The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism

The Bulldozer in the Countryside is the first scholarly history of efforts to reduce the environmental costs of suburban development in the United States. The book offers a new account of two of the most important historical events in the period since World War II--the mass migration to the suburbs and the rise of the environmental movement. This work offers a valuable historical perspective for scholars, professionals, and citizens interested in the issue of suburban sprawl.

Modern American environmentalism owes much to such predecessors as Henry Thoreau, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt. But it owes much more, suggests historian Adam Rome, to the sprawling suburbs of the postwar era, when great sections of the country fell under the bulldozer to make way for the vaunted American Dream.

Homebuilders of the immediate postwar era did not, as a rule, take into account the environmental costs of their work--nor did they have to. "To take advantage of the cheap, unsewered land at the fringes of cities," writes Rome,

they could install septic tanks on tiny lots, in unsuitable soils, or near streams and wells. To reduce land-acquisition costs, builders also could level hills, fill wetlands, and build in floodplains. To maximize the number of lots in a tract, they could design subdivisions with no open space.

Such actions improved a builder's chances of making a profit, to be sure, but in the coming years they yielded significant opposition--and not just from the occasional birdwatcher or hiker. Activist citizen groups and government agencies began demanding responsible building and zoning practices. In the end, non-urban America's onetime habit of letting landowners do what they would on their land gave way to "an explosion of codes, regulations, and guidelines," the product of a growing awareness of environmental problems and the need to solve them--and an extraordinarily far-reaching shift in public policy.

Rome's well-written book makes a welcome addition to the history of environmental thought, one to shelve alongside the best of Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. --Gregory McNamee