A new book looks at how Pennsylvanians have interacted with the environment from pre-colonial days to now.
Its author is Allen Dieterich-Ward, graduate school director and history professor at Shippensburg University. He’s also a member of Cumberland Valley Rail Trail.
“I have a real passion for using heritage and outdoor recreation as a springboard to community development,” Dietrich said.
Dieterich-Ward’s first book was “Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America.” The latest title, “Cradle of Conservation: An Environmental History of Pennsylvania,” broadens the perspective from metropolitan Pittsburgh to look at the state as a whole. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple recently spoke with him about it.
LISTEN to the conversation:
[A longer version of the audio interview will be published on Friday.]
Kara Holsopple: You begin the book with a scene from 1908 as a 25-year-old forester named Ralph Brock is about to give an important presentation. Why did you start with him?
Allen Dieterich-Ward: It was really important for me, as someone who is both trying to stake a claim about the significance of Pennsylvania in the broader sphere of environmental history and someone who is keenly aware of the ways in which environmental policy and the focus of the environmental movement has often, wittingly or unwittingly, become focused on a particular perspective. That perspective is often the middle-class, white and male gaze.
In any attention to thinking about environmental history, it’s as if the environmental justice movement just somehow sprung up in the 1980s. The reality is that’s simply not true. People of color, urban people and women have always fought for and desired a healthy, safe environment in which they have access to fulfill their needs – clean water, breathable air, but also to the same natural amenities that the broader population wants.
“That very land that they are maybe enjoying a hike through has hundreds and, in fact, thousands of years worth of experience that has shaped and reshaped it to get to that landscape of today.”
It was really important for me to start the story at this moment that seems like a traditional history of the conservation movement. Here we have this professional forester who’s giving a speech at the state capitol about seedling propagation in a nursery. But [I wanted] to expand the lens, to really underscore that this was not the typical person that you would think of as being involved in the origins of conservation.
Kara Holsopple: Why did you title the book “Cradle of Conservation?”
Allen Dieterich-Ward: That’s actually a name that’s been bandied around a bit. So often, certainly, before the last couple of decades, environmental history was really about the West, about these pristine landscapes.
But the real conservation movement in terms of conserving resources to serve generations really begins here in Pennsylvania and in New York State. It begins in a place and among people who it’s really important to understand.
The Pennsylvania Forestry Association, which becomes sort of the mainstay for developing the state forests in Pennsylvania for conservation, doesn’t begin out in Franklin County. It doesn’t begin out in the middle of the woods. You don’t build political power out in low-populated, rural areas.
The Pennsylvania Forestry Association is formed by some of the most wealthy and politically well-connected people in the state of Pennsylvania. It’s formed on Locust Street in Philadelphia at the hall of the Pennsylvania Historical Society with this kind of very elite women and men who are motivated in part to redress what they feel guilt for in their own families’ use and abuse of natural resources and their concerns that the use and abuse of natural resources will result in economic decline for the state going forward.
Kara Holsopple: The framework that you use throughout the chronology of Pennsylvania history looks at “working landscapes.” What do you mean by that?
Allen Dieterich-Ward: Historians have always talked about the environment, even dating back to the earliest Greek historians, as kind of a set piece, kind of the stage on which the real drama of human history happens. Environmental historians want to tweak that a bit. We really take a look at what’s the dynamic interplay between the natural world and the cultural world that are constantly shaping and reshaping each other.
Working landscapes are within that conceptualization. That is to say that from the very beginning, Native peoples are shaping the landscape. They’re, of course, being shaped by it. And what we see in Pennsylvania,…
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