New book looks at winners and losers in Pennsylvania environmental history 

A new book looks at how Pennsylvanians have interacted with the environment from pre-colonial days to now.

Its author is Allen Dieterich-Ward, graduate school director and history professor at Shippensburg University. He’s also a member of Cumberland Valley Rail Trail.

“I have a real passion for using heritage and outdoor recreation as a springboard to community development,” Dietrich said. 

Dieterich-Ward’s first book was “Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America.” The latest title, “Cradle of Conservation: An Environmental History of Pennsylvania,” broadens the perspective from metropolitan Pittsburgh to look at the state as a whole. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple recently spoke with him about it.

LISTEN to the conversation:

Kara Holsopple: You begin the book with a scene from 1908 as a 25-year-old forester named Ralph Brock is about to give an important presentation. Why did you start with him? 

Allen Dieterich-Ward: It was really important for me, as someone who is both trying to stake a claim about the significance of Pennsylvania in the broader sphere of environmental history and someone who is keenly aware of the ways in which environmental policy and the focus of the environmental movement has often, wittingly or unwittingly, become focused on a particular perspective. That perspective is often the middle-class, white and male gaze.

In any attention to thinking about environmental history, it’s as if the environmental justice movement just somehow sprung up in the 1980s. The reality is that’s simply not true. People of color, urban people and women have always fought for and desired a healthy, safe environment in which they have access to fulfill their needs – clean water, breathable air, but also to the same natural amenities that the broader population wants.

“That very land that they are maybe enjoying a hike through has hundreds and, in fact, thousands of years worth of experience that has shaped and reshaped it to get to that landscape of today.”

It was really important for me to start the story at this moment that seems like a traditional history of the conservation movement. Here we have this professional forester who’s giving a speech at the state capitol about seedling propagation in a nursery. But [I wanted] to expand the lens, to really underscore that this was not the typical person that you would think of as being involved in the origins of conservation.

Kara Holsopple: Why did you title the book “Cradle of Conservation?”

Allen Dieterich-Ward: That’s actually a name that’s been bandied around a bit. So often, certainly, before the last couple of decades, environmental history was really about the West, about these pristine landscapes.

But the real conservation movement in terms of conserving resources to serve generations really begins here in Pennsylvania and in New York State. It begins in a place and among people who it’s really important to understand.

The Pennsylvania Forestry Association, which becomes sort of the mainstay for developing the state forests in Pennsylvania for conservation, doesn’t begin out in Franklin County. It doesn’t begin out in the middle of the woods. You don’t build political power out in low-populated, rural areas.

The Pennsylvania Forestry Association is formed by some of the most wealthy and politically well-connected people in the state of Pennsylvania. It’s formed on Locust Street in Philadelphia at the hall of the Pennsylvania Historical Society with this kind of very elite women and men who are motivated in part to redress what they feel guilt for in their own families’ use and abuse of natural resources and their concerns that the use and abuse of natural resources will result in economic decline for the state going forward. 

Kara Holsopple: The framework that you use throughout the chronology of Pennsylvania history looks at “working landscapes.” What do you mean by that? 

Allen Dieterich-Ward: Historians have always talked about the environment, even dating back to the earliest Greek historians, as kind of a set piece, kind of the stage on which the real drama of human history happens. Environmental historians want to tweak that a bit. We really take a look at what’s the dynamic interplay between the natural world and the cultural world that are constantly shaping and reshaping each other. 

Working landscapes are within that conceptualization. That is to say that from the very beginning, Native peoples are shaping the landscape. They’re, of course, being shaped by it. And what we see in Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, is that the ways in which one generation understands and uses their environment [and] then places constraints on what the next generation can do.

When you build a factory in a farm field, the next generation can’t simply use that land in the way that it had been before the factory was built. The goal of the book is to help folks to look at the world around them right now and understand that as permanent as a state forest might seem, it is not; that that very land that they are maybe enjoying a hike through has hundreds and, in fact, thousands of years worth of experience that has shaped and reshaped it to get to that landscape of today. 

Kara Holsopple: When I think of working landscapes, the first thing that comes to my mind is coal mining because of where we are. 

Allen Dieterich-Ward: I should note I don’t necessarily have the typical background of your standard university professor. My father was a coal miner and worked 35 years swing shift in the coal mine. He was also a farmer.

The tensions within my professional life between the desire to tell a hero versus villain story when we’re talking about the ways in which the environment is used, I come to it with a personal story that’s a little more complicated. That has always forced me to think not just about heroes and villains but more so about winners and losers.

No matter how well thought out, no matter how lauded a particular policy is or a particular way of using the world is, there are winners and losers. I think working landscapes help to understand that concept because the ways in which the landscape is used produce winners and losers among humans. That can be generational in its scope.

Kara Holsopple: What can we learn today about facing the many unfinished environmental issues from the past and the climate crisis from the state’s environmental history? 

Author Allen Dieterich-Ward is a history professor at Shippensburg University. Photo: Courtesy Temple University Press

Allen Dieterich-Ward: I draw some comparisons between Pennsylvania and New York State. From the beginning, the needs of certain areas in New York State, particularly downstream communities in metro New York City, really determined the environmental protection strategy for the state as a whole.

The first two huge areas that were preserved really had to do with protecting the water in the Erie Canal from sedimentation and then protecting New York City’s water supply.

The downstream needs of New York City really dominated the politics. And you can see that all the way through to today. Western New York state has a significant amount of potential natural gas in the Utica Shale and Marcellus Shale that could be tapped, the same as in Pennsylvania, but primarily concerns about water quality and fracking’s effect on water quality downstream, as well as broader concerns about climate change, allow for a political consensus to be really reached in New York State.

That simply could not happen in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is much more geographically dispersed. It has a lot more people who are dependent upon extraction industries – coal, natural gas, oil. Pennsylvania is actually a better stand-in for the politics of the environment in the United States than New York is because we’ve seen time after time that if you don’t have some sort of political consensus in the United States that transcends geographic area we are at a standstill on being able to do any kind of major environmental policy. 

So, in that regard, I think Pennsylvania can be really useful in thinking about how we go about building consensus around environmental issues that may be perceived differently by different groups, but where you can find that kind of Venn diagram center where people can agree.

That has happened in Pennsylvania. It happened over the issue of water quality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I think right now the big abstract idea of global warming has gotten so politicized that it’s difficult to get political consensus around an issue that is simply about global warming, as existential as that threat is, the politics of it just aren’t there.

But they are around other issues. They’re around water quality issues, around storm runoff issues. They’re around other things that you can get political consensus, I think, much more easily than support the bigger abstract concerns about sustainability.

Dieterich-Ward is a history professor at Shippensburg University and author of “Cradle of Conservation: An Environmental History of Pennsylvania,”