Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. (Reviews).

Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. By Karl Jacoby (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.xix + 305pp. $39.95).

The conservation of public lands in the United States derives from a simple ethic that is probably most clearly expressed in the Yellowstone Park Act of 1872. In wording that provided the legislative model for nearly all subsequent conservation efforts, the lands within the national park were retained in "their natural conditions" and "set apart...for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." By definition, then, any group or individual that challenged conservation was doubly damned; they were not "of the people," and they operated against "the conditions of nature." The conservation of public lands thus served as a powerful mechanism for defining "the public interest" by legitimizing particular conceptions of nature and criminalizing others. These observations serve as the starting point for Karl Jacoby's Crimes against Nature, a superb integration of environmental and social history which reminds us of the "profound social implications" that lie at the heart of natural resource policies (p. 6).

The "hidden history of conservation," as Jacoby terms it, is partly a story of metropolitan elites imposing their ideas about nature and the public interest on rural places and peoples. While this is the standard narrative of most histories of conservation, albeit in more celebratory terms, Jacoby reveals that there is much more to the story. From the outset, conservation was challenged by rural populations that asserted their own definitions of the public good and the appropriate use of public lands. Though often delegirimized by their more powerful opponents, and subsequently "hidden" from history, "country folk" were not ignorant defilers of Nature who indiscriminately killed animals and cleared forests without a thought for the future. Rather, the rural communities discussed in this book "fashioned a variety of arrangements designed to safeguard the ecological basis of their way of life" (p. 193). Not surprisingly, they actively (and sometimes violently) resisted conservation programs that threatened live lihoods and undermined local management of resources.

Crimes against Nature is not an advocacy piece for the wise use movement. Rather, it seeks to reveal the broader social context of conservation and present some of the movement's disturbing legacies. "As conservation's hidden history reveals," Jacoby writes at the close of his book, "Americans have often pursued environmental quality at the expense of social justice" (p. 198). Examining the origins and development of conservation provides an opportunity for uncovering some historical alternatives to this unsettling conclusion, but it also shows plainly that the rise of conservation brought a series of critical changes to rural life in the United States. "Amid the swirl of regulation and resistance that surrounded the movement's birth, we can glimpse the modern American countryside taking shape--a place where market relationships and wage labor predominated, where law took precedence over custom, and where the state played a powerful managerial role, standardizing and simplifring what had been a dense thicket of particularistic, local approaches toward the natural world" (pp. 197-198).

Though his ideas have broad application, Jacoby builds his argument on three case studies: the creation and administration of Adirondack Park by the State of New York in the late nineteenth century; the federal government's efforts to manage Yellowstone National Park through both civilian and military regimes between the 1870s and 1910s; and the application of different conservation schemes at Grand Canyon by various public lands agencies from the 1 890s to the 1 930s. In every case, bounding and regulating these areas had profound consequences for resident peoples. In New York, where the Adirondack Park entirely surrounded some communities and abutted others, this meant a serious curtailment of long established uses of the forest. In Yellowstone, park regulations criminalized native land use practices and abrogated treaty rights that guaranteed off-reservation use of the public domain. The creation of the first national park also denied non-Indians the exercise of what most Americans considered a cherished r ight-the use of public lands for hunting, grazing, and the cutting of timber for home construction and heating. At Grand Canyon, where the tiny Havasupai reservation was (and is) surrounded entirely by national forest and national park lands, federal conservation policies cut an entire community off from most of its homeland. In every case, Jacoby demonstrates that race and class mattered tremendously in both the implementation and experience of conservation. Because the management of natural resources was foundational to the growth of centralized state authority, the price of winning and losing had tremendous long term consequences that only further reified the power of narrow prejudice.

If this book is vulnerable to criticism, it is on just one or two accounts. A more sustained emphasis on gender would have certainly strengthened the argument throughout. Because the efforts of upper class women reformers to "Americanize" Indians, immigrants, and rural whites so clearly meshed with their male counterparts' interests in forest conservation and outdoor recreation, the incredible success of the conservation movement is surely attributable to the manner in which these gendered social concerns reinforced and strengthened each other.

Another possible criticism actually reflects the unique strengths of the work and its implied challenge to new scholarship. Jacoby's analysis of conservation is rooted in a broad understanding of state formation, and is informed by comparisons with analogous developments in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The result is a work of scholarship that not only stands apart from all other studies of American conservation, but has broad significance beyond this important subject. Using comparative history to build his argument, Jacoby demonstrates that defining and regulating geographic space is one of the most central components to the formation of the modern administrative state. In short, this study reminds us that power is not so much a matter of discourse as a question of turf. Jacoby's analysis of American conservation leaves room for continued examination of this key observation, particularly as it relates to urban space and private property. Of course, this is not within the purview of Jacoby's book and he can hard ly be blamed for not engaging the entire American landscape in a single monograph. Ultimately, Crimes against Nature is worthy of the highest praise. It not only raises the bar for studies of American conservation, but integrates both social and environmental history in ways that should provide compelling reading for a long time to come.