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I grabbed The Nature of New York, An Environmental History of the Empire State, by David Stradling pretty randomly from the "new arrivals" shelf at the library. This isn't natural history, it's a description and discussion of how humans have affected the environment of New York, and vice versa. The author notes that state borders are somewhat arbitrary, especially for a discussion of environment, but that in addition to New York being a somewhat manageable topic for discussion, the borders themselves made a difference, especially starting in the late 19th century: while early white settlers in New York cut trees to make farmland or for lumber in much the same way as settlers elsewhere in the region, reforestation was driven significantly by government policy. The most important canal-building, which made a large difference to the environment and how people interacted with it, was sponsored by the state government. Early conservation legislation was also at the state level, notably under both governors Roosevelt (both took some of those policies to the national level as president).
Another theme of the book is identification with place. That was driven partly by people thinking of themselves as New Yorkers, rather than (or in addition to) as Americans, or as residents of Brooklyn or Albany or Buffalo. Stradling connects this to Hudson River School art, which romanticized American and especially New York landscapes. A lot of this book focuses on the Hudson Valley, both for the obvious bits such as its importance for transport, and as a way to discuss the creation and maintenance of farmland and sources of timber. Early conservation efforts were significantly about saving the appearance of the land: not just the value of wilderness, but of specific scenic areas. Places like Storm King mountain were close enough to New York City to attract the attention and interest of people with the money and influence to push for their preservation.
This is 400 years in one book; if you know about a particular topic, the discussion may feel shallow. But there are already entire books on the Hudson River School, Robert Moses, and Love Canal, and the best place to start with Jane Jacobs is her own writing. Love Canal is traced here from a failed canal-building project, one of many such, through the casual use of abandoned canals as chemical dumps, to the equally casual practice of building on poisoned land, and the wastes seeping out, through citizen activism, to the EPA's Superfund. By the time Stradling had covered that and Brownsville and the epidemic of insurance-driven arson by landlords in the Bronx, I was surprised not to find anything on the failed Shoreham nuclear project, and its effects on Long Island politics.
Conversely, I hadn't known that agriculture in and near New York City that thrived when agriculture further upstate didn't, specifically because of the amount of stuff that needed to be transported within the city, and hence the amount of horse manure available to local farmers as fertilizer. The general overview of city history (I suspect any city) is of agriculture moving further away as cities develop. The occasional book or article mentions horse droppings as a pollutant on city streets, often in terms of "see, the automobile wasn't all bad." But Stradling argues that city farmers didn't just have easy access to markets for their fresh produce, they had the advantage of not having to let their land lie fallow or rotate their crops, an advantage over farmers elsewhere in the state.
Stradling only touches on pre-European habitation here: he's working mostly from written records, when he isn't discussing the visible topography and most recent geology. This choice may also be affected by the common assumption that the earlier human inhabitants of the Americas didn't change the environment much. I don't know how true it is for New York; we're starting to find evidence that it's not at all true in the Amazon basin. That's aside from the point that if the first human settlers wiped out the mastodon, horse, giant ground sloth, and several other species, that will have affected the environment in important ways.
Another theme of the book is identification with place. That was driven partly by people thinking of themselves as New Yorkers, rather than (or in addition to) as Americans, or as residents of Brooklyn or Albany or Buffalo. Stradling connects this to Hudson River School art, which romanticized American and especially New York landscapes. A lot of this book focuses on the Hudson Valley, both for the obvious bits such as its importance for transport, and as a way to discuss the creation and maintenance of farmland and sources of timber. Early conservation efforts were significantly about saving the appearance of the land: not just the value of wilderness, but of specific scenic areas. Places like Storm King mountain were close enough to New York City to attract the attention and interest of people with the money and influence to push for their preservation.
This is 400 years in one book; if you know about a particular topic, the discussion may feel shallow. But there are already entire books on the Hudson River School, Robert Moses, and Love Canal, and the best place to start with Jane Jacobs is her own writing. Love Canal is traced here from a failed canal-building project, one of many such, through the casual use of abandoned canals as chemical dumps, to the equally casual practice of building on poisoned land, and the wastes seeping out, through citizen activism, to the EPA's Superfund. By the time Stradling had covered that and Brownsville and the epidemic of insurance-driven arson by landlords in the Bronx, I was surprised not to find anything on the failed Shoreham nuclear project, and its effects on Long Island politics.
Conversely, I hadn't known that agriculture in and near New York City that thrived when agriculture further upstate didn't, specifically because of the amount of stuff that needed to be transported within the city, and hence the amount of horse manure available to local farmers as fertilizer. The general overview of city history (I suspect any city) is of agriculture moving further away as cities develop. The occasional book or article mentions horse droppings as a pollutant on city streets, often in terms of "see, the automobile wasn't all bad." But Stradling argues that city farmers didn't just have easy access to markets for their fresh produce, they had the advantage of not having to let their land lie fallow or rotate their crops, an advantage over farmers elsewhere in the state.
Stradling only touches on pre-European habitation here: he's working mostly from written records, when he isn't discussing the visible topography and most recent geology. This choice may also be affected by the common assumption that the earlier human inhabitants of the Americas didn't change the environment much. I don't know how true it is for New York; we're starting to find evidence that it's not at all true in the Amazon basin. That's aside from the point that if the first human settlers wiped out the mastodon, horse, giant ground sloth, and several other species, that will have affected the environment in important ways.