Gregory Summers
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Office: CCC 477B Phone: (715) 346-4478 or (715) 346-3489 E-mail: gsummers@uwsp.edu Title: Associate Professor and Chair Education: Ph.D., History, Univ. of Wisconsin--Madison, 2001M.A., History, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, 1993 B.A., History, University of Akron, 1991 B.S., Physics, University of Akron, 1991 Certificate of Environmental Studies, University of Akron, 1991 |
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Specialties:
Environmental History and Politics
U.S. Political and Economic History
History of Science and Technology
Industrialization and Consumption
Classes Taught:
History 211: United States History to 1877
History 212: United States History since 1877
History 290: Methods and Skills of History
History 360: Recent America since 1939
History 366: American Environmental History
History 391: Technology in American History
History 394: American Environmental Politics, 1900 to the Present
History 394: Environmentalism in Wisconsin
History 489: Consumer Society in the United States
History 490: History of Wisconsin
History 594: Environmental History for Teachers
History 594: Water in American History
History 594: Wildlife in American History
History 594: Forests in American History
Upcoming Classes:
History 204: Modern Global Environmental History (Spring 2009)
History 304: History of Climate Change (Fall 2008)
Books:
Consuming Nature: Environmentalism in the Fox River Valley, 1850-1950
University Press of Kansas, September 2006
ISBN 0-7006-1486-9, $29.95 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
Read the H-Net Review, by William Lang.
Read a review from Reviews in American History, by J. Brooks Flippen.
From the press web page:
"Environmental debates often pit the protection of nature against economic growth. But as Gregory Summers reveals, environmentalism has unsuspected roots in consumerism that extend deeper than our present-day dilemmas. In Consuming Nature, he tells of an early confrontation that set the stage for Silent Spring, pushing the dawn of environmental politics back several decades.
Summers takes readers to Wisconsin’s Fox River Valley more than fifty years ago to recount how technological and economic progress contributed to residents’ growing opposition to the industrial pollution of the river. On the one hand, there was the Wisconsin paper industry—long the largest employer in the area but also largely responsible for polluting the Fox River. On the other hand, there was the burgeoning demand for outdoor recreation among local residents, which put the river’s recreational and aesthetic benefits on an equal footing with its industrial potential. As a result, many citizens felt that paper mills no longer deserved carte blanche to dump their waste.
This shift from an industrial to consumer society eventually showed up in a small Green Bay courthouse. There attorneys for the Izaak Walton League confronted Adolph Kanneberg, a long-time conservationist now defending the paper industry, with charges that the Fox River had been defiled. But Summers ranges well beyond this courtroom battle. Drawing on prominent national figures, from Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt to Joseph R. McCarthy, he shows how this local drama was playing on a much larger stage. Wisconsin’s showdown over water quality, in fact, was being repeated throughout the country in similar disputes involving urban sprawl and the destruction of wilderness, as Americans struggled to balance their use of nature against the need to protect the environment.
Summers tracks the widening separation between production and consumption over a hundred years, a transformation that helps to explain the polarized character of modern environmental politics. He reveals that the redefinition of nature upon which environmentalism relied was the product of the very forces it opposed, a dilemma whose origins lay in the unexpected connection between the efficient use of natural resources and the growing movement to value nature in its own right. In this way, Summers shows that modern environmentalism is among the most important legacies of a consumer society.
Ultimately, by framing the human relationship to nature in terms of production and consumption, Summers fosters a better understanding of the philosophy of the modern environmental movement.
'Consuming Nature is a first-rate environmental history of the Fox River Valley of central Wisconsin. But Summers’ larger goal is to demonstrate how industrial and agricultural change combined with the emergence of large-scale technological systems like highways and electrical networks to produce modern American consumer culture, thereby creating the material and cultural conditions out of which modern environmentalism would eventually emerge in the mid-twentieth century. The result was a transformation in American ways of thinking about nature that has shaped our politics ever since.'--William Cronon, author of Nature’s Metropolis
'Raises large, provocative questions about contemporary environmentalism and its ambivalence about economic progress.'--Donald Worster, author of Rivers of Empire"
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The Comforts of Nature: A Natural History of the American Home
University of Washington Press, Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series, in progress.
My second book explores the meaning of nature in contemporary American culture by tracing the changing ways in which people have interacted with the material world within their own houses. While not every American owns a house, the ideal of home ownership remains at the core of middle-class prosperity in the United States and a key part of the American dream. Consequently, the average house provides a perfect location to examine the relationship between the material aspects of that dream and their impact on nature. Within their homes, Americans have experienced firsthand every major historical change associated with material progress: industrialization and the adoption of new technologies; urban and suburban development; improved standards of living; shifting gender roles; and growing resource use and pollution. By looking closely at the environmental history of these developments in the average home, I hope to offer a nuanced portrait of the complex meanings that Americans now attach to nature.
Presentations:
“Coming Home from the Woods: A Natural History of the American
Living Room,” American Society for Environmental History, Annual
Conference,
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"Recreation, Industry, Agriculture: The Legacies of Conservation in Wisconsin," Northern Great Plains History Conference, Eau Claire, WI, October 1, 2005.
"From Daylight Saving to Swimming Pools: Consumer Society and the Meaning of Nature as a Public Good," American Society for Environmental History, Annual Conference, Houston, TX, March 16-20, 2005.
"Nature and Progress: Conservation in the Fox River Valley," invited lecture, Annual Conference of the Wisconsin Association of Land Conservation Employees, Appleton, WI, March 2, 2005.
"Environmental Issues in the Election," guest discussion UWSP 90FM, November 2004.
"Issues and Politics in the 2004 Elections, " UWSP History Department Panel Discussion, October 2004.
"The Consumer's Metropolis: Nature, Consumption, and the Boundaries of the City," Institute for Research in the Humanities, Madison, WI, February 2004.
Awards:
Klessig Fellowship - UWSP College of Natural Resources, for the development of History 204: Modern Global Environmental History
Research Grant - UWSP, book proposal: "The Comforts of Nature," April 2005
Summer Stipend Award - FACETS (Faculty Alliance for Creating and Enhancing Teaching Strategies) Research Proposal: "Modernizing the History Survey: Expanding the Classroom Online," Summer 2004.
System Fellowship - The Institute for Research in the Humanities, Madison, WI, September 2003-May 2004.
Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Graduate Fellowship - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,1997-2000
Memberships:
American Society for Environmental History
Society for the History of Technology
American Historical Association
