Historians of early American conservation often tell a tale of good and evil. Wresting control of the land from the “backward rural populace” (p. 2), the federal government did us all a big favor—so the story goes. But in Crimes against Nature, Karl Jacoby rewrites this same narrative with purposeful, jarring ambivalence. The strictures that resulted from public lands creation, in reality, wreaked havoc on local economies and ways of life. From Jacoby’s perspective at the margins of society, the narrative of conservation becomes one of colonial conquest—with the expansion of the nation-state, but more notably in the rise of global capitalism. As such, preservation required imposition, and simplification equated to violence.
Crimes portrays three epicenters of conservation around the turn of the twentieth century: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. In overlapping but somewhat dissimilar ways, each locale experienced drastic transformations in property rights, modes of production and consumption, and degree of interaction with the outside world. In Upstate New York, for example, state forestry officials conducted experiments in restricted land usage at the expense of white settlers. Recent arrivals themselves, locals had developed in just a few generations a complex “moral ecology” (3) defined by restrained subsistence practices and informal social surveillance. Top-down change thus disrupted an otherwise harmonious community and ushered in alien values of public consumption and private profit.
Likewise in Wyoming and Arizona, Jacoby recasts the narrative in terms of class. It is important to note, however, that while the author does not ignore racial difference, he subsumes it under differing visions of appropriate land usage. In all three geographical instances, the arrival of outsiders impacted both Native and Euro-Americans in various ways, united by a common thread of disempowerment.
Crimes against Nature is an invigorating and necessary amendment to the lopsided historiography of conservationist politics. Indeed, Jacoby has done us all a favor by foregrounding power dynamics in environmental history, and historians would do well to take note.
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