<i>Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance</i>

In this book, Worster, the dean of active environmental historians, offers what might be called the Pale Blue Dot theory of history, with a heavy emphasis on the significance of North America. He is concerned with both the limits that the earth imposes on human enterprise and the history of Anglo-American recognition, and rejection, of them. Worster argues that after 1500, when Europeans became aware of the bounty in the Americas, they “enjoyed an unprecedented natural abundance” (5). Eventually they, as exemplified by several British and American writers, developed the notion that nature offered limitless resources for human exploitation, until in the nineteenth century, a thoughtful minority saw through that fiction, explaining that humankind must live within constraints not of its own choosing.Worster presents these arguments mainly in the form of an intellectual history. He synopsizes authors such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, George Perkins Marsh, Fairfield Osborne, David Potter, among others, and bestows an entire chapter on Dennis Meadows and Donella Meadows’ Limits to Growth (New York, 1972) and its reception. He offers his own assessment of these worthies and of many lesser lights, interspersing occasional forays into material history within his narrative, such as the rise of coal and steel in the nineteenth century. He includes chapter-length “field trips” to Nantucket Island, the Imperial Valley of California, and the Athabasca River in western Canada, using specific landscapes to reflect on the general theme of abundance and limit and on topics associated with them, such as whaling, agriculture, and tar-sands oil.In its sources, the book remains thoroughly within the traditions of intellectual history. When describing the flora and fauna of North America encountered by Dutch sailors in the seventeenth century, he relies on Van der Donck’s books without any references, for example, to palynology or archaeology.1 But in a larger sense, the book is interdisciplinary. Worster regards the earth and the biosphere as a historical actor, not as a mere backdrop to human affairs. Natural history and human history flow together.Throughout the book there is tension between the notion of global limits and the focus on North America. Worster’s emphasis on North America is overdrawn at many points. He rates the significance of the “Second Earth,” as he calls the Americas, above that of coal or oil. His contention that Christopher Columbus’ voyages ignited a 500-year economic boom ignores both the seventeenth-century crisis and the persistent poverty in most parts of the world (143). The exploitation of the bounty in the post-Columbian Americas may have revolutionized thinking in the anglosphere about abundance, but it had only a small impact on millions of lives in Asia and Africa.As one expects from a Worster book, the prose is always agreeable and clear. The field trips are particularly well written, admirable examples of how to think about a place. But the book did not get the careful final pass that it deserved. On page 9, a map is printed upside down. The same quotation from Marsh appears both on page 81 and 83. On page 190, Worster claims that earth’s atmosphere is 2 percent carbon dioxide; more accurate figures appear five pages later. He identifies the Anthropocene as “an epoch in which the whole earth is managed and controlled by our brains,” which is a characterization that only a tiny minority of those endorsing that concept would accept (225).Every scholar interested in early modern and modern ideas about nature, its abundance, and its limits will want to read this book. Those who enjoy exemplars of the writerly craft are well advised to read it, too.

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