CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

Four new books by sociologists help answer these questions, by addressing how and in what ways this new view of nature originated in cities. Two accept the industrial-city origin story of moral nature and show how these 19th-century beginnings resulted in changes to how people perceived nature and how unequally access to nature was distributed. The other two interrogate moral nature's origins, by seeking to understand under what conditions nature came to be seen as an ethical good in the first place.

When read together, these books remind us that the moral view of nature in which we are steeped is not timeless and unchanging. Rather, it is a product of specific material conditions and historical conjunctures. Read today, they remind us of the consequences of these moralized views--particularly due to the patterns of race and class exclusion they produce--as we build tomorrow's green cities on yesterday's principles.

Dorceta E. Taylor's The Rise of the American Conservation Movement and Justin Farrell's The Battle for Yellowstone exemplify the industrial-city hypothesis: that urban greening originated in industrial urbanization; that "unnatural" cities produced moral nature. As the wilderness was tamed and cities grew, nature--in increasingly domesticated forms, such as parks and pets--became an object to care for, moralize, philanthropize, study, and preserve. Such a view suggests that "nature appreciation" is a trait of "city people," a product of societies that are "technological, urban, and crowded," as Roderick Nash put it in his classic Wilderness and the American Mind, first published in 1967.

This hypothesis is the departure point for Farrell's book, which is about competing moral arguments (as opposed to economic, scientific, and legal ones) over Yellowstone National Park's nature. He begins by accounting for the origins of a moral orientation toward Yellowstone (and, implicitly, other national parks and wilderness areas). With the end of the American frontier and the growth of American cities, Farrell argues, nature became a "respite from a city life that was increasingly crowded, impersonal, polluted, corrupt." Consequently, Farrell argues, in the early 20th century a new vision of nature--one based on "spiritual" morality--came to compete with older "utilitarian" and "biocentric" frameworks. He then uses this typology to explore several cases of contemporary environmental conflict in Yellowstone--over buffalo, wolves, and fracking.

Taylor's sweeping history of the urban origins of the American conservation movement confirms Farrell's opening argument. It does so by linking "two realms of activism"--mid-19th-century urban-environmental conservation and wilderness conservation--and emphasizing that these two activist groups shared a common class, as well as views of moral nature.

Her protagonists are the "outward bound": essentially naive urban elites who had a love/hate relationship with cities, and who, inspired by transcendentalists such as Thoreau and Emerson, "juxtaposed" nature against "the ugliness of towns." She observes that "those most likely to go searching for wild nature were affluent, well educated, or well connected socially and politically." Taylor then highlights the effects of moralization on access to nature. She reveals the class, ethnoracial, and gender biases in these conservation movements and demonstrates their consequences: the exclusion of various minority populations and inequalities in the use and presence of, and public debate surrounding, natural resources.

These books effectively show how moral nature becomes, for better and for worse, a moralizing force. Beyond the cases they examine, they might be read as cautionary tales for practitioners, policymakers, and even urban-gardening enthusiasts. They are reminders that it is easy to find the romance in dirt-caked vegetables if you are not the farmer who has to get up to tend them in rain and frost; that it is one thing for white hipsters in Brooklyn's Williamsburg to perform agrarianism in community gardens, and quite another for black residents of Harlem with a racial history of forced labor on Southern plantations.

Both Taylor and Farrell offer, in short, a deeply sociological understanding of moral nature's effects. What neither provides is a robust explanation of the idea's origins: how moral nature came into existence, or how it has traveled and transformed over time.

These questions are helpfully addressed, if not fully answered, by two new books that offer new and different explanations for how--and at what times--the city could be understood to have been a source of moral nature.

Stefan Bargheer's Moral Entanglements rejects the industrial-city hypothesis and the urban elites / progressivism story embraced by Taylor and Farrell, instead making a pragmatist argument for what he calls the "banality of morality."

Through his study of the rise of bird conservation in Britain and Germany, Bargheer finds that moral ideas--about nature or anything else--are not preexisting abstract sentiments held by certain populations (for instance, urban elites) that provoke action (such as national park conservation). Instead, moral ideas emerge through individuals' quotidian practices and encounters. Bargheer contrasts British people's experiences of play (bird-watching) with German people's experiences of work (agriculture and forestry), finding that the British came to value birds as toys, while Germans valued birds as tools.

Bargheer's argument suggests that cities produce moral attitudes toward nature by being particular kinds of experiential environments. What's wonderful about his account, in contrast to Taylor's and Farrell's, is that he directs our attention to the physicality of everyday nature experiences, and especially to how changes in the ways we work and play with nature produce different moral sentiments about it.

Bargheer's is not a principally urban book, but it is a good reminder that the 19th-century understanding of cities as places without nature was, indeed, partly a product of physical conditions. Those cities lacked green space, housed their poor in slums and tenements, and suffered from pollution and public-health problems--these conditions helped birth the idea of nature as some good "other" that could be added to urban environments. In this way, Bargheer's argument is congruent with Farrell's and Taylor's, though he arrives at his conclusion through different means.

But how might we understand broader transformations in nature's experiential landscape? Bargheer scales up to the level of institutions. He finds that differences in bird valuation between England and Germany have diminished since the 1970s, as the British model of birds as objects of play has been adopted across the European Union. The model was chosen not because of abstract debates about how to value birds, but because, when EU-wide bird laws were passed, the British model for monitoring and conservation became the template. So, Bargheer shows how different ways of valuing nature are eventually enshrined in institutions that then reproduce those practices--such as conservation organizations that encourage birding.

This insight can be usefully scaled up even further. Beyond institutions like conservation groups or urban greening committees, there are larger patterns in these experiences--more macro changes in work, play, technology, and the built environment--that have altered the dominant forms of moral sentiments over time.

For instance, I have argued elsewhere that industrial urbanism brought about a shift in the ways that nature is commonly experienced in the Global North and West. The modern division of labor has meant that larger numbers of people sell their labor to buy food rather than engage in subsistence agriculture, while only a select group of professionals now slaughters and prepares animal meat for consumption, cares for sick or injured animals, or disposes of the dead. For the rest of us, these activities are deliberately hidden: at the margins of cities, behind closed doors, within the walls of museums. The majority of us have our nature experiences at museums, zoos, parks, and recreational gardens, meaning that we primarily have "moral" experiences of nature rather than utilitarian ones (whether or not we are bird-watchers, and whether we live in Germany or the UK). The other ways of experiencing nature have simply become less accessible.

Bargheer's perspective, then, raises additional questions about continuity and change, as well as periodization--how far back might these sentiments go? Are present ideas about nature continuous with older histories than industrialization's? Is modernity simply one giant drift in the human experience of nature toward moralization?

To that last question, Michael M. Bell's City of the Good answers: yes. His explanation of moral nature offers a second alternative to the industrial-city hypothesis. While Bargheer focuses on small-scale, individual-level practices, Bell zooms out, situating contemporary sentiments about nature (and religion) as part of a much longer tradition of changing moral ideas.

In contrast to both Farrell and Taylor, who link moral nature to 19th-century industrial cities, and to Bargheer, who locates its origin in individual practices rather than any specific historical moment, Bell traces moral nature back much further: to market cities of the early Christian era. For Bell, nature became moral not because of European and American industrialization, some two centuries ago, but because of the growth of cities some two millennia ago.

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