recent years have a series of syntheses been published, paving the way for the next step, the integration of environmental history into mainstream history.Ted Steinberg Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History is a bold attempt to jump that gap. One of the first people to be trained in environmental history by an established environmental historian, Steinberg produced three major works before undertaking this volume. Here he makes the case for treating the American environment as an actor on the stage of national history. He argues that the commodification of nature became the catalytic factor in the transformation of the physical nature of the North American continent. "The benefits of modern, from fast food to flush toilets, for all their virtues," he writes, "have come at the price of ecological amnesia" (xii).Steinberg retells American history through this lens with varying degrees of success. The book is bold and in places wise; simultaneously and despite Steinberg's attempt to create distance from declensionism, he is closely tied to the idea in Marxian terms. His characteristic incisive insights are tempered by the need to cover vast swaths of the past in narrative style, creating something that is simultaneously a textbook and a far more sophisticated argument about the role of nature in history. The complexity of the topic and the need for broad coverage imperil the reader, for the larger argument, that the nature of American nature mattered in the history of the continent, gets lost in the telling and retelling of American history. While the reader is offered Thomas Midgely, the chemist who put lead back into gasoline to eliminate engine knock early in the

Every one should read

A thoroughly engaging review of American history from the forming of the continent to the current day-- with an important difference. Originally conceived to be a textbook, this is a wonderful presentation of the significant role our natural resources and other environmental factors have played in the development of the U.S. I find Steinberg to be a skillful and diplomatic writer: he rightfully highlights the blessings and curses of the natural environment (and our obligation as stewards) without minimizing or displacing other influences.

The Best History Book in the Past Decade

Though I am not a professional historian or environmentalist, I am interested in how humans impact nature and vice versa--that is why I originally purchased Ted Steinberg's book. However, much to my delight, Professor Steinberg's book is much more than that. In a very cogent, readable style, he weaves together a novel and intricate portrait of America. His thoroughly researched arguments which are never dogmatic, opened my eyes to many things that I take for granted--such as the environmental impact of the fast food industry. The publisher call Steinberg's work a "tour de force." I would agree. Down to Earth is the rare book that the casual reader, the college student and the experienced historian will benefit from. This is perhaps the best nonfiction book that I have read in the past decade!

Green History

Completely Arresting!--A brilliant reinterpretation of the American past. Does for environmental history what Howard Zinn did a generation ago for social history.