History 482: Recent American Environmental History

Course Description:

This course examines the interaction between humans and the natural world in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present.  It considers such diverse topics as the impact of industrialization and urban growth on the American environment, the emergence of ecological consciousness and green politics, and the creation of the idea of Nature in American culture.  Students will be expected to develop an historical understanding of the major themes of modern American environmental history: relationships between human activity and pollution in American cities, emergence of reform movements and environmental regulation, relationship between increasing urban growth and increasing environmental concern, motives and mechanics of resource management, and the rise of environmental politics. Further, through activities and class discussions, students will be expected to develop an understanding of the environmental challenges faced by urban planners, public policy administrators, resource managers, and the public.

Course Requirements:

Assignments include regular attendance in class, consistent involvement in service learning experience, and  participation in class discussions (20%); weekly short (1-2 page) journal entries, based on course readings (40%); presentation on service learning experience (15%); and a final project or term paper (25%). [Note: The final project may address your service learning experience and its relation to the content of this course.]  History M.A. students must substitute a lengthier research paper for the final project.  There will be no exams in this class.  Students who fail to complete all assignments will not receive a passing semester grade.

Regular attendance and class discussions are an important part of the course.   All students are expected to have completed the reading assignments before each class session and should be prepared to answer questions and participate in class discussions.

Required Readings:

Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History
Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth
Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks
Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America
History 482 class reader

All books are available for purchase in the university bookstore, and readings are on 3-hour course reserve in the Reserve Book Room of the Main Library (First floor-east).

Week 1: Nature, science, and American history

Theoretical and methodological issues
Definitions of Nature, science and the environment.  Theories of evolutionary and environmental change. What is environmental history?  Historical and scientific views of land: Landmass, topography, biodiversity.  Environment as agent in the transformation of human life.  Approaches to environmental history.  The strange case of Barbie the Lobster.

Readings  January 26:   Steinberg, Down to Earth, read: ix-xii, skim: 11-88
       Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River, 1-39

January 28:   DeLong, "Defining Biodiversity," Wildlife Society Bulletin 24(1996), 738-749 (R)

       Stephen Jay Gould, "The Golden Rule -- A Proper Scale for our Environmental Crisis," Natural History 99(September, 1990), 24-30 (R)
       May Thielgaard Watts, "Reading the Records in Old Adobe Walls, or The Spanish Conquest of the Grass Hills," Reading the Landscape of America, 266-272 (R)
       George Marsh, Man and Nature (1864), 28-40 (R)
       David Lowenthal, "Nature and morality from George Perkins Marsh to the millennium," Journal of Historical Geography 26:2 (2000), 3-23 (R)
       Barbara Liebhardt, "Interpretation and Causal Analysis: Theories in Environmental History," Environmental Review 23-23-36 (R)

Week 2: Industry, the state, and the environment

Landscapes and land allocation in 19th century America
Cultural concepts of property ownership inform the ways in which different people use the land.  How do humans organize the natural world?  How lands have been measured, divided, and allocated: the meaning of property.  Explorers and scientists.  The reordering of Western life: How to take title.  Patterns of settlement and the ideal of westward expansion.  The federal government as broker of western lands.  Expansion of a federal bureaucracy.  Industrialization.

Readings  February 2:    Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,"Journal of American History 76(1990),
                    1087-1106 (R)
        Steinberg, Down to Earth, 89-115; Price, Flight Maps, 1-55

February 4:    Steinberg, 116-137; Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River, 41-81

Week 3: The commodification of Nature, natural resource management and their consequences

The "Soreness of the land"
Natural resource exploitation and environmental degradation.  Energy and the environment.  Urbanization and mining.  Ecosystems unbalanced: The legacy of hydraulic mining.   Agriculture and the destruction of the great plains grasslands.  Hooved locusts and other pests.  Cultural change: Logging's subversive text, The Lorax. Water and the arid West.  State and society in the Western economy.  Creating the Salton Sea.  The damming of the region.
 

Readings February 9:     Steinberg, 175-189; Gumprecht. 82-171

February 11:     Price, 57-109

Week 4:  The emergence of the conservation movement

Conserving for the future
Understanding conservation and preservation.  Ideas of the wilderness.  To dam Hetch Hetchy: "No holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of Man."  Progressive era sensibilities.

Readings February 16:        President's Day.  No class.

February 18:             Steinberg, 138-156; Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 3-70
    John Muir, "Hetch Hetchy Valley," in The Yosemite, 249-262 (R)
    Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo, "Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race: Carleton Watkins, John Muir, and the Construction of Wilderness,"
                       Environmental History 6:4(October 2001), 543-560 (R)
    William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground (1995), 69-90 (R)
    Adam Rome, "Coming to Terms with Pollution -- the language of environmental regulation, 1865-1915," Environmental History 1(1996), 6-28 (R)
 

Week 5:   Crimes of the cities

Defining elements of the environment in turn-of-the-century urban spaces
How to "read" the landscape: the vernacular built environment as autobiography of our culture.  Size, density, form, and economic organization as basic definitions of urban elements.  How to understand turn-of-the-century maps.  Social organization of space in America's "new cities."  What the city is and what it represents: early twentieth-century views of the urban environment.  Disease and sanitation as environmental issues.

Readings:     February 23:     Steinberg, 157-172; Gumprecht, 173-233

            February 25:     Steinberg, 190-225
                    John Brinkerhoff Jackson,  "How to Study the Landscape," The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics, 113-126 (R)
                    Pierce Lewis, "Axioms for Reading the Landscape," and D.W. Meinig, "The Beholding Eye," in Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes
                                (1979), 11-48 (R)
                    David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, "A Gift of God=?  The Public Health Controversy over Leaded Gasoline during the 1920s," in Rosner and
                                Markowitz, eds., Dying for Work: Workers' Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century America (1987), 121-139 (R)
                    Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 76-87, 227-231 (R)

Week 6: Designing livable cities

The challenges of "cities beautiful"
Emergence of the city beautiful movement: Landscape designers and urban planners.  City parks and the transformation of urban places.

Readings:     March 1:         Gumprecht, 235-301

    March 3:     Carolyn Merchant, "The Women of the Progressive Conservation Crusade, 1900-1915," in Kendall E. Bailes, ed., Environmental History: Critical Issues in
                                                Comparative Perspective (1985), 153-170 (R)
                            Dolores Hayden, The grand domestic revolution: a history of feminist designs for American homes, neighborhoods, and cities (1981), 182-205 (R)
                            Christine Rosen and Joel Tarr, "The Importance of an Urban Environmental Perspective in Environmental History," Journal of Urban History
                                            20(1993/94), 299-310 (R)

Week 7:  Ecological imaginations

Defining ecologies
Science and the emergence of the ecosystem idea in the 1930s: Arthur Tansley and Raymond Lindeman.  Ecology as "science and religion." The ethics of the land.  Our responsibility for the environment.  New approaches to environmental problems.

Readings     March 8:         Steinberg, 226-238; Spence, 71-132

        March 10:         Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1-100 (R)
                                      Donald Worster, "The Value of a Varmint," in Nature's Economy, 258-290 (R)

Week 8:  Metropolitan center and rural periphery

Development theories and the case of the American West
Wallerstein's world-system approach on a regional scale: applying theories of urban development and rural underdevelopment to the American West.  Prerequisites for postwar growth: Geopolitics, militarism, and the Atomic West.  Widening the environmental influence of the metropolitan West.
 

Readings     March 15:         Steinberg, 239-281

                         March 17:       Price, 111-165

Week 9:  Emerging environmental consciousness after 1950

"Silent Springs"
The environmental costs of our post-war prosperity.  Pesticides and the destruction of American ecosystems.  Acid rain and toxic rivers.  Green revolutions.  Tourism and consuming natures.  Environmental ethics.

Readings      March 22:         Steinberg, 283-285; Price, 167-206

                          March 24:         Ralph Lutts, "The Trouble with Bambi: Walt Disney's Bambi and the AmericanVision of Nature," Forest and Conservation History
                                                                    26(October 1991), 160-171 (R)
                                                        Alexander Wilson, "The View from the Road," in The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez, 19-51(R)
                                                        J. B. Jackson, "The Abstract World of the Hot-Rodder," in Landscape in Sight,  199-209 (R)

Week 10: Urban economies, urban ecologies in the late twentieth century

"Not in My Backyard"
Explorations in the natural world of urban spaces: gardens, lawns, parks, beaches.  Rats, cockroaches, and other forms of urban wildlife.  Impact of industrialization in cities: from smokestacks to toxic waste dumps.  Autos and air.  Environmental racism, environmental justice, and the political challenges to urban and suburban development.  "Eco-misery" and the city of the future.

Readings         March 29:         Jane Kay, "California's Endangered Communities of Color," in Bullard, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color
                                                                        (Sierra Club Books, 1993), 155-188 [R]
                                                            Paul Mohai, "African American Concern for the Environment," Environment (June 2003), 11-26 [R]
                                                            Jeff R. Crump, "Finding a Place in the Country: Exurban and Suburban Development in Sonoma County, California," Environment
                                                                        and Behavior 35(2003), 187-202 [R]
                                                            Scott Kuhn, "Expanding Public Participation is Essential to Environmental Justice and the Democratic Decision Making
                                                                        Process," Ecology Law Quarterly 25(1999)  online
                                                            Selection of short articles from Environmental Health Perspectives online

March 31:         Cèsar Chavez Day.  No class!
April 5-9:         Enjoy Spring Break.

Weeks 12-15: Contemporary environmental ideas, issues and politics

Struggles and solutions
The emergence of radical environmental politics and its backlash.  Eco-feminism.  What is eco-terrorism? The "Sagebrush Rebellion" and the specter of state's rights.  Environmental challenges to the future of America.

Readings         April 12:         Prabha Khosla, "Women's Environments: the Struggle for a Healthy and Sustainable Planet,"Women & Environments (Fall 2003), 9-12
                                                       Catherine Nash, "Environmental history, philosophy, and difference," Journal of Historical Geography 26(2000), 23-27 [R]
                                                       Gwyn Kirk, "Ecofeminism and Racial Justice: Bridges Across Gender, Race, and Class," Frontiers 18:2 (1997), 2-20 [R]
                                                        Rhonda Zingraff and Anthony E. Ladd, "The 'Female' at Risk in Nature and Nurture," Proteus 15:2 (Fall 1998), 3-9 [R]

                            April 14:         Christopher Sellers, "Body, Place and the State: The Makings of an 'Environmentalist' Imaginary in the Post-World War II
                                                                    U.S.,"  Radical History Review 74(Spring 1999), 31-64 [R]
                                                       Adam Rome, "'Give Earth a Chance': The Environmental Movement and the Sixties," Journal of American History 90(2003), 525-554
                                                       R. L. Spieldoch, "Uranium is in my body," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 20(1996), 173-186 [R]

Readings         April 19:         Ellen Stroud, "Troubled Waters in Ecotopia," Radical History Review74(1999), 65-95 [R]
                                                        Van Schoik, Brown, et.al., "Barriers and Bridges: Managing Water in the U.S.- Mexico Border Region," Environment (Jan/Feb 2004),
                                                                    26-41 [R]

                            April 21:       Celebrate John Muir's birthday.  No class.  Participate in Earth Day:  April 22.

Readings         April 26:         Price, 207-256; Spence, 133-139

                            April 28:         John D. Leshy, "Unraveling the Sagebrush Rebellion: Law, Politics and Federal Lands," 317-355 [R]
                                                        Raymond Wheeler, "Southern Utah: The Trauma of Shifting Economies and  Ideologies," in Ed Marston, editor, Reopening the
                                                                        Western  Frontier, 162-175 [R]

Readings             May 3:  Ronnie Hawkins, "Cultural Whaling, Commodification, and Culture Change," Environmental Ethics 23:3 (Fall 2001), 287-306 [R]

                                May 5:  "2001 Climate Change Report," Environment 43(May 2001), 8-19 [R]

Week 16             May 10-12:         Student Presentations

Final project/term paper due no later than 8 p.m. Wednesday May 19, in my office, FO2-208

CLASS ATTENDANCE AND CONDUCT POLICIES:  Although there are no examinations in this class, class attendance is mandatory.  As per University policy, excused absences include verifiable illness, accident, or participation in officially approved University activities.  Class conduct policies include the expectations that students will be attentive in class, respectful of others= opinions, and that students will turn off all electronic devices (including but not limited to pagers, cell phones, personal stereos) during class time.

LATE ASSIGNMENT POLICY: All written work is due at the beginning of class period on the specified due date.  With the exception of the final project, late work will be accepted, but late work will be graded at the instructor=s convenience and will not likely be returned with other assignments.  Late final projects will not be accepted.

SEMESTER GRADES:  Semester grades will be calculated as follows:
A 90-100%
B 80-89.9%
C     70-79.9%
D 60-69.9%
F       below 60%

WITHDRAWAL POLICY: Students who do not attend the first two class meetings will be dropped from this class.   It is the student=s responsibility to file the appropriate withdrawal form at the Admissions and Records Office.   Please note the following university deadlines:
February 9:  Last day to withdraw without receiving a AW@ grade; no signatures needed
February 16:  Last day to add course, without fee, or designate CR/NC grading option
February 23: Last day to add course, with $10 late fee
April 23:    Last day to withdraw without dean's signature (NOTE: This is week of spring break!)
May 14:  Last day to withdraw (requires instructor's, chairperson's, & dean's signatures)
 
 

Course Assignments

Assignment 1: Attendance and Participation in Class and Service Learning (20%)

Since this class meets only once a week, students are expected to attend all class meetings, unless they have a verifiable excused absence.  In preparing for class discussion, students might wish to consider the following questions:
- What are the main points of the readings?
- What is the author's  -- or authors' -- interpretation of a particular issue or event?
- How do the readings contribute to our understanding of the environmental history of the modern United States?
- How do the issues raised in the readings correspond to current or historical issues of interest to you beyond the classroom?
Students may also wish to generate questions of their own about the readings.  In addition, part of each class meeting will be devoted to discussion of service learning opportunities and experiences, and their relation to course materials.

As per University policy, students will receive a log on which their service learning hours can be recorded.  Be sure to have your supervisor note your hours.  Since service learning is an integral part of this course, students should plan to spend approximately 30 hours of service for this course.

Assignment 2: Short Journal Entries (40%)

Keep a journal of your studies of the American environment, combining thoughts on the readings with your observations of the world outside of the classroom: both in your service learning experience and elsewhere.  You must make ten entries of 1-2 pages, based on weekly reading assignments (i.e., journal entry must cover major readings for the week). [Students may have a "bye" for four weeks of the semester; the choice of "bye" weeks is your own, so please plan your schedule accordingly.] Questions for the first three weeks' readings is attached.

As per University policy regarding assigned work, at least two journal entries must be completed by week 6 of the semester.  Due dates: With the exception of Week 1, due dates for each journal entry will be the beginning of class following on the week about which you are writing.  (Example: If you write about week 2 readings, the due date for your entry is the beginning of class, Monday, February 9, week 3.)

Format: Journal entries should be typewritten, single- or double-spaced, on white paper.  I will provide folders in which you can store your journal entries.  Beginning with the second journal assignment, please turn in this folder.

Assignment 3: Class Presentation on Service Learning (15%)

Students will present their individual (or group) contributions to the agency or organization at which they serve.  At a minimum, students should address the following questions and issues in their presentations:
- Describe the mission or function of the agency or organization, including the ways in which it serves the needs of the community
- Detail your contribution to the agency or organization: What were your responsibilities?  In what ways did your contribution advance the goals of the agency or organization?
- Reflect on your service learning experience: What difficulties and challenges did you encounter?  How might the agency or organization better serve the interests and talents of service learners?
- Place in historical context your service learning experience: What environmental issues, ideas, and values does the agency or organization reflect the content of this course?  How do you place your contribution within the larger historical importance of environmental activism?

Assignment 4: Final Project or Final Paper (25%)

Complete a research-based final project on a topic of your interest, chosen in consultation with the instructor.  This assignment may take a variety of forms: construction of a web page, teaching unit, research paper, public policy statement, draft environmental impact statement, oral history, video, performance, public lecture, or other format (with instructor's approval).  Students may choose to focus on their service learning experiences for this assignment.
 

Guidelines: The research component of this assignment may utilize primary or secondary sources, depending on availability, student research ability, and interest.   Projects may examine a particular event, idea, or contemporary issue, but must be historical in scope.   Regardless of format, all final projects must include a written component and bibliography (total of approximately 12 pages).  For example, if a student wishes to submit a video as a final project, a written draft of the script and bibliography of sources used, must accompany the video.

Due date: No later than  8 p.m., Wednesday, May 19, in my office, FO2-208.