Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America by Ian Tyrrell

Abstract

Crisis of Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America, by Ian Tyrrell. Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 2015. xii, 351 pp. $40.00 US (cloth). In this provocative work, Ian Tyrrell interprets Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive conservation movement as not merely a US-based reform movement, but also a set of ideas and goals promulgated by like-minded members of an international political and intellectual elite. Crisis of Wasteful Nation is thus one rightful successor to Samuel Hays' Conservation and Gospel of Efficiency: Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, 1959). Tyrrell presents with fluid writing and careful detail a set of ideas, institutions, conferences, informal networks, non-governmental organizations, and broad overlapping ideologies that brought together two visions: geopolitical leadership and imperial ambition in remaking modern world in agrarian and industrial image of United States; and natural resource conservation in interest of a habitable planet for future generations. At its heart this book argues that toward end of his presidency and in his years of international conservation leadership thereafter, Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and a host of like-minded reformers, academics, engineers, missionaries, and politicians around world debated two central ethical and economic quandaries of resource exploitation: international equity (between rich developed Western countries and those less so) and intergenerational equity (between present and future). Would United States and other industrial powers consume world's timber, coal, and oil resources and grow powerful to detriment of all others? And would those same powers leave an impoverished, damaged world for their children? In confronting such questions, Tyrrell posits, conservationists anticipated current discourse of sustainable resource use: Roosevelt and company articulated a proto-sustainability that envisioned the recycling of basic resources within space of a single generation, on a worldwide scale (213). Rational global resource management, in this vision, could re-make not United States but also world in a vision of future-minded, rational, efficient resource use. The audacity of his plans as they took shape in last few years of his tenure, Tyrrell writes of T.R., only makes full sense in context of a struggle over what kind of empire United States should become: one that provided international leadership on resource conservation or one that sought perpetual and global extension of its resource-based abundance (261). We know what happened there. To find that struggle amongst Theodore Roosevelt and his ilk is provocative and compelling. …