The ecological landscapes of Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson

American Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 905-929

  Kinkela, David ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT FREDONIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77949572580     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.0.0115     Document Type: Review

References (106)

1. Quoted in Christopher Klemek, "Placing Jane Jacobs within the Transatlantic Urban Conversation," Journal of the American Planning Association 73.1 (Winter 2007): 49-67, 49.
2. Comment originally made at the Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, April 23, 1999.
3. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 315.
4. Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 247; emphasis in original.
5. For an earlier analysis of Jacobs and Carson, see Sara F. Anderson, "The View from the Outside: How Three Women's Work Contributed to Changes Toward Equity and Human Rights: A Study of the Work of Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Betty Friedan," The New England Journal of History 52.1 (1995): 40-53.
6. Also see Rebecca Solnit's short but illuminating article, "Three Who Made a Revolution," The Nation, April 3, 2006, 29-32.
7. See for example, Max Allen, Ideas that Matter: The World of Jane Jacobs (Ontario: The Ginger Press, 1997);
8. Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006);
9. or Timothy Mennel, Jo Steffens, and Christopher Klemek, eds., Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the future of New York (New York: Municipal Art Society, 2007).
10. For works that incorporate and build on Jacobs' urban vision, see Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
11. Alex Marshall, How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
12. For published works on Rachel Carson, see Paul Brooks, The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972);
13. Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt, 1997);
14. Frank Graham Jr., Since Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970);
15. H. Patricia Hynes, The Recurring Silent Spring (New York: Pergamon Press, 1989);
16. Carol B. Gartner, Rachel Carson (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983);
17. Priscilla Coit Murphy, What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005);
18. and Mark Hamilton Lytle, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
19. Roger Keil, "Urban Political Ecology: Progress Report," Urban Geography 24.8 (2003): 723-38, 729.
20. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw, "Urban Political Ecology: Politicizing the Production of Urban Natures," in In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, ed. Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, 1-19 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 11.
21. See the report for the Fifth Roundtable on Urban Environmental History, The Place of the City in Environmental History: La place de la ville dans l'histoire de l'environment (held at Technical University, Berlin, July 3-6, 2008).
22. See the report for the Fifth Roundtable on Urban Environmental History, The Place of the City in Environmental History: La place de la ville dans l'histoire de l'environment (held at Technical University, Berlin, July 3-6, 2008). Also see Martin V. Melosi, "The Place of the City in Environmental History," Environmental History Review 17.1 (Spring 1993): 1-23;
23. Melosi's forthcoming article "Humans, Cities, and Nature: How Do Cities Fit in the Material World?" in the January 2010 issue of Journal of Urban History;
24. Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007);
25. Andrew C. Isenberg, ed., The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006);
26. Ari Kelman, A River and a City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
27. Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002);
28. and Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
29. Joel A. Tarr, "Urban History and Environmental History in the United States: Complementary and Overlapping Fields," in Environmental Problems in European Cities of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Chistoph Bernhardt (Berlin: Waxman Muenster, forthcoming). Article can be accessed at http://www.h-net.org/environ/historiography/usurban.htm
30. Alexiou, Jane Jacobs, 57-94,
31. and Jane Jacobs, "Downtown Is for People," Fortune, April 1958, 135.
32. Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 19.
33. Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: A Witness to Nature, 280-85, 310-11.
34. Regarding landscape, the term is itself a problematic one. Although Jacobs and Carson did not emphasize the notion of landscape, I use it to define the geographies of space-urban, suburban, and rural-in which humans interact with the natural world. See Joan Iveson Nassuer, ed., Placing Nature: Culture and Landscape Ecology (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997);
35. and Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, Press, 1996).
36. Ben Minteer, The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 16.
37. David Ward and Oliver Zunz, eds., The Landscape of Modernity: New York City, 1900-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
38. Thomas Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (New York: Penguin, 1990).
39. Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 3.
40. Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities ( Ibid., 447.
41. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 10.
42. Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 253.
43. See also James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
44. Ward and Zunz, Landscape of Modernity, 3-45.
45. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 32.
46. Daniel Joseph Singal, "Toward a Definition of American Modernism," American Quarterly 39.1 (Spring 1987): 7-26, 11.
47. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 27.
48. Carson, Silent Spring, 12.
49. Text from Carson's acceptance speech for the National Book Award, quoted in Lear, Rachel Carson, 218-19.
50. and Michael Smith, "'Silence Miss Carson!' Science, Gender, and the Reception of Silent Spring," Feminist Studies 27.3 (Fall 2001): 733-52.
51. The antinuclear movement was, perhaps, the most vocal in its rejection of the power of scientific modernity. See, for example, Lawrence Wittner, The Struggle Against the Bomb: Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954-1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997);
52. and Michael Bess, Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and their Strategies for Peace, 1945-1989 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
53. Marston Bates, "Man and Other Pests," The Nation, October 6, 1962, 202.
54. Dennis O'Harrow, "Jacobin Revival," ASPO Newsletter, February 1962
55. reprinted in Planning, September 1986, 28-29.
56. "Manhattan Piles Her Nails," Town and Country Planning, October 1962, 375-76; emphasis added.
57. See also Adam Rome, "'Political Hermaphrodites': Gender and Environmental Reform in Progressive America," Environmental History 11.3 (July 2006): 440-63.
58. Jon Lee, "Silent Spring Is Now Noisy Summer," New York Times, July 22, 1962, 1.
59. Fredrick J. Stare, "Some Comments on Silent Spring," Nutrition Reviews 21.1 (January 1963): 1-4.
60. Vera Norword, Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 164.
61. Also see Norword, "The Nature of Knowing: Rachel Carson and the American Environment," Signs 12.4, special issue, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory (Summer 1987): 740-60.
62. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962).
63. Letter from Fred Soper to Wilbur Sawyer, November 23, 1938, http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/VV/B/ B/G/S/-/vvbbgs.pdf; emphasis in original.
64. Fred Soper, "The Newer Epidemiology of Yellow Fever," American Journal of Public Health 27.1 (January 1937): 7.
65. Fred Soper, "Eradication: 'To Pluck Up by the Roots,'" keynote address given to the Wisconsin Anti-Tuberculosis Association, published in the association's newsletter, The Crusader, June 1962, 4, at http://profiles.nlm. nih.gov/VV/V/B/D/M/-?vvbbdm.pdf.
66. Peter J. Brown, "Failure-as-Success: Multiple Meanings of Eradication in the Rockefeller Foundation Sardina Project, 1946-51," Parassitologia 40.1-2 (June 1998): 125.
67. See Joshua Blu Buhs, The Fire Ant Wars: Nature, Science and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 81-170.
68. See Edmund Russell's fascinating history of pest control in the American postwar suburb, "War Comes Home," in War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 165-83.
69. Also see Ralph Lutts, "Chemical Fallout: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout, and the Environmental Movement," Environmental Review 9.3 (1985): 210-25.
70. Thomas H. O'Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950 to 1970 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 30.
71. Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 157.
72. Jacobs, Death and Life, 34.
73. See Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1973).
74. For a fascinating study on landscape and disease, see Gregg Mitman, "In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History," Environmental History 10.2 (April 2005): 184-210.
75. Mitman examines the connection between health, ecology, and landscape by reexamining Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac.
76. William H. Whyte, The Organizational Man (1956; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 3.
77. William H. Whyte, The Organizational Man (Ibid., 12.
78. Betty Freidan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 20.
79. Quote from Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1974), 309.
80. Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Ibid., 223.
81. See Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2001).
82. See Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property in Disney's New Town (New York: Ballantine, 2000);
83. and Peter Gordon and Harry W. Richardson, "A Critique of New Urbanism" (paper presented at the meeting of the American Collegiate Schools of Planning, Pasadena, California, November 1988, and online at http://www.rcf.use.edu/pgordon/urbanism. html).
84. For a historical overview of New Urbanism and its antecedents, see Emily Talen, New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2005);
85. and A. Joan Saab, "Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow," Journal of Planning History 6.3 (August 2007): 191-213.
86. Paul Robbins and Julie Sharp, "Turfgrass Subjects: The Political Economy of Urban Monoculture," in In the Nature of Cities, ed. Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, 106-23, 111.
87. See the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, 1972.
88. Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). However, Rome suggests that the destructive nature of suburban homebuilding actually engendered the emergence of a new environmental consciousness within the United States.
89. See William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon, 69-90 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
90. Numerous texts dealing with the ecological implications of man's harmful relationship to nature appeared within a few years of Silent Spring. See, for example, Marston Bates, Man in Nature (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1961);
91. Magnus Pyke, The Science Myth (New York: Macmillan, 1962);
92. and Murray Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment (New York: Knopf, 1962).
93. See Klemek, "Placing Jane Jacobs within the Transatlantic Urban Conversation,"
94. and my forthcoming book, "Opening Pandora's Box: DDT and the American Century."
95. Victor B. Scheffer, The Shaping of Environmentalism in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 120.
96. See Peter Dreier, "Jane Jacobs's Legacy,"
97. and David Halle, "Who Wears Jane Jacobs's Mantle in Today's New York City?" in a special retrospective on Jane Jacobs in City & Community 5 (September 2006): 227-31, 237-41.
98. Solnit, "Three Who Made a Revolution," 30.
99. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 324.
100. Andrew Jamison, The Making of Green Knowledge: Environmental Politics and Cultural Transformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 84.
101. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2d ed. (1977; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2.
102. Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 31.
103. See, for example, Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990);
104. Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2000);
105. and Steve Lerner, Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
106. For the text of her speech, see http://www.smallisbeautiful.prg/ publications/jacobs-83.html.