Vanishing America
Subtitle: species extinction, racial peril, and the origins of conservation
By: Miles A. Powell
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 251
ISBN-13: 9780674971561
Subjects: Environmentalism; Extinction (Biology); Racism; History
Description: Vanishing America examines discourses of extinction - of species and of peoples - to identify key transitions in American environmental and racial thought between the mid nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. By 1900 many whites had begun to see themselves as an imperiled race and increasingly identified with the nation's dwindling wildlife. Fearing they would share Indians' anticipated extinction, elite environmental pundits developed racially-charged preservationist arguments that influenced the development of scientific racism, eugenics, immigration restriction, and population control, and which still inform the modern environmental movement. Vanishing America suggests that a long history of drawing connections between environmental health and the mental and physical wellbeing of white Americans has helped create an enduring divide between the nation's environmental movement, on the one hand, and the nation's poor people and nonwhite races on the other.--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: A nation's park, containing man and beast; title: Surviving progress; title: Preserving the frontier; title: A line of unbroken descent; title: The last of her tribe; title: Dead of its own too-much; title: Epilogue: De-extinction.