Environmental History
Stephen Germic
Richard A. Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco
Bay Area, University of Washington Press, 2007.
Perhaps a bit too complacently, Walker announces at the start of his volume that he
has “never made a very good revolutionary” [p. xvii], and for those among us who are
dedicated to class-based critiques and who still believe firmly in a host of revolutionary
possibilities, the general tone of this volume—I dare call it smug resignation—is often
infuriating. In fact, for the most part, capitalism and its various agents perform the hero’s
role in Richard A. Walker’s environmental history of the San Francisco Bay area.
According to Walker, the San Francisco Bay area is not so much urban as it is “a
quilt of countryside tucked into the folds of the metropolis.” [p. 3.] The Bay Area boasts
more than 200 public parks and nature reserves, just under 2 million acres of agricultural
land, nearly three-quarters of a million acres of open water and wetlands, and about half a
million acres of woodlands. Walker submits that this is the largest metropolitan greensward
in the United States, making it, in the slightly revised terms introduced by Raymond Williams
in 1973, the “country in the city.” [p. 3.]
Walker explains that the “Bay Area environmental story bears witness to the
importance of the elite in land conservation and nature protection.” [p. 10.] To be sure, the
first efforts of conservation were born through the efforts of non-elite former farmer and
visionary activist John Muir and the Sierra Club that he helped to establish; however, the
record of conservation successes and failures in the Bay Area largely bear out and reveal the
middle- and upper-class character of the conservation movement. For example, William
Kent, a man Walker terms a “flexible capitalist” [p. 25], prominent railroader, Sierra Club
activist, and, finally, politician, worked both to secure such sites as the Muir Woods and
Redwood National Park and sponsored the Raker Act “whereby Congress turned over
Hetch-Hetchy to the water men.” [p. 25.] It probably bears mentioning that American
Indians, particularly the Paiute, are a remarkable absence in Walker’s description of the
origins of conservation, especially in and around the Yosemite region, which includes the
Hetch-Hetchy. While considerable mention is made by Walker regarding the importance of
Yosemite in the history of regional and American conservation, the struggles of the Paiute to
preserve their homeland from violent expropriation, principally during the 1850s, might
reasonably be considered an important conservation effort.
Though notable activists and community leaders of the Bay Area failed to save
Hetch-Hetchy, a similar elite did realize a great deal of success in limiting sprawl during the
era of rapid suburbanization after World War II. “Greenbelt Alliances” arose over several
decades to beat back developers by passing zoning and various growth-limiting laws and
successfully pushing for public green spaces. Dorothy Ward Erskine, who founded People
for Open Space, the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association, and Citizens for
Regional Recreation and Parks, was a key figure. Typical of the liberal elite, Erskine was
wealthy and well-connected, developing a variety of organizations broadly characteristic of
the era’s reformist impulses.
Walker rightly notes that “the Bay Area gets scant attention in histories of
environmental justice,” [p. 231] and thus the final chapter, a discussion of contemporary
race, class, and environmentalism with an emphasis on activities in Oakland, is probably the
most original. This is not to say that it is a particularly strong chapter, though Walker
adequately reviews the rise of environmental justice in the 1980s and introduces readers to
critical figures such as Urban Habitat founder Carl Anthony and Asian Pacific Islander
Environmental Network founder Pam Tau Lee. Through this discussion of key activists,
Walker effectively describes the important redefinition of the meaning of environmentalism
to include efforts to confront and address the differential impacts of environmental insults
on poor communities and, inevitably, communities of color. Yet, it is also characteristic of
what might be called Walker’s hedging toward elite reformists that he concludes the chapter
with what seems a gratuitous piece of advice for environmental justice activists: “Diluting
one’s message by trying to do too much can lead to incapacitation. Militants would,
therefore, do well not to forget the environment on the road to environmental justice.” [p.
248.] Less in terms of content than tone, The Country in the City might remind readers of
Martin W. Lewis’s unfortunate volume, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical
Environmentalism.1 Among more recent volumes, Walker’s should probably be placed
alongside Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to
the Politics of Possibility.2 Walker’s history catches the wave of the alleged paradigm shift that
would exploit the energies of capitalism to realize environmentalist goals, a shift that young
polemicists like Shellenberger and Nordhaus are noisily promoting. I would submit that we
not allow the equally alleged end of Marxism to take environmentalism with it.
Finally, what counts as “natural” in this volume is emphatically not wild. I sometimes
felt Walker was tempted to include the bushes, trees, and lawns of suburban backyards in his
acre-count of the regional greensward. The “wild,” according to Walker, has garnered far too
much attention, attention he regards as masculinist and thus implicitly compromised when
compared to the implicitly feminist women who rescue nature in the Bay Area. This
masculinist/feminist binary is another unfortunate aspect of the study: Walker uses it to
legitimize his study in the contested arena of identity politics. Unfortunately, Walker‘s use of
this binary comes across as an underdeveloped theme very weakly supported by a larger
conceptual framework that might have been much more usefully developed to make sense of
the class contradictions of Bay Area environmentalism.
Martin W. Lewis, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1992).
2 Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of
Possibility (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
1