Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America

by Ian Tyrrell

Long before people were “going green” and toting reusable bags, the Progressive generation of the early 1900s was calling for the conservation of resources, sustainable foresting practices, and restrictions on hunting. Industrial commodities such as wood, water, soil, coal, and oil, as well as improvements in human health and the protection of “nature” in an aesthetic sense, were collectively seen for the first time as central to the country’s economic well-being, moral integrity, and international power. One of the key drivers in the rise of the conservation movement was Theodore Roosevelt, who, even as he slaughtered animals as a hunter, fought to protect the country’s natural resources.

In  Crisis   of the Wasteful Nation , Ian Tyrrell gives us a cohesive picture of Roosevelt’s engagement with the natural world along with a compelling portrait of how Americans used, wasted, and worried about natural resources in a time of burgeoning empire. Countering traditional narratives that cast conservation as a purely domestic issue, Tyrrell shows that the movement had global significance, playing a key role in domestic security and in defining American interests around the world. Tyrrell goes beyond Roosevelt to encompass other conservation advocates and policy makers, particularly those engaged with shaping the nation’s economic and social policies—policies built on an understanding of the importance of crucial natural resources.  Crisis of the Wasteful Nation  is a sweeping transnational work that blends environmental, economic, and imperial history into a cohesive tale of America’s fraught relationships with raw materials, other countries, and the animal kingdom.

Genres: History

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 21, 2015

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Ian Tyrrell retired as Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia in July 2012 and is now an Emeritus Professor of History. Born in Brisbane, Queensland, he was educated at the University of Queensland and Duke University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar and James B. Duke Fellow. His teaching and research interests include American history, environmental history, and historiography.

He was a pioneer in the approach to transnational history as a research program for reconceptualizing United States history through his essay “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History” in the American Historical Review in 1991; and in Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (University of North Carolina Press, 1991), which dealt with the issues of gender and empire in that leading nineteenth-century women’s international organization.

Reviews

[Jindřich Zapletal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a quite compelling story to tell (Teddy Roosevelt's conservation policies placed in international context) but tells it in a disorganized, verbose, and repetitive way. Plenty of context is taken for granted, there are plenty of dead ends, in the end I learned something, but it was a quite inefficient learning experience in total.