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Environmentalist Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is situated with respect to Jeffersonian republicanism and conflicting tendencies in his thought are examined. At times Leopold seems to reify stability and virtue in a timeless wilderness and thus follow the Jeffersonians' problematic vision of a virtuous landscape sheltered from history. On the other hand, Leopold often sees the basis of virtue in a more complex mosaic of stability and change across a spectrum of wild and humanised places. Here, Leopold avoids the pitfalls of his republican predecessors and articulates a more promising geography for civic virtue and participation. He also anticipates recent developments in environmentalism. Adapted from the source document.

Conceptions of developmental change and stability, and their spatial implications, are investigated in Jeffersonian republicanism and Thoreauvian environmentalism. Both Jefferson and Thoreau associated capitalist development with corruption and sought a stable, virtuous, materially frugal society in the face of modernisation. The Jeffersonian programme of agrarian, republican virtue rested on westward expansion and wilderness conquest. This approach was self-defeating: it exhausted the land base for agrarianism and promoted a commercial ethos inimical to republican virtue. Thoreau tried to address this contradiction by seeking stability and virtue through wilderness preservation. Yet both Jefferson and Thoreau problematically tried to displace developmental change away from a privileged locale and create an ahistorical, timeless preserve for virtue, whether agrarian republic or protected wilderness. A green republicanism drawing on aspects of Jefferson and Thoreau can offer an important critical standpoint on social and ecological change under capitalism. However, such a perspective must replace the Jeffersonian/Thoreauvian spatial dichotomisation of change and stability with a regionalism embracing a spectrum of interrelated locales experiencing different degrees of dynamism and permanence. Adapted from the source document.

A review essay on books by (1) Mari Caputi, A Kinder, Gentler America: Meloncholia and the Mythical 1950s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); (2) Marcie Frank, How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); (3) Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Lanham. MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006) & (4) Helen Liggett, Urban Encounters Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).