Vanishing Species, Dying Races: A History of Extinction in America

Until the dawn of the nineteenth century, leading scientists in North America and Europe still debated whether extinction could occur in a world of God's flawless design. Today, not only is extinction irrefutable, it has become a rallying point for environmentalists and other political activists in America and around the globe. Americans have thus spent two centuries struggling to come to terms with extinction and its implications for how humans should interact with the environment and each other. For most of this history, Americans have considered racial extinction a possibility every bit as real and worrisome as the eradication of species. And in many instances, individuals have drawn connections between wilderness declension and racial decline. However, Americans have expected different races to follow the nation's wildlife into oblivion at different times, and attitudes towards species extinction have shifted accordingly.;In my dissertation, I explore what I perceive as a key transition in American environmental and racial thought. Prior to the late nineteenth century, white Americans generally viewed Indians as the race most likely to vanish from the continent. Whites associated Indians with wilderness, and believed that both must make way for the inevitable march of civilization. During this period, white Americans often either denied that species extinction was occurring, or accepted it as an inevitable corollary of progress. As the turn of the century approached, however, whites came to see themselves as an imperiled race, and increasingly identified with the nation's dwindling wildlife. Fearing that they would share the Indians' anticipated demise, white elites developed the preservationist arguments that laid the groundwork for the modern environmental movement. By identifying the social, cultural, economic, demographic, and environmental factors that propelled this transition, I have attempted both to expose the racial anxieties underlying modern environmentalism, and to carve out a place for the environment in the history of American race relations.