Nature wars, culture wars: Immigration and environmental reform in the progressive era

In the decades around 1900, native-born Americans and immigrants fought a variety of battles about environmental issues. Those battles had important consequences. The critique of immigrants also reveals that native-born Americans had more complicated views about nature than environmental historians have acknowledged. Though a back-to-nature impulse was a defining characteristic of the Progressive Era, the complaints about immigrants make clear that some forms of closeness to nature made many Americans deeply uncomfortable.