| The Unnatural State: Conservatives, Libertarians, and the Postwar American Environmental Movement, examines the surprising relationship between three historical subjects that, at first glance, could not seem farther apart: environmentalism, conservatism and libertarianism in the years after World War II. Despite the fact that they blossomed during the same historical era, the three are rarely discussed together in historical scholarship, except as enemies. Popular images suggest that environmentalists are the eternal enemies of government-leery people like conservatives and libertarians. Suspicious of capitalism, distrustful of economic growth, and quick to invoke state power to achieve its aims, environmentalism (the conventional wisdom goes) has had precious little room for accommodation with the market-friendly, antistatist worldviews of conservatives and libertarians, and vice versa. In other words, environmentalists are liberals who embrace the state, conservatives and libertarians are not, and never the twain shall meet.;The Unnatural State suggests, however, that the relationship between them is actually more complicated. In four detailed case studies---Senator Barry M. Goldwater (1909-98), right-wing antifluoridationists of the 1960s, "free-market" environmentalists of the 1970s and 80s, and environmental author Edward Abbey---this dissertation reveals that postwar conservatives, libertarians and environmentalists have influenced each other in important and sometimes profound ways. It paints an intricate portrait of conservatives and libertarians with environmentalist sympathies and environmentalists with conservative and libertarian antistatist leanings. In the process, environmentalism itself emerges as a movement of considerable ideological complexity, and likewise, conservatism and libertarianism turn out to be, at least in some cases, more "green" than might be assumed.;Indeed, the fascinating ideological complexities of postwar American environmentalism suggest that the very categories of "liberal" and "conservative" are inadequate to the task of describing the intricacies of the postwar political landscape. The Unnatural State reveals just how widespread and deep the influence of "environmentalism" has been in the postwar era, and how porous traditional ideological barriers became in its presence. It also provides a model of environmental history's potential for significant contributions to twentieth-century American social, cultural and especially political history, an issue of much concern to environmental historians in recent years. |
