Douglas Cazaux Sackman

A Companion to American Environmental History.

A Companion to American Environmental History gathers together a comprehensive collection of over 30 essays that examine the evolving and diverse field of American environmental history. • Provides a complete historiography of American environmental history • Brings the field up-to-date to reflect the latest trends and encourages new directions for the field • Includes the work of path-breaking environmental historians, from the founders of the field, to contributions from innovative young scholars • Takes stock of the discipline through five topically themed parts, with essays ranging from American Indian Environmental Relations to Cities and Suburbs

Trafficking Nature And Labor Across Borders: The Transnational Return Of Us Environmental History

Nogales is the shared name of two towns in North America that have grown up in the Sonoran desert; they are separated and united by the international border between the United States and Mexico. Until the early twentieth century, people who frequented Brickwoods Saloon in Nogales, Arizona would literally be standing on the border if they moved close to its south wall (it had to be knocked out to make room for a border marker put up in 1894). A lot of alcohol flowed north over the borderline at Nogales during prohibition. Much illicit traffic in people and goods continues to flow through Ambos Nogales (as the two towns are collectively known). Yet there is also a tremendous amount of licit traffic that goes through Americas Port of Entry at Nogales—

Guano and the Explosion of Pacific Worlds

2.5 billion worth of fresh produce—tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, peppers, eggplant, mangoes and more, much of it organically grown. These goods came over the border in Mexican trucks in 2011, supplying a healthy dose of fruits and vegetables to American consumers in the winter months. Meanwhile, Mexican workers from places like Oaxaca make a perilous passage through the desert to enter the United States, heading to fields and groves in California or Georgia or Washington or countless other places to harvest fruits and vegetables for Americans or perform other work vital to the so-called American way of life. Over 6,000 migrants, lost or left behind by coyotes, have perished of dehydration in the crossing in the last decade trying to make it to Americas fields and other opportunities for work, as other less environmentally punishing border zones in California and Texas have been hardened with walls and intensive surveillance regimes.

The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America

In his far-reaching, original, and hard-hitting book, Gregory T. Cushman takes as his starting point an age-old yet repressed wisdom: excrement makes the world go around (in this case, “the Pacific World”). In particular, he focuses on marine bird guano deposited on islands off the coast of Peru (and elsewhere in the Pacific) and shows how this accumulated avian waste became a rich and hotly contested commodity from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. As populations boomed in Europe and the Americas and farming industrialized, guano, with its vital nitrogen content, became the imperial world’s magic elixir of food production, restoring or increasing the fertility of soils across the globe and their capacity to raise crops with astounding yields. But the influences of guano stretched even further than this, for Cushman uncovers, among other things, how the vast fecal resources of the Pacific (and its nitrates and phosphate) were connected to the creation of modern explosives and warfare, imperial rivalries in the Pacific, and the rise of the neo-European Pacific states (including Australia and New Zealand as well as the United States, Chile, and Peru). Also discussed are the contested exploitation of natural resources on Pacific islands, the creation of a repressive trans-Pacific labor regime, the rise of scientific environmental authority in policy-making, and the widespread dissemination of an ecological understanding of the fate of human societies and natural communities on the planet. Cushman trenchantly explains how this wealth of nature was exploited in ways that entrenched global inequalities and brought about environmental destruction. Always keeping an eye on large-scale and often-apocalyptic implications of capitalism’s use and overuse of natural resources to produce food and wealth, Cushman delves into the ways Malthusian fears and international competition in part fueled World War Two, and he takes stock of the nuclear blasts set off on atolls and islands after the great conflagration. Boldly proclaiming “the importance of shit to history” (p. 5), he is clearly reaching for the sky in this ambitious history.

Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden

of statistics and other sources to analyse tobacco consumption patterns in both urban centres such as Beijing and Shanghai and in provincial Dingxian in Hebei province, and its real value lies in the way that it reinforces the argument that the Nanjing decade was the ‘golden age of Chinese bourgeoisie’. Chapter 8 focuses on literary representations of smoking in Republican China. Here, Benedict rightly acknowledges that, despite modernization and diversification, ‘consumer choice, not only of the type of tobacco smoked but also of the mode of consumption (cigarette or pipe), continued to be dictated largely by income’ (197) and class. Chapter 9 takes up a theme that has been touched on in earlier chapters, female smoking, and here Benedict describes both the ‘new women’, who took to smoking in public, to elite discourse and the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union against women’s smoking, though she gives the reader little sense of how these representations of women and femininity were contested at the time. The book contributes to the growing number of studies of commodities and cultures of consumption not only in Chinese history, but in other fields as well. It raises new questions about economy, culture and society in late imperial–modern China. Chapters 3 and 9 are particularly enlightening because of the new light that they shed on why, at different times and in different locations, Chinese people took up smoking tobacco and why women, but not men, became the target of anti-tobacco campaigns.