History 7B

Prof. Rebecca McLennan

Lecture 6

Industrializing Environments:
Reinventing “Nature” in Gilded Age America
 Industrial Capitalism and the Environment
(c.1870-c.1900):
Three kinds of change

Feedback loop

2. Conceptual/ideological change

1. Physical/material change
Drastic transformation 3. New ways of
of environments governing environments
 Industry and the environment in the Gilded Age (1870-1900)
• Exponential growth of cities—and all the byproducts of city life

• Farming: Unfarmed areas into farmed. Diversified, family farms into

monocultural enterprises >>national and global markets. Altered soil
chemistry and vegetation—fast

•Deforestation

• Changed river hydrology, ecosystems: irrigation, city water, waste.

• Altered nonhuman animal populations: some decline (big game, birds),

some flourish (eg rock pigeons)

• Reduced species diversity

• Macro scale: growing fossil fuel dependency begins process that will
culminate in climate change (not recognzied obvious until the 1970s)

• Micro scale: changed human micro-biome (we have always been

“ambulatory ecosystems”): food, bacteria, viruses.
New terrain…
…mass scale
Industrializing logging: the “steam donkey”
Scaling-up: deforestation, California, 1880s
Scaling-up: railroading the forest
 Wood cities, wood sidewalks:
Nicholson paving in Chicago, 1870s
Bird’s Eye View of San Francisco, c. 1880
 Industry and the environment in the Gilded Age (1870-1900)
• Exponential growth of cities—and all the byproducts of city life

• Farming: Unfarmed areas into farmed. Diversified, family farms into

monocultural enterprises >>national and global markets. Altered soil
chemistry and vegetation—fast

•Deforestation

• Changed river hydrology, ecosystems: irrigation, city water, waste.

• Altered nonhuman animal populations: some decline (big game, birds),

some flourish (eg rock pigeons)

• “Age of Extermination”: Reduced species and species diversity

• Macro scale: growing fossil fuel dependency begins process that will
culminate in climate change (not recognzied obvious until the 1970s)

• Micro scale: changed human micro-biome (we have always been

“ambulatory ecosystems”): food, bacteria, viruses.
 “Age of Extermination” (c.1870-1900)

The (American) Gray Wolf:

From revered and feared (Indian) to despised and bountied (settler farmers,
ranchers, US Forest Service and Biological Bureau)
Plains Buffalo Skulls, 1870s
Refining sugar, bone china, fertilizer
Laquc, sea cat, sea bear, Callorhinus ursinus

“Callorhinus Rex” (with female fur seals)

Henry Wood Elliott
 The northern fur seal drive, St. Paul Is., Pribilofs, Alaska
(for the Alaska Commercial Company; 100,000+ pa, 1871+)

Henry Wood Elliott, pen and ink, 1873

Unangan workers salting fur seal hides
Pribilof Islands

Early 20th century. (NOAA/National Archives)

 Transporting the pelts via sea and rail

Pribilof Islands

Chicago

San Francisco
New York

Satellite Image. Googlemaps

 C.W. Martin & Co,
London furriers
(the major processor of Northern fur seal pelts,
1870-80s)

Source: Under Eight Monarchs: C.W. Martin & Co

Beyond Ruination:
“Life in Capitalist
Ruins”
(Anna Tsing)
 Accepting and confronting extinction

“We need not marvel at extinction; if we must marvel, let it be at our

presumption in imagining for a moment that we understand the complex
contingencies on which the existence of species depends.”

CHARLES DARWIN, 1859

“Should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral,
intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we
may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely balanced relations of organic
and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the
extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he
alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy.”

ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, 1869

Source: Mark V. Barrow, Jr., Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of
Jefferson to the Age of Ecology. University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

Raising the alarm

among
naturalists:

Joel Asaph Allen,

Harvard University,
1876
 William Temple Hornaday: Campaign to save the bison
Popular book: The Extermination of the American Bison, 1888
(pictured with bison calf, c. 1888)
 Elite hunting
vs.
subsistence and commercial hunting, 1880s+
 Hunting into sport,
elite hunters into conservationists, c. 1880+
 Inventing the Myth:
Untouched Wilderness/Pristine Nature, 1870s+

Eadweard Muybridge (yes, this is spelled correctly!)

John Muir, 1872
John Muir’s walk to Yosemite, 1868
(still inspires hikers today)
III. Building the Wilderness
Conservation v preservation
 The National Parks
Yellowstone, est. 1872
 Hunters into poachers:
US Cavalry Company M drives (rides) off poachers
1882 +
U.S. Calvary at Yosemite
Touring Yosemite
US National Parks, 2019