Review: One area that we need to be mindful of is the history and genesis of our ideas. Whilst there is much to be said for currency there is the fact that our work is the sum total of reactions from the past. This might seem easy in theory but it becomes far harder in practice when you have to select from an enormous range of documents and bring just a few to the attention of the reader. The aim of this text is to attempt such a selection from the resources of North American environmental history.

Clearly this is a most daunting task - the material to choose from is vast and the space given in the book is minute by comparison. There's also the problem that every person would have their own favourites and there would always be some inclusions that people would disagree with! Given this, the review question becomes not what is included/excluded but what is the tenor of the book - has it conveyed the key ideas that we can see from wider reading and research? The editors start with one of the early texts used by the colonists - Blackstone's Commentaries on the laws - the first text used to create some sort of legal situation in a nation before Federalism. Next comes an extract by Penn which shows, amongst other aspects, the respect to be given to indigenous groups and their land rights. From this start we then see spread in the nature of the documents. If the very first colonists were concerned about survival then the next set of writers were looking at resource use and cataloging the new land. Thus we read about Franklin's stove to counter wood shortages and Kalm and Jefferson commenting upon the land use patterns and the efficiencies of the early settlers. The next development is the spread of nature studies and writing. Early writers such as Bartram are juxtaposed with work by Red Jacket (one of the few indigenous writers to be quoted) and the far more widely known Emerson, Thoreau and a lengthy quote from Perkins Marsh. By now we have reached the latter part of the 19th Century and have work by Muir amongst others. It's also the time of legislation and so part of the New york State Constitution is also given. In the early 20th Century, the move was to conserve land. The early national parks were strengthened and far land was given over to conservation especially by Roosevelt. This change is reflected in the selection of works by Pinchot and Leopold. Wars and recessions may have dimmed the movement but by the 1960s, Rachel Carson highlighted the modern movement in the US. Of all the writers, Carson is the "must have" with the obligatory quote from Silent Spring. From this came a range of activity much of it represented here. Acts are quoted and Hardin's story of the Commons is given in the original (which shows how has been misread and misquoted!). Legal action was becoming more common with work from the Sierra Club and Love Canal providing us with a examples. There's also reference to the new environmental ideologies such as Deep Ecology and the linking of ecological concern with social movements. The final contributions sum up modern ideas in the US as we have work by Wilson (biodiversity), Kyoto (pollution) and LaDuke (environmental activism and social justice).

This is indeed a very broad selection. There are old favourites that you would expect and less well-known writers who still have something to show us. Unlike many collections, this also has laws, court cases and agreements which shows, very neatly, how our ideology and philosophy mixes in the real world. This books makes very interesting reading. It's long enough to get a broad, basic overview whilst being select enough to be manageable. For those wishing to see how US ideas developed this is an excellent book to choose.