American Earth: Environmental Thinking Since Thoreau

For my second book, I ended up choosing to read American Earth: Environmental Thinking Since Thoreau, which is a collection of essays edited by Bill McKibben. American Earth is a massive book, nearly 1000 pages in length, so I didn’t read the entire thing.  After finishing my previous book, I dove deeper into researching the environmental community and had a strong sense of what it was I was looking to gain out of American Earth.  Going into the book, I chose to build off of what I gathered from my previous book, Environmentalism: A Global History, and focus on the historically significant environmentalists.  

American Earth is a truly unique book in that it conveys the complexity of the environmental community very clearly.  Environmentalism, by its nature, is very similar to the feminist and racial movement of the past century in the way their tactics have worked and the amount of success they’ve achieved.  There is a broad spectrum of thinking of what the man-environment relationship should look like, as was made apparent recently when we watched Grizzly Man.  My original thoughts coming out of my previous book were to look at the influence of romantic thinking within the community, but to do so would be too broad a topic to examine within one paper.  American Earth made this clear.  

Aside from forcing me to shift my train of thought for my paper, American Earth conveyed the thinking of some of America’s greatest naturalists and environmental thinkers.  It doesn’t talk about the actions taken by each of these people, but instead presents writing that they did which clearly reveals the way they look at nature.  This is what will make American Earth such a valuable resource as I go through my research process.  

My topic is starting to take its final form, and I’m choosing to focus on the influence that early environmental thinkers have on today’s environmental community and its thinkers.  Some of these early thinkers include Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, and even Theodore Roosevelt.  Many of these thinkers were inspired by the environmental destruction that they saw resulting of the first and second industrial revolutions.  One of the most significant thinkers within the environmental movement’s history is Rachel Carson, however, in my paper I’m going to focus less on her philosophy and more on how her book Silent Spring, resulted in the origins of the environmental movement.  There is a distinction between the environmental community and the environmental movement.  Drawing inspiration from this book, a new generation of environmental thinkers built their philosophy off of the thinking of earlier work.  What we see today is an environmental philosophy that has changed very little over the past hundred years.  The presence of early environmental philosophy is what I will be examining in my paper.