Abstract
Whether in the form of edited volumes or monographs, the environmental history of individual cities is now an established scholarly genre, having received a significant boost from a dedicated series at the University of Pittsburgh Press. 1 This review offers a new compendium and a monograph to add to that list, both addressing the environmental history of Boston. These two works contribute to another growing trend: like Chicago for social historians and New York for urban scholars (and for anyone with access to any sort of a writing instrument whatsoever), Boston is quickly becoming a favorite subject for environmental historians. 2
One reason is obvious. Boston occupies fertile ground on the borders between land and water, wilderness and urbanity, war and amity, trade and domesticity. More than just compelling subject matter is necessary to create a locus of scholarly activity, however, and anyone hoping to foster active environmental history in their own locale might take note of the organizational groundwork on display. The edited volume Remaking Boston springs from a number of institutional foundations, including a long list of area educational institutions employing environmental historians and an active seminar on environmental history. The Boston Environmental History Seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society is entering its twelfth year and has been a continuous presence on the H-Environment lists, with regular presentations and symposia throughout every one of those years. The editors of Remaking Boston have long been a part of these institutions: Anthony Penna is emeritus Professor of History at Northeastern University, author of many noteworthy works of environmental history and fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society; Conrad Edick Wright, through his position at the same society, seems to have had a hand in almost every published work of history on Boston or Massachusetts in the last twenty years, either in an editorial, advisory, or financial capacity. The many authors, editors, and institutions of environmental history related to Boston were brought together at the conference “Remaking Boston: The City and Environmental Change Over the Centuries,” in 2006, and that event contributed to both Remaking Boston and Eden on the Charles.
Like all histories of a specific city, both of these texts have to make a choice about rising above parochialism, or reveling in it. If a work is just about one city, who beyond that one city would truly care? Too many knowing allusions from the author about local geography or culture, and readers from the rest of the world tune out. Too much overarching synthesis or generalization, and the author loses the power of specificity and narrative linked to a unique place, along with the captive audience of the city’s denizens. What results is always a difficult balancing act—making the specific case applicable and relatable to other regions, the nation and beyond, while keeping the generalities specific.
The editors of Remaking Boston responded to this challenge by coaxing all of the many disciplines interested in urban environmental topics under one historical roof, and offering the result “as examples of current work in urban environmental history and models for scholars to emulate” (p. 4). Martin V. Melosi has criticized this approach when nonhistorians fail to pull it off, leaving scientific and policy concerns uncontextualized or placing that history against an undertheorized, cartoonish past. 3 Remaking Boston appears to be more successful with this task of bridging interdisciplinary rifts: disparate approaches are all wrestled into order by Penna’s introduction, and essays are organized in such a way that differing viewpoints appear to complement and respond to one another.
While the list of authors primarily consists of scholars from institutions of higher education in Boston, there are also representatives from farther afield, including Brooklyn College and William & Mary University. These academics are joined by employees of a long list of regional environmental agencies and institutions, from the Department of Conservation and Recreation, the Wildlife Society, National Parks Service, and an environmental consulting firm. No matter their employer, the contributors include geographers, cartographers, environmental engineers, climate scientists, historians, biologists, and urban planners. Together they offer impressive interdisciplinary and heterogeneous approaches, something that is often claimed but rarely delivered. This is occasionally jarring to the reader; all authors bring their own jargon (this text includes the words flocculation, rubbersheet, eotechnic, and phonological) and attend to their own concerns, with intermittently odd juxtapositions.
After Penna’s introduction, Remaking Boston consists of twelve essays, divided into three sections describing the harbor, the town and the countryside, and climate or weather. These are not just three distinct geophysical categories, however; Penna also groups the essays around three themes, representing physical changes in the environment over time, but also “the link of rural and urban spaces and how Bostonians made sense of their environment” (p. 4). Whether topical or thematic, each of the three sections begins with a general explanatory essay, but then turns to specific essays from different authors.
There are a few topics from Boston’s environmental past that the book explicitly does not cover, including “industrial air pollution, the search for an adequate water supply, and the legal aspects of the cleanup of Boston Harbor” (p. 5). I would add that while transportation is discussed in multiple essays, most notably by William B. Meyer, it is the specific focus of none. This leaves an obvious gap in understanding a city that is home to both the Big Dig and Logan Airport—the latter necessitating one of the nation’s largest experiments in reclaimed land. Strangely for a volume with contributions from active participants in environmental management and advocacy, the historical study of politically active environmentalists and organizations is missing from this volume. Beyond brief mentions from Rudnick, and Driscoll and Haglund, a history of environmental politics and specific groups within the late twentieth-century environmental movement does not seem to be a part of remaking Boston.
Peter S. Rosen and Duncan M. FitzGerald open the section on the harbor with a technically complex recounting of the geological prehistory and human intervention that “established the physical context for the harbor’s modern history” (p. 20). This includes the actions of glaciers, seawater invasion, infills, and seawalls. The transition to the next essay involves one of the book’s many interdisciplinary rifts, requiring the reader to jump from the earth scientist’s technical prose to historian Michael Rawson’s essay on science, policy, and the harbor. That essay is discussed below.
By the time the reader makes the transition to the last two essays in the section on Boston Harbor, a significant strength of Remaking Boston is becoming clear: if the interdisciplinarity of the work is given a chance, the benefits of overlapping and contrasting disciplinary approaches delivers. Environmental engineer Steven M. Rudnick’s essay on “Remaking Boston Harbor” builds upon the broad historical base of Rawson’s essay to offer a recounting of sewerage and pollution issues of a populous city situated on a harbor which did not actually wash away waste, while Stephen T. Mague’s excellent cartographical exploration of shoreline builds on both to demonstrate the undeniable complexity of the deceptively simple question of where the land ends and the harbor begins. It has never been clear where those lines lay. Even if we reconstruct where they were believed to be in the past, writes Maque, “the shoreline and its position often serve as the battle line for the clash between public and private rights” (90).
The section on the “The Town and Countryside” stands out as the heart of this volume, and might be of most interest to urban environmental historians as it touches many of their traditional topics. Brian Donahue’s thoughtful essay “Remaking Boston, Remaking Massachusetts” serves as the general overview here, and as he seems very aware of the historiography of urban environmental studies, he contextualizes not only this section but the entire volume. Four more essays, on reforestation, parks, the Charles River, and the reshaping of Boston’s hilly terrain complete this section, with William B. Meyer’s history of Beacon Hill of particular interest.
Meyer returns to write the general introductory essay for the final portion of the book, on climate and weather. Meyer, Penna, and Wright address a problem known to editors and conference panel chairs alike—what to do with excellent papers that nevertheless do not fit with a larger theme? The time-worn solution is to jam them in somehow and hope for the best, resulting here in the whiplash-inducing proximity of historian Lauri Bauer Coleman’s essay on eighteenth-century religious interpretations of natural events with biologists Abraham J. Miller-Rushing and Richard B. Primack’s graph-heavy and statistics-laden essay on climate change, plants, and the photographic record.
In sum, Remaking Boston is certainly a worthy addition to a growing genre, and a thoughtful approach to Boston’s distinctiveness. While it successfully displays the interdisciplinary complexity of urban environmental studies, it still might take an unusually flexible teacher to assign this work in a class—though by definition, most urban and environmental scholars are used to interdisciplinary approaches.
Overall, the history of what is called “land-making” in Remaking Boston might be the most attractive theme for non-Bostonians. While other cities have experience with artificially creating land on the water’s edge, the sheer scope of land-making in Boston is what marks the city’s history as distinctive. Partly because of this, the subject appears prominently in multiple essays in the first section of Penna and Wright’s edited volume. Michael Rawson’s essay “What Lies Beneath” is one of the most interesting here. It fulfills the editor’s intent to inspire other scholars; Rawson’s description of the easily overlooked history of land creation and the design of the harbor as a hydraulic system could clearly be applied to other cities, which might also have hidden histories of physical reshaping, swamp filling, hill cutting, and leveling. Understanding the impermanence and malleability of urban terrain can go a long way toward destabilizing received wisdom concerning nature, wilderness, and landscapes. 4
The treatment of land making in Remaking Boston is a sample of Rawson’s larger effort to understand the relationships between human desires and physical preconditions that structure the city. Eden on the Charles goes further along this path, offering a complex treatment of science, culture, policy, and nature as a readable work for a general audience. This is Rawson’s response to the problem of parochialism, discussed above, but also quite clearly bears the marks of its beginnings as a dissertation directed by William Cronon. Like Nature’s Metropolis, Eden on the Charles manages to provide a history of a city that is not just about that city but also about forces, decisions, and paths that shape the physical surroundings of cities. No wonder that Eden on the Charles was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for history and the recipient of the 2011 Abel Wolman Award; it’s a book for the seminar room, the living room, and the mayor’s office. It has something meaningful to say to all.
Rawson manages this nigh-impossible task of refashioning academic prose for a general audience by means of a variety of tricks in the writing, conceptualization, and design of the book. First among these is the almost complete removal of historiography from the text itself. Only two historians are named in this text: Sam Bass Warner Jr. and Carolyn Merchant. Along with cultural theorist Raymond Williams, who gets a nod in both the introduction and conclusion, these are the only places where the conceptual framework and academic discourse break the surface. Everywhere else they are submerged under the clear flowing water of narrative, and a focus on the physical and political aspect of the subject at hand. The footnotes dealing with secondary sources are lengthy, but general, consisting of long lists of titles without specific quotations or page numbers. For the latter, readers will have to go to the 2005 dissertation. 5 In fact, almost all scholarly impedimentia, including acknowledgments and an explication of the statistical representation of petitions, are relegated to the back of the book.
The text, scoured of scholarly presumptions, is incredibly accessible, often consisting of simple, short sentences. Decisions have clearly been made to cater to readers: the subject that is of interest to most—the history of Boston Common—is front and center, delivered without the usual historian’s habit of a preliminary chapter recounting the historical context that precedes the matter at hand. Treatment of each of the disparate topics—the Common, water supply, suburbs, the harbor, and parks—is not belabored; the text is short and to the point. There’s barely a block quote in the book; rather, the analysis is illustrated by short quotes from newspapers, speeches, diaries, memoirs, and the occasional departure into contemporaneous literature, all woven seamlessly into paragraphs. Rawson hops back and forth into different sources for each subject: for example, scientific literature and government-commissioned reports provide the evidentiary base in the harbor chapter, memoirs and letters and petitions in the Common chapter. Rawson’s skill at constructing prose is also on display in the process of simplifying complexity: he manages to apply an original label on an opaque concept, boiling uncountable and otherwise-invisible concerns into the tight phrase “Constructing Water.”
Much of the accessibility of the work is Rawson’s doing, but parts reflect the work of editors positioning the work for a wider appeal. For example, while not in color, the images in the text are large, splashing across the width of two pages with superimposed text. This design choice is common in a glossy newsmagazine but rare in academic works. Likewise, the typesetting is readable, like something from a popular press. The subtitle “The Making of Boston” might be unsustainably broad, but it’s in the interest of accessibility.
General readers might be most attracted to the Boston Common chapter with its accessible subject matter. But the water chapter is excellent, and despite some fairly abstruse diversions at the start, the suburbanization chapter eventually proves its worth. Throughout, the work explores the theme of “inventing” concepts that have somehow become embedded assumptions about what makes a city environment, and therefore what resources have subsequently been labeled as public goods. For Rawson, this may be a theme that is secondary to the interplay of material and cultural nature, but the definition of the public is overwhelmingly at the center of what defines a modern city. There can be no more important consideration for environmentalists, historians, and citizens than the dividing line between public and private goods, the responsibilities and rights of citizens, and the meaning of taxation. The impact of early choices in the urban environment reverberates far beyond the mundane: “Public water would encourage urban residents, in Boston and elsewhere,” writes Rawson, “to expand their vision of the public good” (p. 104). This book might be connected to the historical debate over the relative weakness or strength of the American state. Eric Morser, another Cronon student, has recently written an urban environmental history explicitly addressing what has come to be known as the debate over the myth of the weak American state. 6 Eden on the Charles is a stealthy entry into that discussion, a sort of a “bringing the state back in” moment for urban environmentalists.
Rawson’s approach has limitations, including some slightly inflated claims, oversimplification, and jarring discontinuities. Almost inevitably, because of the genre, the book is awash in a sort of Beantown triumphalism, presuming that Boston had by the twentieth century somehow succeeded in defining itself as an archetypal modern city, before the rest of the nation. The beginning of this argument—“that Boston’s experience suggests that the process of city building was itself a process of inventing new ways of relating to the natural world”—is unobjectionable (p. 277). The claim that Boston “helped to define” what it meant to be a modern metropolis (ibid.) also seems supportable. Where it gets a bit out of hand is in the overwrought statement that, in some ways, “every city became Boston” (p. 280) in the twentieth century. Secondly, valuing readability and accessibility means deemphasizing methodology and theory, and like any work of this type, Eden on the Charles can be criticized for oversimplification. At the same time, the book is not advancing any particularly new ideas; rather it is bringing to bear the sort of analysis that has been going on for quite some time elsewhere. It’s not revolutionary to declare that “what we call ‘nature,’ . . . is neither wholly cultural nor wholly physical, but almost always both” (p. x). Finally, many social historians will be strangely adrift in a book that clearly thinks about class as a force that structures the politics of policy debates, but then seems to abandon the issue in pursuit of the physical and environmental outcomes. Put another way, scholars used to presuming the preeminence of one set of forces—be they cultural, social, political, or material—in determining the path of history will be a bit confused as Rawson jumps between these approaches, sometimes abruptly. But this is actually Rawson’s goal, bringing traditionally distinct aspects of material and cultural nature together “with the conviction that engaging nature in all of its physical and cultural complexity produces a more nuanced understanding of its place in human history” (p. x).
In the end, Eden on the Charles is a remarkable accomplishment. It does justice to immensely complex subjects of urban and environmental history, and yet makes them accessible for a broad audience. Rawson offers a simple message that needs to be heard: “We are living twenty-first-century lives through environmental relationships that were designed around nineteenth-century conditions,” he writes. “Many of these relationships fail to recognize limits, and as a result are failing us today” (p. 281). If they are ever going to reach anyone outside of academia with such vital contributions, urban and environmental historians will have to attempt more works like this one.