Abstract

A Maine potato farmer struggles to stay in business while maintaining the productivity of his fields.... A forester in Tennessee oversees government land whose most important use today is for recreation.... Agribusiness reigns in Washington state's Columbia Basin where Franklin D. Roosevelt once envisioned a utopia of small farms.... The Texas chapter of the Sierra Club lobbies successfully against water importation to the Panhandle....What do these vignettes have in common? All reveal American ambivalence toward progress.Geographer Bret Wallach here gives us a different view of conservation in the United States, one that sees it as a distinctively American expression of an almost universal uneasiness about the character of the modern world. Ranging from the turn of the century to the 1980s and from Maine to California, he demonstrates how the management of public and private lands has always expressed that uneasiness, even on the part of people who thought they were singleminded advocates of progress.At Odds With Progress is a highly readable work that combines a scholar's attention to fact with a fine writer's feel for language. Through it, we come to realize that environmental conservation has always struck far deeper than the technical concerns of specialists. For nearly a century, it has been the way that Americans could oppose what appears to be the unstoppable path of history.