In this book, Worster, the dean of active environmental historians, offers what might be called the Pale Blue Dot theory of history, with a heavy emphasis on the significance of North America. He is concerned with both the limits that the earth imposes on human enterprise and the history of Anglo-American recognition, and rejection, of them. Worster argues that after 1500, when Europeans became aware of the bounty in the Americas, they “enjoyed an unprecedented natural abundance” (5). Eventually they, as exemplified by several British and American writers, developed the notion that nature offered limitless resources for human exploitation, until in the nineteenth century, a thoughtful minority saw through that fiction, explaining that humankind must live within constraints not of its own choosing.
Worster presents these arguments mainly in the form of an intellectual history. He synopsizes authors such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, George Perkins Marsh, Fairfield Osborne,...