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Sara S. Gronim, Richard W. Judd. The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740–1840. (Studies in Environment and History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 318. Cloth $85.00, paper $25.99, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 839–840, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.839
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Richard W. Judd offers an origin story for concerns with environmental stewardship in the United States that begins a century before George Perkins Marsh and John Muir. Judd argues that men who explored, described, and collected in the forests of eastern North America developed a distinctive understanding of the natural world that incorporated both the use values of particular plants, animals, and soils and the necessity of preserving ecosystems in and for themselves. In a study that is part collective biography and part history of ideas, he successfully reveals a shift in environmental beliefs from the assumption that forests were merely “wilderness” whose transformation into fields and gardens were the salutary effects of civilization to the recognition of the complex costs of such transformations.
Judd traces three braided arcs of change to make his case that convictions about environmental stewardship have deeper historical roots than historians commonly credit. The first arc describes changes in social relations among naturalists. In the middle of the eighteenth century, naturalists in eastern North America were few and fragmented, and largely dependent upon European patronage. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of systematic collectors, like Thomas Nuttall and André Michaux, rambled through the forests east of the Mississippi River, assembling extensive natural histories of North American flora and fauna. Growing networks of naturalists, supported by growing public interest, generated the development of books and journals devoted to natural history, displays in museums and public gardens, and university positions. By 1840 American naturalists had become a genuine scientific community, one distinct from amateurs and increasingly specialized.
