Book Review: The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. By Adam Rome. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp 299. ISBN 978-0-521-80490-5)
Adam Rome provides us with a unique history of post war America, one which examines the boom in housing development and its impact on the environment. Veterans of World War II returned to a country that was experiencing a tidal wave of economic activity. The depression and war years over, America emerged as the world's foremost economic power. The previous decades had thwarted real estate development and Americans faced a severe housing shortage. Many Americans found themselves forced to live with relatives, or worse. Salvaged buses, garages, and even chicken coops, became "homes" for some. The shortage was exacerbated by the proliferation of marriages and rapidly expanding families.
Entrepreneurs and real estate developers found opportunity in this supply-demand imbalance. Soon American ingenuity retooled from a war driven economy to the mass production of housing developments. William Levitt, best known among many of these entrepreneurs, and his "Levittown" developments, exemplified mass production applied to home building. Levitt and other developers quickly found they could cheaply acquire thousands of acres of vacant land, bulldoze and reshape the terrain, and rapidly manufacture cookie-cutter homes. Utilizing prefabricated materials and a workforce that operated much like Henry Ford's Model T production line, these developers could complete a new house every day. Home buyers seemed pleased with the typical Levittown price of $7,995, and thanks to the new GI Bill, veterans could get a long term mortgage with little or no down payment.
Although Rome's book is an environmental history of the post war period, it is an economic history too. Developers generally bought large tracts of cheap farm land and other open land outside the boundaries of the big cities. Many new home owners soon became two car families. They equipped their houses with the latest appliances. A new trend of consumerism arose, creating a boon for automobile manufacturers and electrical appliance makers. On the other hand, many developers found vertical integration enhanced their profits. Some acquired their own nail factories, lumber yards, and other supply companies, and thus increased their share of the profits. Overall, new home owners appeared content. The American landscape was dotted with suburban "Levittowns," and American enterprise had triumphed.
As Adam Rome's extensive examination into this story reveals, the solutions to America's housing shortage created severe environmental problems that took a few years to surface. The most compelling of these is shown where developers, using advanced heavy equipment like "the bulldozer" completely altered the natural terrain. These developers found it cost effective to simply level hundreds of acres, destroying existing foliage and blocking run off streams. Then they laid fresh concrete streets and foundation slabs. This yielded hundreds of postage stamp sized lots on which to build. Later they added a few small trees or bushes, and some sod or grass seed. Building around existing trees and streams was not as efficient or profitable.
The homes in nearly all of these subdivisions included septic tanks for waste disposal, not sewage system connections. Sewage systems would have increased the builders cost. While septic tanks had been widely used for centuries, they had never been deployed so densely and on such a massive scale. Moreover, natural rain water run off was artificially altered by the bulldozer method that eliminated nature's drainage systems and mature foliage. This combination was further complicated by a high failure rate of septic systems to adequately neutralize human waste. These combined factors became an early warning sign of problems created by the rapid growth and the poor planning of these new housing developments.
In some cases, the waste problem was worsened because many homes obtained their potable water from local wells instead of city or county water purification systems. Rome gives examples such as kitchen water taps dispensing drinking water containing non-biodegradable detergent soap suds, and home owners having to carry in fresh drinking water from outside the subdivision. The septic systems became a threat to natural aquifers, streams, and rivers, and hence threatened the health of human beings as well as other wildlife.
Rome also tells us about the early attempts at solar energy homes in the 1950s and elaborates on the efforts of electric companies to encourage electrical use, selling homes with electrical heat instead of natural gas or oil. In the post war years with low oil and natural gas prices, home buyers showed little interest for alternative fuels. Rome also tells us that electric power companies used creative incentives to encourage the selection of electric over gas heat.
The author tells us that by the 1960s local movements emerged that recognized the need for more planned developments and an interest in more "open spaces." Landscape architect and urban planner, Ian McHarg, felt that development should emanate from more "natural processes" and be limited to areas intrinsically suitable to a particular development. Rome intimates that developers resisted altering their methods, which would result in higher building costs and higher prices for home buyers.
Land use regulations had been universally a function of local and regional governments. Several federal government agencies, however, had issues concerning land use, particularly those related to farming, wildlife, and urban development. In 1970, President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into federal law. That same year Washington Senator Henry Jackson introduced the National Land Use Policy Act. The author contends that as land use regulations increased, especially at the national level, a "quiet revolution" emerged. The revolution was premised on the concept that what people or business enterprises did with their land was a liberty deeply-rooted in American culture. At the national level, Jackson's land use bill never passed, despite several years' effort and several votes in the U.S. Congress.
Rome characterizes the defeat of the national land use legislation as ideological, intimating a populist backlash against the federal government, because the law represented an attack on liberty, the American system of free enterprise, and threatened the "American way of life." But with that conclusion he lessens the impact the elite and big business may have played in defeating this bill at the federal level. Was national land reform defeated by those same folks in Vermont and Maine that Bosselman and Callies wrote about in The Quiet Revolution in Land referred to by the author? (227) The defeat of the federal bill for national influence over land use was more likely brought about by wealthy land owners and corporate interests in agribusiness, mining, property developers, and the like. The author's own words support the second conclusion: "The [U.S.] Chamber of Commerce also worked to stir up opposition at the grassroots. In a 1974 `action' letter sent to roughly 2,500 local and state affiliates...the organization stressed the economic threat to small property owners." (246) The point overlooked by Rome is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is neither populist, nor a true grassroots organization. It is a lobby for big business. It is more likely that the bill was defeated because of several years of politicking and lobbying by elite and corporate interests, to the detriment of broader and reasonable national oversight of land use.
Adam Rome clearly states that he has limited the scope of his work to the 1945-1970 period. This is unfortunate because much has evolved in the thirty-one years from 1970 through the 2001 copyright date. The author even briefly hints at several points, and a likely reader who possesses some anecdotal knowledge feels left with an incomplete story. Moreover, the author completely neglected to mention any environmental issues resulting from the 1956 formation of the Interstate Highway System, which occurred during the period under study. Because of significant alterations of the natural terrain, disruption of wildlife habitats, and social changes brought about by the interstate highways, there would appear to be some parallels at least worth mentioning.
The narrow topic that Rome did cover, he covered well. The Bulldozer in the Countryside is exceptionally well documented with abundant primary and secondary sources that frequently include the author's insightful comments. The book is well organized and is written with excellent prose that makes Rome's story easy to follow.
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