A Review of Karl Jacoby

A Review of Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation

by Stefanie Hustoft

Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature is an environmentalist history that analyzes the conservation movement and its evolution from its beginnings in the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century.[1] Jacoby argues that the government and upper class implemented restrictive new laws which restricted the lower classes’ use of spaces that were previously accessible. He acknowledges that most environmental histories draw from sources written by upper-class tourists and bureaucrats. While Jacoby draws on those sources and follows their perspectives through his narrative, the narrative is more concerned with conservation’s effects on the ordinary people that used and lived on this land. In analyzing the average person’s perspective, he draws from newspapers, court cases, and the occasional personal account. Jacoby splits his research into three sections focusing on the conservation efforts of three spaces: the Adirondack Mountains of New York, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, and Arizona’s Grand Canyon. Each section represents a different stage in the United States’ conservation efforts.

The first section focuses on attempts to discuss the beginnings of the United States trying to keep its wilderness pristine. Jacoby represents this phase of conservation history with the Adirondack Mountains in New York. The area’s first conservation efforts sought to ban using the region to grow or hunt food and squatting. He states that when the United States created new laws, the government simultaneously created new criminals. These new criminals often lived in the area, farmed, and hunted there before it became protected land. Their criminalization shows how the state set these new laws in motion without caring how they affected the lives who already lived in the mountainous area. In this section, the people living in this region found ways around new laws against poaching and squatting, like closely watching the habits of new park rangers to avoid them while they continued to use the park as before. The government resorted to an oppressive system to keep the locals nearby in line.

The second section discussing Yellowstone disregarded the forest’s established residents when the government decided to spread its conservation efforts west. Similar to the events of the Adirondack Mountains, the Native Nations of the area continued to use the forest despite the United States government’s presence. The state would attempt to control the use of Yellowstone further by removing the Native Americans from other reservations. However, Native Americans continued to sneak into the park, hunting to subsist and profit. Ultimately, the Yellowstone rangers took a similar, oppressive approach to the Adirondack Mountains to keep people from utilizing the park as they had previously.

The third section analyzes the Grand Canyon, specifically how the United States dealt with the Havasupai Nation. Jacoby states that the Havasupai had to argue for autonomy with the National Parks Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Contrary to how the United States forced the Native Americans of the Adirondack Mountains and Yellowstone to stop using the parks, both agencies confined the Havasupai to a small enclosure in the park. Furthermore, the game and resources in the area given to the Native Americans quickly dwindled due to White Americans using that land for their ends.

Jacoby’s research on the United States’ conservation efforts and their effects on residents of the park areas is enlightening. It challenges prior conservation narratives in environmental historiography that hail government efforts as necessary to protect North America’s unique environments. However, a critique of Jacoby’s work is partially rooted in evidence and Native Americans’ experiences. Marsha Lee Weisiger’s Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country is similarly critical of the United States’ New Deal conservation efforts for their traumatizing effects on the Dine. One thing that this work did that Jacoby’s research could have benefited from is using oral histories and bringing Native Nations’ trauma to the forefront. Otherwise, Crimes Against Nature is an insightful book that further complicates the assumed goodwill of the American environmental conservation effort.

[1] Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001)