By the end of World War II, Americans' relationship with nature had changed dramatically. New consumption patterns drove an industrial economy that exploited the earth in new ways, and the atomic age heightened awareness of the earth's fragility. Environmental historian Steven Stoll identifies 1945 as the year in which environmentalism was born -- a fusion of decades-old thinking about conservation with activism to form a diverse political movement. In this thematically organized collection of primary sources, Stoll traces the development of the environmental movement and identifies its central premises and ideologies, including preservation politics, population growth, biological interdependence, climate change, ethical consumption, and environmental justice. Stoll's insightful introduction provides students with a solid overview of environmentalism's origins and contextualizes the issues raised by the documents. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography offer additional pedagogical support.

U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: A Brief History with Documents

History

Stoll, Steven

Americas

Bedford/St.Martin's

St. Martin's Handbook 6e paper & Writing and Revising & Oil Crisis of 1973-1974 & U.S. Environmentalism since 1945

Science & Math

Lunsford, Andrea A.

Kennedy, Dorothy M.

Muth, Marcia F.

Kennedy, X.J.

Merrill, Karen R.

Environment

The once arid valleys and isolated coastal plains of California are today the center of fruit production in the United States. Steven Stoll explains how a class of capitalist farmers made California the nation's leading producer of fruit and created the first industrial countryside in America. This brilliant portrayal of California from 1880 to 1930 traces the origins, evolution, and implications of the fruit industry while providing a window through which to view the entire history of California. Stoll shows how California growers assembled chemicals, corporations, and political influence to bring the most perishable products from the most distant state to the great urban markets of North America. But what began as a compromise between a beneficent environment and intensive cultivation ultimately became threatening to the soil and exploitative of the people who worked it. Invoking history, economics, sociology, agriculture, and environmental studies, Stoll traces the often tragic repercussions of fruit farming and shows how central this story is to the development of the industrial countryside in the twentieth century.

The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California

Business & Money

Economics

University of California Press

Economic growth is more than an observable fact—it’s a belief in the limitless abundance of the natural world. But when did people begin to believe that societies should—even that they must—expand in wealth into the indefinite future? Did they think about the limits of the natural environment?
In this vivid book, the historian Steven Stoll considers the way people throughout the Atlantic world read wealth into nature during the 1830s and 1840s. Opening among the supersized products and high-stacked shelves of Costco, The Great Delusion weaves past and present together through the life of a strange and brooding German engineer and technological utopian named John Adolphus Etzler, who pursued universal wealth from the inexhaustible forces of nature: wind, water, and sunlight. He was not a major theorist. He did not invent anything we use today. But Etzler absorbed and articulated just about every major materialist idea of the time, using those theories to pursue his own program for abundance and happiness. In Etzler we see a disturbing picture of ourselves. If he seems eccentric—or just plain crazy—he was no less so than the most pragmatic thinkers of his time, and of ours. Eloquent and insightful, The Great Delusion neatly demonstrates that Etzler’s fantasy has become our reality and that we continue to live by some of the same economic assumptions that he embraced.

The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth

Hill and Wang

A Major History of Early Americans' Ideas about Conservation
Fifty years after the Revolution, American farmers faced a crisis: the failing soils of the Atlantic states threatened the agricultural prosperity upon which the republic was founded. Larding the Lean Earth explores the tempestuous debates that erupted between "improvers," intent on sustaining the soil of existing farms, and "emigrants," who thought it wiser and more "American" to move westward as the soil gave out. Larding the Lean Earth is a signal work of environmental history and an original contribution to the study of antebellum America.

Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America

A major history of early Americans' ideas about conservation Fifty years after the American Revolution, the yeoman farmers who made up a large part of the new country's voters faced a crisis. The very soil of American farms seemed to be failing, and agricultural prosperity, upon which the Republic was founded, was threatened. Steven Stoll's passionate and brilliantly argued book explores the tempestuous debates that erupted between "improvers," who believed in practices that sustained and bettered the soil of existing farms, and "emigrants," who thought it was wiser and more "American" to move westward as the soil gave out. Stoll examines the dozens of journals, from New York to Virginia, that gave voice to the improvers' cause. He also focuses especially on two groups of farmers, in Pennsylvania and South Carolina. He analyzes the similarities and differences in their farming habits in order to illustrate larger regional concerns about the "new husbandry" in free and slave states. Farming has always been the human activity that most disrupts nature, for good or ill. The decisions these early Americans made about how to farm not only expressed their political and social faith, but also influenced American attitudes about the environment for decades to come. Larding the Lean Earth is a signal work of environmental history and an original contribution to the study of antebellum America.

Short-listed for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll offers a fresh, provocative account of Appalachia, and why it matters. He begins with the earliest European settlers, whose desire for vast forests to hunt in was frustrated by absentee owners―including George Washington and other founders―who laid claim to the region. Even as Daniel Boone became famous as a backwoods hunter and guide, the economy he represented was already in peril. Within just a few decades, Appalachian hunters and farmers went from pioneers to pariahs, from heroes to hillbillies, in the national imagination, and the area was locked into an enduring association with poverty and backwardness. Stoll traces these developments with empathy and precision, examining crucial episodes such as the Whiskey Rebellion, the founding of West Virginia, and the arrival of timber and coal companies that set off a devastating “scramble for Appalachia.”
At the center of Ramp Hollow is Stoll’s sensitive portrayal of Appalachian homesteads. Perched upon ridges and tucked into hollows, they combined small-scale farming and gardening with expansive foraging and hunting, along with distilling and trading, to achieve self-sufficiency and resist the dependence on cash and credit arising elsewhere in the United States. But the industrialization of the mountains shattered the ecological balance that sustained the households. Ramp Hollow recasts the story of Appalachia as a complex struggle between mountaineers and profit-seeking forces from outside the region. Drawing powerful connections between Appalachia and other agrarian societies around the world, Stoll demonstrates the vitality of a peasant way of life that mixes farming with commerce but is not dominated by a market mind-set. His original investigation, ranging widely from history to literature, art, and economics, questions our assumptions about progress and development, and exposes the devastating legacy of dispossession and its repercussions today.

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

Endless economic growth rests on a belief in the limitless abundance of the natural world. But when did people begin to believe that societies should—even that they must—expand in wealth indefinitely? In The Great Delusion, the historian and storyteller Steven Stoll weaves past and present together through the life of a strange and brooding nineteenth-century German engineer and technological utopian named John Adolphus Etzler, who pursued universal wealth from the inexhaustible forces of nature: wind, water, and sunlight. The Great Delusion neatly demonstratesthat Etzler’s fantasy has become our reality and that we continue to live by some of the same economic assumptions that he embraced. Like Etzler, we assume that the transfer of matter from environments into the economy is not bounded by any condition of those environments and that energy for powering our cars and iPods will always exist. Like Etzler, we think of growth as progress, a turn in the meaning of that word that dates to the moment when a soaring productive capacity fused with older ideas about human destiny. The result is economic growth as we know it, notas measured by the gross domestic product but as the expectation that our society depends on continued physical expansion in order to survive.

U.S. Environmentalism since 1945 & American Women's Movement & Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s & Postwar Immigrant America

MacLean, Nancy

Horowitz, Daniel

Ueda, Reed

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stoll, Steven. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Stoll, Steven

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stoll, Steven. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: A Brief History with Documents

St. Martin's Handbook 6e paper & Writing and Revising & Oil Crisis of 1973-1974 & U.S. Environmentalism since 1945

The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California

The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth

Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America

Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth

U.S. Environmentalism since 1945 & American Women's Movement & Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s & Postwar Immigrant America