Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery

By Steve Nicholls

(University of Chicago Press, 524 pp., $30)

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Edited by Bill McKibben

(Library of America, 1,047 pp., $40)

Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant

By Jonathan Peter Spiro

(University of Vermont Press, 462 pp., $39.95)

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

By Donald Worster

(Oxford University Press, 535 pp., $34.99)

A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature

By James William Gibson

(Metropolitan Books, 306 pp., $27)

Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet

By Edward Humes

(Ecco Books, 367 pp., $25.99)

I.

In contemporary public discourse, concern for "the environment" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.

In the arid country around the Utah-Arizona border, where water is as precious as oil, Lake Powell is a 27-million-acre-foot, man-made oasis. Created in 1963 by the Glen Canyon Dam, it is one of those alterations of nature that makes the successful human habitation of the desert Southwest possible. Twenty million people depend on the lake for water, and some 400,000 households rely on the dam for hydroelectric power. The lake has also become a popular refuge for sun-scorched Southwesterners: tourists pump $500 million annually into the local economy. To many in the Southwest, Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam are testaments to man's ability to harness nature's power and put it to productive use. As a federal official who helped oversee the construction of the dam once mused, "to have a deep blue lake where no lake was before seems to bring man a little closer to God."