Larson’s Laid Waste! is a freewheeling account of what he calls America’s “culture of exploitation,” the sense of entitlement to unregulated access to new territories and their natural resources. He frames the book as an exploration of the roots of contemporary resistance to government policies designed to reverse environmental degradation and mitigate climate change.Some features of the book will be vexatious to interdisciplinary readers. Larson deploys the term exploitation broadly to include not just environmental destruction but harsh treatment of slaves (the “culture of exploitation in its most visceral and brutal form”) and free industrial labor (142, 171–173). Thus, the text often reads like those narratives for which “progress” is merely a euphemism for expropriation, though Larson’s historical understanding is more nuanced.More seriously, given its objectives, the book does not provide a systematic analysis of the role of natural resources in U.S. economic growth. Chapters 5 through 8 offer relatively conventional accounts of geographical expansion, internal improvement, technological innovation, and the rise of big business. Deforestation emerges as a matter of concern at the end of the nineteenth century, but neither the nation’s early leadership in woodworking technologies nor its transition across the century from organic to fossil-fuel energy sources finds any coverage. The epilogue’s opening quotation from President Donald Trump announcing the end of the “war on beautiful clean coal” would be more powerful if mining and the use of coal had received attention in the preceding 200 pages (231). Despite its importance for U.S. economic preeminence, the minerals sector is entirely missing from the book.A more distinctive feature of the book is its attention to the perspectives of leading thinkers at various historical junctures. Larson reviews the thoughts of not only familiar figures like Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Matthew and Henry Carey but also lesser-known colonial writers like John Oldmixon, William Byrd II, and William Wollaston, and the early national geographer Jedediah Morse. Particularly relevant is the work of nineteenth-century diplomat and philologist George Perkins Marsh, often considered the country’s first environmentalist. Marsh’s Man and Nature (New York, 1864) deplored the deforestation of his native Vermont, anticipating the complex systems approach of modern ecology and sounding an urgent alarm for the nation as a whole. Appearing in wartime, Man and Nature attracted little immediate attention. But Marsh influenced John Muir and other conservationists, launching another philosophical and cultural tradition, fully as American as the laissez-faire faith lamented in Laid Waste!.That the United States suffers from its history of unregulated environmental exploitation can hardly be denied. Laid Waste! succeeds in lending “historical aid and comfort” to efforts to overcome this legacy (241). But whereas resource-based development was central to nineteenth-century economic life, it seems evident that the health and economic well-being of most Americans in the present century would be improved by moving to a more sustainable approach. The challenge is to make this new economic reality apparent to American voters.