This Is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century . By Cody Ferguson

The history of the environmental movement is spread across dozens of studies. In them, historians have examined diverse and distinct manifestations of that still vague idea, “environmentalism.” Cody Ferguson’s This Is Our Land is one of the latest contributions to this wealth of perspectives, and it valuably complicates the picture even more by focusing on an underappreciated cast of characters. Ferguson is interested in “grassroots environmentalism,” by which he means volunteer-based organizations concerned primarily with local conditions, with social justice, and with democratic processes as much as with environmentally friendly results. He tells the story of grassroots environmentalism from the 1970s to the 1990s through three organizations. Ranchers and farmers in Montana organized the Northern Plains Resource Council to fight against strip mining and the degradation of their land. Urban professionals in and around Tucson founded the Southwest Environmental Service to address land use and pollution in southern Arizona. Residents of coal mining towns in eastern Tennessee formed Save Our Cumberland Mountains to challenge the worst effects of strip mining in Appalachia, and later took on landfills piled high with out-of-state garbage.