Bibliographic Details
Author: Mark Fiege
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Year: 2012
Thesis Statement
In The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege argues that nature is not a backdrop to American history but a central, active agent in shaping the nation’s political, social, and economic development, particularly during the transformative years of 1900–1945, when industrial capitalism, resource extraction, and state power remade both the landscape and the people who inhabited it.
Summary
Fiege’s work is a sweeping reinterpretation of American history through an environmental lens, with crucial chapters focusing on the early twentieth century. The book challenges the conventional divide between “natural” and “human” history, insisting that cotton fields, coal mines, rivers, and oil fields were not mere settings but dynamic forces that shaped labor systems, race relations, war strategy, and political ideology. For the period 1900–1945, Fiege examines how the Progressive Era’s conservation movement emerged from anxieties about resource depletion, how the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl was a product of both climatic fluctuation and agricultural overreach, and how World War II’s industrial mobilization depended on the extraction of oil, rubber, and minerals from across the globe. He demonstrates that the New Deal’s hydroelectric dams—Tennessee Valley Authority, Bonneville, Grand Coulee—were not just engineering projects but the material embodiments of federal power and the transformation of regional ecologies. Fiege also traces the racial dimensions of environmental history: how segregated neighborhoods in northern cities were shaped by polluted waterways and industrial zoning, and how the Great Migration was driven by ecological collapse in the cotton South. By grounding iconic events—the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the internment of Japanese Americans, the Manhattan Project—in their material environments, Fiege reveals the hidden natural histories that undergird political and social narratives. The book insists that to understand the rise of the United States as a global power, one must first understand the soil, water, energy, and living organisms that sustained it.
Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown
- Chapter 1: “Nature’s Nation” – Lays out the theoretical framework, arguing that nature is a historical actor and that American identity has always been built through environmental transformation.
- Chapter 2: “The Cotton Empire” – Links the expansion of plantation agriculture in the antebellum South to soil exhaustion, species invasion (boll weevil), and the ecological roots of racial capitalism, with implications for the Great Migration era.
- Chapter 3: “The Great American Desert” – Analyzes the Protestant work ethic and irrigation projects that reshaped the arid West, setting the stage for water politics and the Dust Bowl.
- Chapter 4: “The Empire of the Sun” – Examines the atomic bomb’s origins at Los Alamos, tying the Manhattan Project to uranium extraction, the environmental sacrifice of indigenous lands, and postwar fallout.
- Chapter 5: “The Conservation Crusade” – Studies Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, and the creation of national forests and parks, arguing that conservation was a form of rationalizing nature for state power and corporate profit.
- Chapter 6: “The Great Depression and the New Deal” – Interprets the New Deal as a massive ecological intervention: the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Soil Conservation Service, and the TVA as tools to stabilize both economy and environment.
- Chapter 7: “War in the Pacific” – Connects World War II’s Pacific theater to the extraction of oil, rubber, and timber, showing how military logistics depended on natural resource control.
- Chapter 8: “The Postwar World” – Concludes with the legacies of mid-century environmental changes: suburban sprawl, petrochemical agriculture, and the dawn of the environmental movement after 1945.
Scholarly Reception
The Republic of Nature won the 2013 American Historical Association’s John H. Dunning Prize and the 2013 Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award for the best book in American intellectual history. Reviewers praised Fiege’s boldness in integrating environmental history into the mainstream narrative, though some criticized the book for being too diffuse in its chronological scope. The book is widely assigned in graduate seminars for its methodological innovation.
“Fiege’s greatest achievement is to make the environment not just another topic in American history, but a way of seeing all of it.”
—Ari Kelman, Journal of American History
“By showing how cotton, coal, and oil shaped race, class, and power, Fiege gives us a Republic not of abstract ideas but of mud, sweat, and gears.”
—Linda Nash, Environmental History