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The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. By Adam Rome. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 299 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. Cloth, $54.95; paper, $19.95. ISBN: cloth 0-521-80059-5; paper 0-521-80490-6

To anyone who has grown up or lived in post–World War II suburban America, the story told in Adam Rome’s The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism should be appallingly familiar. The book provides a historical narrative tracing the growth of suburbia, particularly tract housing, from 1945 to 1970 and the concurrent rise of the American environmental movement. It thus differs from other environmental histories focusing on environmentalism as a response to abuses in urban or rural forms of production (e.g., industrial development, mining, lumbering, ranching, etc.). Instead, the culprit in this account is the American Dream of homeownership. The goal of the book, however, is to do more than just fill in gaps in the historical literature. Rome, a historian at Pennsylvania State University, argues that the environmental critique of homebuilding during this period was instrumental in the emergence of environmentalism. His focus is not so much on environmentalism as a grassroots movement but on the national debates that took place in congressional hearings, federal agencies, and professional and trade publications. The book is thus more about national trends than specific case studies, although it abounds with descriptive details of specific events and locales. It also clearly elucidates not only the historical events but also the ideas about housing, the environment, and land use that informed and underpinned the public debates that arose around suburban sprawl. By focusing on “the homebuilding story,” Rome arrives at three new ways of approaching the history of American environmentalism. One is addressing the question of how the postwar construction boom came to be perceived as a threat to the comforts promised by postwar prosperity. Studying the history of suburban development, he argues, reveals how Americans came to see not only oil spills or pesticides but also the “new machinery” of tract house production as a threat to quality of life. Another approach is being able to examine not only the various stages of the environmental movement but also how the concerns of environmentalists shifted from one stage to the next. Environmental concerns about