The capacious reach of the term “environment” has served the project of environmental history well. But its expansiveness is of limited use when we seek to explain ebbs and flows in public support for environmental causes, agencies, and laws. At any given moment in history, what “the environment” meant for most Americans was not nearly so abstract or pliable as it has proven for environmental historians. The historical arc of modern Americans’ commitments to environmental protection spans three distinctive eras, each with its own reservoirs of popularity as well as its own tactics, challenges, successes, and failures. Only by penetrating beneath the surface continuities between these eras, to plumb just how different the engagements of each were, can we better understand when and how the modern cause of “the environment” was born.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, talk about “the environment” had little of its later coherence or political meaning. Instead, Americans grouped and pursued what we would now identify as environmental concerns quite separately and indeed often found them at odds. Take, for instance, two initiatives that seem classically “environmental”: creating and protecting national parks, and cleaning up the water people drank. John Muir and his Sierra Club members—then a tiny group based almost entirely in California—famously found themselves pitted against San Francisco residents’ own quest for a reservoir of clean water: what that battle over the damming of Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley in the 1910s was all about. In this era, the places sparred over by preservationists, like Muir, and conservationists, like the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service Gifford Pinchot, seemed worlds apart from the places that so-called sanitation or public health advocates worried about.1 Though mostly residing in cities, those concerned with national parks or natural resource depletion set their sights primarily on a distant countryside and its rural, often local consumers, whether of fish and game or timber or minerals. Public health workers, by contrast, sought to shield people from infectious diseases that spread mainly in human settlements, in cities and towns. The clearest forerunners to environmental concerns about industrial contaminants meanwhile ran through the nation's factories, where workers were falling sick from myriad chemical exposures.