From Rocks to Riches Time and Change and Ochre in a Village in the Vaucluse Roussillon en Provence! GRAHAM F. PRINGLE AND HILDGUND SCHAEFER Fifty miles north of Marseille and thirty miles east of Avignon lies the village of Roussillon. With its spectacular ochre cliffs, it is one of the most popular tourist villages in the internationally famous region of the Luberon. Fifty years ago, in his Village in the Vaucluse, Laurence Wylie described life in Roussillon at the beginning of the 1950s. At that time, following the collapse of the world’s ochre market after World War II, it had been reduced from the epicenter of a thriving ochre-mining industry that had flourished for more than 150 years to a small, inwardly turned farming community with little contact with the outside world, which it mostly viewed with disdain and hostility. After describing the village’s rise and fall as a mining center, the authors follow its rise to even greater wealth as a tourist village, second-home community, and dormitory town for nearby urban centers—its economy once again based on the ochre that had enriched it before as a mineral to be extracted, but now as a tourist attraction, with Roussillon’s colorful red cliffs and ochre-tinted houses drawing visitors from all over Europe. But this came at a price, and the price was social: the loss of a more intimate way of life, with evenings spent with friends or neighbors, sipping wine and trading gossip. In the new age, those evenings are spent around the family’s television set, vicariously living the lives of others. In a series of interviews in the second half of the book, people who experienced the transformation describe their feelings about the changes, and the relationships that still exist, some strong, some weak, between the old life and the new, and the perceived gains and losses between the two.
In 1891 Benjamin Harrison, the first president engaged in conservation, had to have this new area of public policy explained to him by members of the Boone and Crockett Club. This didn’t take long, as he was only asked to sign a few papers setting aside federal timberland. But from such small moments great social movements grow, and the course of natural resource protection policy through 22 presidents has altered Americans’ relationship to the natural world in then almost unimaginable ways. Presidents and the American Environment charts this course. Exploring the ways in which every president from Harrison to Obama has engaged the expanding agenda of the Nature protection impulse, the book offers a clear, close-up view of the shifting and nation shaping mosaic of both “green” and “brown” policy directions over more than a century. While the history of conservation generally focuses on the work of intellectuals such as Muir, Leopold, and Carson, such efforts could only succeed or fail on a large scale with the involvement of the government, and it is this side of the story that Presidents and the American Environment tells. On the one hand, we find a ready environmental engagement, as in Theodore Roosevelt’s establishment of Pelican Island bird refuge upon being informed that the Constitution did not explicitly forbid it. On the other hand, we have leaders like Calvin Coolidge, playing hide-and-seek games in the Oval Office while ignoring reports of coastal industrial pollution. The book moves from early cautious sponsors of the idea of preserving public lands to crusaders like Theodore Roosevelt, from the environmental implications of the New Deal to the politics of pollution in the boom times of the forties and fifties, from the emergence of “environmentalism” to recent presidential detractors of the cause. From Harrison’s act, which established the American system of National Forests, to Barack Obama’s efforts on curbing climate change, presidents have mattered as they resisted or used the ever-changing tools and objectives of environmentalism. In fact, with a near even split between “browns” and “greens” over those 22 administrations, the role of president has often been decisive. How, and how much, distinguished historian Otis L. Graham, Jr., describes in in full for the first time, in this important contribution to American environmental history.
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