The environmental history of the United States covers the history of the environment over the centuries to the late 20th century, plus the political and expert debates on conservation and environmental issues.Erin Stewart Mauldin, "The United States in Global Environmental History" pp.132-152. The term "conservation" appeared in 1908 and was gradually replaced by "environmentalism" in the 1970s as the focus shifted from managing and protecting natural resources to a broader concern for the environment as a whole and the negative impact of poor air or water on humans. The late twentieth century saw a shift towards “environmental justice,” highlighting the way in which environmental benefits and burdens are unevenly distributed across lines of race, class, and ethnicity.
For recent history see Environmental policy of the United States.
Environmental trends
The Pre-Columbian Environment
According to Erin Stewart Mauldin, the geological history of the United States predates human settlement by millions of years. The landscape of the North American continent's landscape was shaped by plate tectonics, volcanic activity, and glaciation. The Appalachian Mountains resulted from plate collisions, the Rocky Mountains from the subduction of the Pacific Ocean floor, and the Pacific Northwest and New England from the accretion of microcontinents. Glaciation formed the Great Lakes and influenced soil composition across the country, with volcanic activity contributing to regions like the Columbia Plateau. Paleoindians from Siberia were the continent's first human inhabitants starting 30,000 BCE. They coexisted with megafauna like mammoths.
The reasons for these species' extinction, possibly due to climate change or human hunting, remain debated. The absence of large domesticable animals in North America affected the development of societies, limiting hunting and herding and later giving European colonizers a biological edge. Native Americans developed diverse subsistence strategies, including agriculture, hunting, and fishing, with varying practices across regions. They also impacted the landscape through land clearing and hunting practices, leading to environmental changes. The pre-Columbian landscape encountered by Europeans was significantly shaped by human activity, challenging the idea of an untouched wilderness.
Colonization and Settlement Scholar Dina Gilio-Whitaker explains that as the Spanish arrived in North America in the 1500s, and the English established the first permanent colony of Jamestown in 1607, they brought ideas of land ownership that conflicted with the Indigenous attitude of land as a commune. The settler colonial drive to own the land required the forced removal of Indigenous people. European settlers destroyed Indigenous agricultural resources in a successful attempt to starve people off their ancestral land. The disruption and seizure of Indigenous trade routes made some native groups vulnerable and dependent on the settlers themselves. These actions altered the environment away from that which was stewarded by native peoples, instead shifting it towards colonial ideas of ownership.
According to historian David Silkenat, indigenous practices and stewardship such as controlled burns, subsistence hunting and gathering, and large farms growing corn, beans, squash, and more, were met with settler monoculture plantations dependent on enslaved people. Settler agriculture in the South varied, with a mixture of smaller farms and large extractive plantations which took a toll on the soils.
However, settlers did not easily adapt to their new environment, finding that European farming practices did not translate to their new land according to historian Kenneth MacMillan. While the English expected the climate of the Carolinas and Virginia to be like that of Spain, they were met with both hotter and colder conditions than expected. They mistakenly believed there to be similar commodities to that of the East and West Indies such as gold. The Jamestown colony, located in what is now Virginia, facing the inconsistent weather of the South, struggled to establish reliable food sources, often having to trade with native people for corn and other resources, especially through the cold winters. However, by 1617, English tobacco was established as a cash crop, and grown on plantations, using African slave labor.
New England to 1815
Before 1815 the New England farmers were largely self-sufficient.Richard W. Judd, Second nature: An Environmental History of New England (2014), pp.69–94. The forest provided wood to build homes and barns, and fueled the stove all winter long. Timber was sold for ship construction and naval stores were sold for export to England. The remaining forest was the habitat for deer and other game that were easily hunted with muskets or traps. Once cleared the land provided pasture for the sheep (raised for the wool), the hogs, and the family cow, as well as space for the vegetable garden. The significance of the forest ranged from a threat to settlers to being a place of Puritan religious significance, as well as a source of beauty and pride. As population grew the forest transitioned from a perceived abundance to a dwindling asset. After 1815, when export markets reopened after the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, farmers in the region increasingly focused more on profitable commercial crops, especially sheep, cattle, hay, lumber, wheat. As the nearby cities grew they sold more milk and cheese, eggs, apples, cranberries and maple syrup.Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia guide to American environmental history (2002) pp. 24–37.William Cronon, Changes in the Land, Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) pp. 108–112, 127-130.
Destruction of a fourth of the forests, 1780s to 1860s
According to geographer Michael Williams, by 1860, about 153 million acres of forest had been cleared for farms, and another 11 million acres cut down by industrial logging, mining, railroad construction, and urban expansion. A fourth of the original forest cover in the eastern states was gone. At the same time there was a major change in how Americans viewed forests. They were recognized as the foundation of industrialization, agricultural expansion, and material progress. Lumber was the nation's largest industry in 1850, and second in 1860 behind textiles. As Frederick Starr emphasized in 1865, forests were integral to the four key necessities for prosperity: "cheap bread, cheap houses, cheap fuel, and cheap transportation for passengers and freights." Lumbering was a very dangerous trade, with crippling accidents and death a common hazard. But it paid well because the lumber was essential for construction and wood was the main fuel for homes, business, steamboats and railroads. Intellectuals began examining the complex relationships between forests and soil, climate, farming, railroading and the economy. They pondered the overall ecological balance. Was the nation's energy at risk as settlement expanded westward into the trans-Mississippi prairies where wood was scarce.
Given the economic and cultural importance of the forests, some worried commentators, especially George Perkins Marsh and Increase Lapham. began questioning the widespread destruction. They saw the forests and backwoods pioneers as symbols of America, and their disappearance was concerning. Romantic writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson helped Americans appreciate the aesthetic and recreational value of forests, beyond just their economic importance. The early conservation movement had its roots in these concerns.Michael Williams, "Clearing the United States forests: pivotal years 1810-1860," Journal of Historical Geography 8#1 (1982) 12–28 at p. 25.Thomas R. Cox et al., This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present (1985) pp.111–153
Industrial Revolution, 1810s–1890s
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, wastes from mining operations began to enter rivers and streams, and iron bloomeries and furnaces used water for cooling. In the early 19th century, the development of steam engines led to their use in the mining and manufacturing sectors (such as textiles). The expanded use of steam engines generated larger volumes of heated water (thermal pollution). The productivity gains, along with the introduction of railroads in the 1830s and 1840s—which increased the overall demand for coal and minerals—led to additional generation of wastes.
The Second Industrial Revolution led to development of manufacturing processes that generated new types of wastes, including air, water and land pollution (solid and hazardous waste). These new industrial sectors included: iron and steel oil and gas extraction petroleum refineries manufacturing (smelting) of non-ferrous metals rubber manufacturing fertilizers and chemicals paper products manufacturing.
Hazards of textile mills Cash wages brought rural workers into the new textile mills first in New England after 1810 and then in the South after 1870. The mills were powered by waterwheels on local rivers and caused little harm to the external environment. The hazards came indoors as workers faced air and noise pollution. The men, women and children worked in family teams 10 hours a day in a tightly enclosed environment filled with dust and fiber. The machinery occasionally caused accidents but the polluted environment was much more serious. Having large numbers of people laboring in close quarters day after day was the ideal settings for the rapid spread of diseases including the common cold, bronchitis, pneumonia and tuberculosis. The also suffered hearing loss and fatigue. Byssinosis, also known as "brown lung disease" or "Monday fever," was particularly prevalent among cotton textile workers, with symptoms including chest tightness and shortness of breath.. There were sharp disagreements among workers, employers, and medical professionals regarding the impact of factory environments on health.Janet Greenlees, When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries (Rutgers UP, 2019) pp.12–14 and passim. The mills seldom employed medical care on site but they did support community hospitals.Janet Greenlees, Janet. "‘For the Convenience and Comfort of the Persons Employed by them’: The Lowell Corporation Hospital, 1840–1930." Medical history 57.1 (2013): 45-64. online
Hazards of underground mines
Underground mining was a very hazardous occupation.Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America's Bloody Coal Industry (1989). However the coal, iron, lead and copper was essential for industrialization. Enslaved people worked the mines pre-civil war. Later, labor demand drew many European immigrants, black workers under Jim Crow, and local Appalachian families.
According to economic historian Price V. Fishback, in addition to the hazards of mine collapses, miners and the area where mines, such as coal, were located faced well and water supply contamination. From various mining processes, arsenic, barium, lead, manganese, iron, and sulfate, were found in well and water supplies. Open mine fields, blasting, and transportation also created particulate matter and fumes containing sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, benzene, carbon monoxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals. In turn, miners and those who lived near the mines face black lung, cardiovascular diseases, other lung diseases, and potentially cancer.