ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: THE CONTRIBUTION OF DONALD WORSTER

Author(s): Ian Tyrrell and Donald Worster

Source: Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (July, 1994), pp. 56-68
Published by: Australia New Zealand American Studies Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41053717
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 ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY:
THE CONTRIBUTION OF DONALD WORSTER

Ian Tyrrell
Donald Worster, who is Hall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of
Kansas, has taught also at the University of Hawaii and Brandeis University. He received his
Ph.D. degree from Yale University, is the author of many books and articles in environmental
history, and is acknowledged to be among the leaders in his field. The interview was
conducted by Ian Tyrrell on 8 January 1994, during the American Historical Association
Convention in San Francisco. Professor Worster had been, the previous day, with Martin
Lewis of Duke University and Christine Rosen of Berkeley," among commentators for Samuel
Hays's paper 'Charting a Course for Environmental History,1 in a session, 'New Directions
for Environmental History.1 That session set the context for the following discussion.

LT.: You said once that Western history is best experienced by those who have lived
it.

D.W.: I wouldn't say that someone who hasn't lived in the West couldn't write
Western history.

LT.: But your background was Western; you were born in Needles, California, in
1941, 1 believe.

D.W.: One month before Pearl Harbor.

LT.: And you grew up on the Great Plains, is that right?

D.W.: Yes.

LT.: And in a way the two books that I think are most closely associated with
are regional studies: The Dust Bowl book and The Rivers of Empire, both of wh
think are very good books.

D.W.: They're not my best, which is Nature's Economy, my first book and not a
a regional one.

LT.: How did you come to write that book? It's a very ambitious book.

D.W.: It was my dissertation, and far too ambitious a project for a dissertation,
perhaps too ambitious even for someone of advanced years who has spent quite a
lot of time thinking about the problems it addresses. But I'm glad I did it. I had spent
the better part of a year thinking about what I wanted to do for a dissertation, starting
with the work of Lewis Mumford who was one of my heroes at that point. I read

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everything he had ever written, and thought I might do something on his life and
thought. But what increasingly intrigued me was his interest in ecology as the basis
for a new cultural perspective, and that led me more and more into the history of
science and of ecology. About that time, the news magazines were full of ecology,
and then in 1970 the whole environmental movement burst onto the scene with the
first Earth Day. So I saw that a cultural history of ecology would be a very interesting
way to discover how people had thought about the natural world and to determine
whether ecology really offered a radical new way of thinking. After writing it, I took
another year off to revise it, and it's still not complete. This next spring Cambridge
will produce an enlarged, revised edition number two, which will update the story
from 1970 to the 1990s. All the way down to the emerging science of chaos and
complexity.

LT.: Which I think you touch on in The Wealth of Nature. There was that little piece
I can remember somewhere on chaos theory.

D.W.: Yes, that essay is an anticipation of the new chapters.

LT.: That's very interesting; there's quite a lot in the Nature's Economy book,
however, that would suggest that you were thinking about the problems of the dust
bowl in Kansas at the same time. I mean the stuff on the grasslands.

D.W.: Oh, I shoved that in, in 1974, when I became part of a working group at the
Aspen Institute in Colorado looking at world food problems and global environmental
issues. In the spring of that year, as I was revisiting the plains, there were many dust
storms occurring in the region, reviving memories of the 1930s dust bowl conditions.
I saw grain elevators coated from top to bottom with red or brown dust and heard
about motorists stranded on highways. Those conditions had been part of my own
growing up so I shoved some of that stuff into the book. I was looking for ways to
get the history of ideas down to some contact with real people living real lives in the
real world. Later I saw there was an entire book on the subject of the dirty thirties.
In 1978-79 1 came back to Kansas, this time from Honolulu, and in twelve months did
the research and writing, and shipped it off to Oxford University Press.

LT.: It certainly had a considerable impact, probably because it is conceived as a case

study of a very large environmental problem. Would you agree with that, that it is
taken as a paradigm for agricultural history in the modem world, and what is wrong
with modern capitalist agriculture?

D.W.: Well, the agricultural history people have generally not taken it that way. But
I think it is an important case study of modern agriculture, from an ecological
perspective, one that has global ramifications; and it was those ramifications that I

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brought in at the end of the book, ramifications derived from my summer in Aspen
thinking about the Sahelian drought, about the spread of desertification on a global
scale. Contemporary Africa was very much in my mind as I was doing that book.

LT.: Yes, the global dimension has been a continuing theme in your work. One thinks
of The Ends of the Earth volume that you've done, but also Rivers of Empire. I'm
impressed by the way you set that story of the Western problem with aridity within
a larger context and included some comparative material, which is of interest to
Australian historians as well. How did you come to write Rivers of Empire and what
do you see as the significance of that book in comparative terms?

D.W.: I was wondering what I could do after the dust bowl study, and my impulse
was to follow the Okies west. They were my own people; I had come from Okie roots
and I thought I would go west too. At first I thought I might follow their migration
into California's Imperial Valley and do another case study. But the topic of water
in Western agriculture increasingly intrigued me, and eventually it took me all the
way back to ancient Mesapotamia. That's where my Okie trail led. But I have
believed all along that environmental history ought to be the harbinger of a new kind
of history that escapes, or transcends, the nation state boundaries that we have
observed for so long, in writing history. The only academic field still trapped in
nation state boundaries is history. It 's a legacy from the nineteenth-century nationalistic
era. But environmental history, stirred into being by global environmental
degradation, is a field that promises to transcend now and then those rigid
boundaries.

LT.: Critics have said that Rivers of Empire is a book about Califomian irrigation. I
wonder if you think it is again using California as a paradigm for Western irrigation?
Does California call the tune in Western irrigation?

D.W.: It certainly sets trends that can be seen operating throughout the American
West, and maybe globally. There's a lot of Califomian agricultural investment in
Mexico, in Africa, and Australia. One has to acknowledge that California has been
regionally, nationally, and globally important. Many people in American Western
history have wanted to saw California off and let it float to sea, to deny th^t it has
been an important part of the West. Their West is some fantasy world in frontier
Montana, a world that lasted a few glorious years and then was over. California just
doesn't fit that mythology, and I wanted to bring it into the mainstream of Western
history a little more.

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LT.: To raise another point about this book which I dug out of one of the critics:
Donald Pisani said that you reduce complicated history to little more than a morality
play. He claims Rivers of Empire ignores the context of reclamation, local, political
and economic conditions, the depression of 1893 and so on. Is Rivers of Empire
another version of the declension approach to environmental history?

D.W.: Well, it is a story with a moral or two. I guess that's a morality play. I think
history can have moral implications, but it should offer more than simple-minded
morality tales. The story of water in the American West is a very complicated story
about real human needs as well as greed and destruction, and about people not
getting what they expected to get. It is certainly a declensionist story if you have any
stock in irrigation companies. The future of irrigation in the West is bound to be one
of decline; we cannot maintain the current level of agricultural development in the
American West. I compare desert irrigation to trying to get an elephant to stand on
a rubber ball. I mean you can do it for a while, and it's a wonderful stunt, but
eventually the elephant falls off. If you have no personal investment in seeing that
irrigated agriculture survives at its current level, if you admit that agriculture is not
always the highest and best use of the land, if you see some hope in liberating
ourselves from an outmoded agricultural mythology, along with its ethos of
domination of nature, then you don't have a declensionist story at all.

I.T.: Going back to yesterday's AHA session, it's noticeable that there are lots of
people saying how environmental historians have been overly pessimistic, that
things have been altered for a very long time. This seems to me to be quite an
important counter-attack in the debate over environmental issues seeping through
into the historical profession. Do you have any comment on that?

D.W.: I don't know who they have in mind when they say it's been overly pessimistic,
except perhaps for myself. Bill Cronon's book Nature's Metropolis is not a
pessimistic book, nor is Richard White's work, so far as I can see, deeply
pessimistic. I don't even know whether my own work is pessimistic, unless you
define a critical view of market culture, of capitalist development, of our domination
of nature thinking, as pessimism. I think what those critics are asking is whether
history should be critical at all or whether it should be more hopeful about our
institutions. Personally, I don't think that you can have a land ethic emerge and
flower under the shadow of our current economic institutions and drives on this
planet. That belief informs some of my historical writings as it does my personal
essays, and if that's pessimism, well, so be it.

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LT.: I'm a pessimist myself, so I don't have a problem with it. But I'm also somebody
who thinks that class issues are important and I'm not quite sure that they've actually
been stressed enough in environmental matters. A critique of Cronon's book,
Nature's Metropolis, for example, might be that there hasn't been enough class in it.
"The people' don't really appear in the book. In the discussions in the sessions on
environmental history at the AHA, the issues of the social geography of class, for
example, to do with pollution, were not being raised and nowhere in the United
States do they seem to be getting raised very much. In Samuel Hays's paper, 'the city'
was the key influence rather than the energy system and the mode of production.

D.W.: Well, that situation is changing as books appear on pollution, toxic wastes, and
other urban and rural problems, including, for example, a recent book by Robert D.
Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality which offers a race
and class-oriented analysis of environmental policy. I tried to bring in some elements
of class in Rivers of Empire, to show that there has been a relationship between
irrigation development and the politics of class, labour and so on, but I don't think
that environmental history is required to follow some pre-detennined set of race/
class/gender categories.

LT.: I wonder if I could turn to your background at Yale because it's always intrigued
me, especially the influence of Howard Lamar in Western history. Was he your
dissertation adviser?

D.W.: No. Sydney Ahlstrom was my adviser.

LT.: The religious historian. That's an interesting connection.

D.W.: When I went to Yale in 1966, I got seduced by the dominant interests i
intellectual and cultural history. It's still one of my major interests. Sydney Ahlstro
was a very accommodating, wide ranging, hospitable person to have as a mentor.
I had a fundamentalist family upbringing, and, ironically, a strong interest
Darwinism as well - that's not an unusual connection, by the way - and Ahlstrom
was exactly the kind of mentor needed to feed those interests.

LT.: So now we understand Nature's Economy a little bit better.

D.W.: It was only after I left Yale that graduate students began showing up i
numbers to work in Western history, and to create around Howard one of the most
vibrant graduate programs in the country in frontier and Western history. I muc
regret not being a part of all that, of not becoming one of Howard Lamar's protege
in the way that William Cronon, Patricia Limerick, and others are.

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LT.: Were you influenced by the American Studies department there?

D.W.: I was in that program and undoubtedly bear its identifying marks. I had been
an English Literature undergraduate major, and then moved into American Studies
at Yale. The book that most influenced me, that took me to that program in fact, was
Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land.

LT.: A great book.

D.W.: Yes, and I wanted to follow in that genre, but as I say I got seduced away into
intellectual and cultural history with ecology at the centre. Back in the sixties it was
easier to find interdisciplinary freedom in American Studies than in history, but that
is no longer so.

LT.: Because of the changes in the discipline?

D.W.: Yes, history has become much more accommodating to new ideas, new
approaches. Today, I think of myself comfortably as an historian, and acknowledge
that the field of history has been, on the whole, pretty accommodating to the new
interest in environmental history.

LT.: You were at Hawaii in American Studies though, weren't you?

D.W.: In fact, until my present position I was always in an American Studies

program - at Brandeis University, at the University of Hawaii - and those were
stimulating places to be in. Hawaii was especially fascinating because it opened up
for me the whole Pacific Basin. I got interested in Australia through my Hawaii
experience and took a short-term fellowship at the ANU's Humanities Centre,
which was my entre to the environmental history of Australia. The entire Pacific
Basin still intrigues me, and living in its epicentre for a while encouraged me to look
beyond the United States, to take an interest in history outside my country. So I credit
Hawaii, its people and landscape and its oceanic connections with having had a
deep impact on my life.

LT.: It certainly is a place that's undergone an incredible environmental trans-

formation and lots of influences from different places, both cultural and
environmental.

D.W.: If I had stayed I probably would have tried to write something of that story
- the Hawaiian islands' environmental history. But it's a minefield of political
sensitivities, perhaps better left to people who have deeper roots than I in the place.

LT.: In fact the whole story of the Pacific Basin and its environmental interactions is
one that's very open. Another issue: As you said in your comments yesterday,

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environmental historians have won practically all the professional prizes. To me as
a temperance historian, coming from a sub-discipline which is in many ways very
similar and which evolved at the same time, it seems that environmental history has
done a much better job in achieving recognition in the profession at large. Yet
environmental history is still not very well integrated into the textbooks. I was
looking for references to the dust bowl this last session when I was teaching my
environmental history course in Australia, and I really found most of these references
terribly inadequate. I agree that human dimensions are very important to the dust
bowl but the ecological dimension of it was almost entirely absent. Is this still a
blinkered view of historians that they haven't integrated this new and very vibrant
work into historical interpretation? How can this deficiency be overcome, if it is
indeed a deficiency?

D.W.: It is still a very serious deficiency, but eventually the environmental

dimension will creep into the textbooks. The vast majority of American teachers of
history still have not discovered the earth; they don't see its relevance. They tend to
let all that nature stuff go over to the sciences. It's an antiquated mentality, but it will
fade away under the growing influence of some very talented historians like Bill
Cronon, Carolyn Merchant, Richard White, Alfred Crosby, and Stephen Pyne.

LT.: About syntheses, the attack on Clive Ponting by Martin Lewis and others
yesterday at the AHA convention interested me, because it seemed that Ponting was
trying in The Green History of the World to do a genuinely global synthesis and yet
there were quite sustained attacks on Ponting as inadequate. I wonder what you
thought of The Green History of the World, as an attempt to give a global overview?

D.W.: It has some deficiencies as history, but I'm very charitable about a book that
attempts to take on so important, so huge a topic. Perhaps Ponting got some of his
details wrong, but not all of them. I also like David Attenborough's The First
Eden: The Mediterranean World and Man, which is not a scholarly book either but is
provocative and interesting.

LT.: Did you want to make a comment on Lewis's extension of his critique in his own
book - Green Delusions - while we're at it?

D.W.: I've not yet read Green Delusions, but if it's an attack on radical
environmentalisms, well I suppose I am a radical environmentalist myself. I hav
been a supporter of the infamous Earth First! movement and of people like Ed Abbe
and Dave Foreman, though I don't support everything they've said. There are some
things they have said or done that made me cringe; nonetheless I think they've been

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an honest, fearless, necessary voice in the United States. On the whole, American
environmentalists haven't been nearly radical enough.

LT.: In what I think is another wrong-headed book, Anna BramwelTs Ecology in the
Twentieth Century, there is an attack on the environmentalists, too, from a European
point of view. That seems to have been missed to some extent because it's a European
view.

D.W.: It's a weak book, claiming the greens are tied in with Nazis and other crimina
minds.

LT.: It's achieved a lot of attention, though, in the general media, because I think the
press want to find attacks on environmentalists, attacks that have got academic
respectability.

D.W.: Well, that's where the sensational news is, the emotion-raising story. We need
rational criticism of the environmental movement, but I don't think that's what the
media or the publishers always want.

LT.: Turning to your more recent works, I've been reading The Wealth of Nature. I
guess the title of it is directly taken from The Wealth of Nations and I wondered
whether you would like to comment on the politics of that book. Do you see it as a
book which is doing a critique in some way of economics?

D.W.: In a very small way, yes, though it's not the book that we need to have written
which is a critical study of the ideas and worldview of modem economics. I'd love
to see that sort of book appear, one that really undertook to explore the cultural,
moral, and political assumptions made by economists and their rather unconsidered
devotion to materialism, growth, progress, and 'development1, a book that really
probed into the assumptions economists tend to make about nature.

LT.: I don't understand why that hasn't been done. I lecture about it and I just don't
understand the absence.

D.W.: I don't either, but perhaps it's because the economic historians, who might be
expected to do such a book, are often a part of economics departments; they are
part of the church, and can't step outside it. As Keynes said, economists are th
people whose ideas rule the world, these days, and we need a critical history of
their ideas. The closest we've ever had was Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly
Philosophers. My own book, and that one essay in it particularly, 'The Wealth of
Nature', was an attempt to look at some of that economic thinking, but the task
needs help from people who have a much better grounding in economic philosophy
and theory than I.

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LT.: One of the things that interested me in that book was the way you talked about
a characteristic American tendency to regard the environment as inexhaustible, and
you linked that to ideas of Edenic innocence and abundance. I wonder though
whether this is a purely American phenomenon. Are you falling into the American
exceptionalist way of thinking there just for a minute, or is that idea particularly
strongly identified with the development of the United States?

D.W.: Edenic fantasizing is certainly a characteristic of American culture and our

history. Whether it's unique to America is not a claim I'm prepared to make, though
my recent research suggests that such thinking is less prominent, say, in Canada.
Canadians have not enjoyed a vast, seemingly inexhaustible agricultural frontier.
When Americans got over the Appalachian Mountains and saw what would become
Ohio, Illinois, and Kansas rolling out before them, with so many opportunities for
homesteads and farms, the prospect simply blew their minds. I don't think that
happened in Australia on the same scale, or in South Africa or other frontiers where
Europeans went. Of course, events like the California gold rush were repeated in
Australia and to some extent in Canada. There has been a myth of abundance spread
all over the world, as part of the rise of capitalistic culture, the view that the world
of nature is an endless resource.

LT.: Another exceptionalist theme in American environmental history has been the
theme of wilderness, and I know that the English commentator Peter Coates has said
this is very distinctive part of American environmentalism. Has that theme been
overemphasised historiographically in view of the point you were making about the
role of agriculture and the points made in Samuel Hays's paper about the importance
of the city?

D.W.: I don't think it's overemphasised at all. Again it's striking how little passion
or enthusiasm Canadians have shown for wilderness; there's some, but often it
seems derivative from the United States. There's no national wilderness system or
large wilderness preservation movement in Canada. Indeed, there is a lot of hostility
in Canadian literature, particularly in Ontario, to the idea of the wild. In contrast,
wilderness is a very powerful ideal in the United States, perhaps because of the
extraordinary environmental abundance in the United States, but also because of our
political ideology. Wilderness is connected to the American ideal of personal
freedom. It may also have something to do with Protestantism; the preservation of
wilderness, as in the case of John Muir, meant the preservation of God's creation, and
the right of all things to exist free of human hierarchy and authority. There are lots
of things going on in that movement that touch things in the United States. Nor can

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you separate the wilderness ideal from the frontier theme of Frederick Jackson
Turner. These days there is a lot of criticism of the wilderness emphasis in the
environmental movement from people who feel that we have made it into a romantic
fetish that has unjustly erased the Indian from the landscape. One has to be careful
not to do that, or to define wilderness naively, but I believe the wilderness ideal and
wilderness preservation is one of the great gifts Americans have made to the world.

I.T.: Incidentally John Muir had some interesting connections with the fruit industry.
He was actually an orchardist himself for quite a long while, and there is a symbiotic
relationship between the valuation of a highly made over landscape in California,
and the perception of the natural landscape. I think this is very important in the
development of that early twentieth century environmental movement.

D.W.: He married into an orchard and made it a financial success that could support
his wife and daughters while he went back to the mountains. Now, you can look on
that as someone who was participating in the development of agribusiness in
California.

LT.: I didn't say that.

D.W.: No, you didn't, but my point is that the Edenic dream in California has both
elements in it: the orchards representing the abundance of the lands that feed us, that
make us rich, and at the same time the mountains representing the wilderness, a
place of freedom and equality of all creatures. These two Edenic images are in
constant interplay.

I.T.: I don't know what you're working on at the moment although Under Western
Skies, a collection of essays, appeared recently.

D.W.: It's a book of essays, the longest of which deals with Alaska through the prism
of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, from the rise of the fossil fuels and their role in the
opening up of Alaska, the 'last frontier'. The other long essay in the book is on the
Black Hills of South Dakota and the controversy between the Dakota and the white
Americans over who should own the Black Hills. Are they sacred Indian lands or
not? That's a very controversial piece because I've argued that the Hills have not
historically been sacred lands, while I support the Indian effort to get them back,
though more on the basis of legal issues than on religious and spiritual issues. Other
essays in the book deal with the re-evaluation of Western history that's going on, the
so-called New Western History.

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 LT.: We might come back to the New Western History. But in Under Western Skies
there is a hint that - after studying the wheat and irrigation frontiers - you may
be planning to work on the pastoral industry. That is an area of comparative interest
in Australia. I realise sheep weren't as important here as in Australia, but for a while
they were important in California, for example. Is that a major neglected topic?

D.W.: One of the essays in the book is called 'Cowboy Ecology', and it tries to
address some of the questions you've raised, to put the American cowboy experience
into a global comparative context, and to raise questions from an ecological
perspective about the modern pastoral industry. At one point I thought I might
undertake a broader study of the cattle and sheep industry in the West, but I haven't
any immediate ambitions to do that.

LT.: Sheep are one of the great bug-bears now of the environmental movement, in
a way because they eat so voraciously.

D.W.: They've been so since John Muir, who after witnessing their impact on the
California landscape, as he trailed behind them as a seasonal shepherd, called them
'hooved locusts'.

LT.: In Australia today, some people think we should get into llamas or alpacas
which don't do as much damage. Another point that you raised just before was about
energy and fossil fuels. If I was to develop a critique of yesterday's AHA session, I
would say that rather than looking as Hays did at the city as the key organising
principle, the city is a surface manifestation of this massive transformation which is
rooted in energy systems, and modern cities are impossible without this prodigious
consumption of fossil fuels. I wondered whether you might comment on the way that
European historians - I'm thinking here of Peter Brimblecombe's Silent Countdown,
J.C. Debeir's In the Servitude of Power and so on - have written on the relationship
between energy and mode of production as a central organising theme of
environmental history. It seems to me that this would be a good approach for the
United States, because the United States is a country which is the most voracious
consumer of energy, instead of using labour.

D.W.: Are our per capita uses of fossil fuels higher than in Australia? '

LT.: I think they are. I think you'll find the US is the highest, but Australia is very high
too.

D.W.: Canada's very, very high.

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LT.: There are three or four countries like Australia, Canada and the United States
that are extremely high.

D.W.: We need to look more closely at the fossil fuel industry, which dramatically
changed our relationship with the earth in all kinds of ways. My effort to write about
it in Alaska was to see how this incredibly remote, inhospitable environment, in
nineteenth-century terms, was made so easily accessible by the fossil fuels, and so
quickly. Even John Muir, who travelled up to Alaska several times, got there on coal-
buming steamers. He came to find the wilderness through fossil fuels.
LT.: He came to Australia too. He also found his wilderness in the Blue Mountains.

D.W.: Much of the modern quest for wilderness, for the natural world and its values
was fuelled by fossil fuels. As they run out, we need to look back to see what kind
of profound influence their use had on both nature and culture - how, for example,
that use changed agriculture dramatically. There'd be a lot of things you wouldn't
try to do as a consequence of not having that kind of surplus energy.

LT.: I think the relationship between energy and economics is crucially important.

D.W.: The big question is whether the fossil fuel industry has been an independent
agency or not. Certainly, it was first invented by capitalist enterprise, but then it had
its own distinguishable effects. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution may have owed a
lot to deforestation and the search for an alternative source of fuels and other
resources.

LT.: It's a very important issue, though, why fossil fuels w

it was a matter of technological necessity or whether
motivated by patterns of consumption and demands for
anybody has really worked that out, and until they do w
to whether, as you say, the fossil fuel industry is an ind

D.W.: The story of Massachusetts's Nantucket Island and t

the depletion of whales in the Pacific Basin is relevant
followed by the discovery of rock oil in Pennsylvania, and
invested in the whaling industry shifted over into Pennsyl
talking about the history of energy you have to talk about
have to talk about whales, about South Sea islands, abou

LT.: You do, all forms of energy, and how they interr
Western History, what do you think of recent development
such a thing as the New Western History?

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D.W.: There is a substantial change going on in the field towards a more critical
attitude towards Western mythology than there has been at any point in the past.
That doesn't mean that every recent work is really new, but the spirit of critical
inquiry is more deep and profound than it's ever been, and that's a healthy situation.
Western history is opening up to groups who have long been excluded. Many who
take pride in a more traditional approach are actually scurrying to claim 'we were
there first, we discovered all of this, we've always been looking at the past from the
Indians1 point of view,' etc., and that's baloney. The field has changed dramatically,
though I wouldn't give credit to younger historians only. Writers like Dee Brown,
author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, in the early 1970s, and Henry Nash
Smith, and Wallace Stegner (in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell
and the Second Opening of the West) earlier took a more critical stance towards the
West; a more mature, probing Western history has been emerging over the past
forty years.

LT.: My final question is: what are you going to work on next?

D.W.: I have long wanted to do a biography of John Wesley Powell, one that would
also be a biography of the western region during his lifetime, 1834 to 1902, when the
region first took shape against the background of a corporatising America. Powell
still seems to me still to be at the f ountainhead of thinking about the West, a person
whose life touched so much, reflected so much, of his times, including the conservation
movement - an extraordinarily interesting life that moved from a prairie homestead,
through the Civil War, down the uncharted Colorado River, to Washington, D.C.,
and on down to the beginning of the twentieth century. We have, of course, that
magnificent biography of John Wesley Powell done by Wallace Stegner I mentioned
earlier, but it was written four decades ago in the kind of shadow of the New Deal
when we had very different attitudes towards the federal government's role in the
West than we do today. So it's time to go back and look at Powell and his ideas again.

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