In those excited words – the introduction to a cover story in 1950 – Time heralded a revolution in American life. Instead of building houses one at a time, the new leaders of the housing industry had begun to use factory like methods of mass production.

On January 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon inaugurated a new decade and a new era by signing the National Environmental Policy Act. The act declared a national interest in protecting and restoring environmental quality, required officials to prepare environmental impact assessments for federal projects, and established a Council on Environmental Quality to advise the president. Seven months later, President Nixon sent the CEQ's first annual report to Congress. The report was “a historic milestone.” For the first time, the president explained, Americans had paused to consider carefully “the state of the Nation's environment.”

The CEQ marveled at the moment. “Historians may one day call 1970 the year of the environment,” the report began. “They may not be able to say that 1970 actually marked a significant change for the better in the quality of life; in the polluting and the fouling of the land, the water, and the air; or in health, working conditions, and recreational opportunity. Indeed, they are almost certain to see evidence of worsening environmental conditions in many parts of the country.” Yet 1970 surely was “a turning point, a year when the quality of life has become more than a phrase; environment and pollution have become everyday words; and ecology has become almost a religion to some of the young. Environmental problems, standing for many years on the threshold of national prominence, are now at the center of nationwide concern.

About 20 years ago, the best-selling chronicler of American middle-class culture, Erma Bombeck, offered a succinct interpretation of the rise of suburbia:

In that passage from The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, Bombeck humorously noticed what more scholarly observers have overlooked: Like the automobile and the highway, the septic tank was a key element in the suburbanization of the United States. With backyard systems for waste disposal, houses did not need to be near municipal sewer lines, so the area available for suburban development expanded tremendously.

Because the census bureau did not begin to count the nation's septic tanks until 1960, historians have no sure way to gauge the increase in numbers after World War II. But the available evidence makes clear that the increase was phenomenal. In 1945, according to one government estimate, only about 4.5 million homes had septic tanks.

In September 1943, Newsweek offered a tantalizing glimpse of a possible postwar “dream house.” “One way for America to hedge against future fuel shortages would be to build more solar homes like that of Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Duncan in Homewood, a Chicago suburb,” the piece began. Designed by architect George Keck to receive a maximum amount of the sun's heat in winter and a minimum amount in summer, the Duncans' solar home saved money and resources. Even on the coldest January days, the magazine announced, the couple seldom had to turn on the furnace. This was indeed a home to grip “the imagination of postwar thinkers and builders.”

The Newsweek story was just one of dozens of articles about solar homes to appear before the end of World War II. In a 1944 feature titled “The Proven Merit of a Solar Home,” Reader's Digest called Keck's work “probably the most exciting architectural news in decades.” In movie theaters across the country, millions of Americans saw a newsreel about the exciting promise of solar design. From Architectural Forum to American Builder, the trade press also explored the possibilities. In 1945, a builder of prefabricated homes received nationwide publicity after announcing plans to sell a modern, affordable solar house. According to a Popular Mechanics reviewer, the new house was a breakthrough, the first application of “the solar principle to large-scale production of better, brighter, easily heated homes.”

In 1950, photographer William Garnett made a series of aerial photographs of the construction of Lakewood Park, a California suburb. Four of Garnett's images soon became iconic. The first was a bulldozed landscape – a large tract of earth with no topographical features, no trees or grass, indeed no visible life of any kind. In the second photograph, the tract had dozens of foundations in lines stretching indefinitely beyond the frame. Except for the utility poles and the piles of lumber by each foundation, nothing rose more than a few feet above the ground. The third photograph showed the wood skeletons of the houses-to-be. In the fourth photograph, the roofs and walls were done. The ground was still bare and the streets unpaved. But the tract was about to become a neighborhood.

The photographs were commissioned by the developers. Like Levittown, Lakewood Park exemplified a revolutionary new way of building, and the developers took great pride in the project. “This is planning as businessmen can do it,” one told Time magazine. The development was a gigantic undertaking, covering 3,500 acres and costing $135 million. The plans called for the assembly line construction of 17,000 homes. The community would also have 17 churches, 20 schools, 37 playgrounds – and a shopping center with department stores, supermarkets, banks, service stations, offices, movie theaters, and recreation facilities. In two years, the developers predicted, more than 70,000 people would live in Lakewood Park.

In 1950, economist K. William Kapp published a pioneering book entitled The Social Costs of Private Enterprise. He did not mention homebuilding at all, and he devoted only a page to urban land use, yet his work offered a powerful analysis of the environmental problems caused by the postwar pattern of development.

The capitalist system contained a fundamental flaw, Kapp argued, since businesses routinely forced members of society to pay a significant part of the costs of production. To illustrate the point, Kapp considered a handful of environmental issues, including air and water pollution, soil erosion, destruction of wildlife, and waste of energy. Because no one charged for the use of air as a waste depository, manufacturers sent dirty, destructive, and deadly pollutants into the skies. Manufacturers also destroyed aquatic life, contaminated drinking supplies, and marred the aesthetic qualities of water by pouring wastes into rivers, lakes, and oceans. To reduce the costs of logging, timber companies often left steep slopes to erode, and so increased the siltation of streams and the severity of floods. In the race to exploit limited oil, gas, and coal resources, extractive firms used inefficient means of production and abandoned wells and mines prematurely. Market hunters also took for today without thought of tomorrow. For a number of species, from the passenger pigeon to the whale, the result of competitive exploitation was extinction or near-extinction.

“Take a last look,” William Whyte told the readers of Life in 1959. “Some summer's morning drive past the golf club on the edge of town, turn off onto a back road and go for a short trip through the open countryside. Look well at the meadows, the wooded draws, the stands of pine, the creeks and streams, and fix them in your memory. If the American standard of living goes up another notch, this is about the last chance you will have.”

Why? What was the problem? “Go back toward the city five or 10 miles,” Whyte wrote. “Here, in what was pleasant countryside only a year ago, is a sight of what is to come. No more sweep of green – across the hills are splattered scores of random subdivisions, each laid out in the same dreary asphalt curves. Gone are the streams, brooks, woods and forests that the subdivisions' signs talked about. The streams are largely buried in concrete culverts. Where one flows briefly through a patch of weeds and tin cans it is fetid with the ooze of septic tanks. A row of stumps marks the place where sycamores used to shade the road and if a stand of maple or walnut still exists the men with power saws will soon be at it. Here and there a farm remains, but the ‘For Sale’ signs are up and now even the golf course is to be chopped into lots.”

“The great issue in planning is not where to build,” planner S. B. Zisman wrote in 1965, “but where not to build.”

With that dictum, Zisman summarized a dramatic change in the planning profession. For decades, the principal task of urban planners was to decide where to allow residential, commercial, and industrial development. What areas should be restricted in use, and what areas should be open to all forms of building? On planning and zoning maps, a different color represented each type of land use, while open space – as yet unzoned and undeveloped – was typically white. But the explosive growth of suburbia after World War II changed the way planners thought about the white spaces on city maps. Year after year, as cities consumed more land, people began to appreciate the value of open space. “The chief lesson to be learned,” Zisman argued, “is that open space is a functional land use – open space is not the left-over land, or the vacant land, the unused land or the waste land. It is of an equal order of consideration with any kind of development.” That meant that planners now needed to ask a new question. What sites were more valuable as open space than as subdivisions, shopping centers, or factories?

As my subtitle suggests, The Bulldozer in the Countryside is about the relationship between two of the great stories of modern American history, the mass migration to the suburbs and the rise of the environmental movement. Each story has inspired a considerable scholarly literature. Yet scholars so far have not recognized the important connections between the two stories. The construction of tract-house subdivisions after World War II changed the nature of millions of acres of land, and a variety of people soon began to complain about the environmental costs of suburban development. The Bulldozer in the Countryside argues that the elaboration of an environmental critique of homebuilding in the period from 1945 to 1970 played an important role in the emergence of environmentalism.

When I started my research, however, I did not expect to write a book about the environmental movement: I simply saw a chance to help overcome a serious shortcoming in the literature of environmental history. The scholarship in the field has focused mainly on rural forms of production – farming, ranching, mining, lumbering, fishing, and hunting. Yet the enterprises of the metropolis also have had profound environmental consequences. Since I wanted to write about suburbia, I decided to focus on homebuilding. How had the environmental impact of residential development changed over time? In answering that question, I hoped to contribute to scholarly understanding of urban environmental history.