The recipient of this year’s S-USIH Book Prize, awarded annually for the best academic book in US intellectual history published in the previous year, is Keith Makoto Woodhouse, for The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
In The Ecocentrists, Keith Makoto Woodhouse has crafted a provocative history of the radical environmental movement that exposes the tensions between the human-centeredness of modern liberal thought and the concerns to defend the natural world that is increasingly imperiled by human development. Beginning with both the theoretical divide between nature and culture and early movements to defend the land from human intervention, Woodhouse charts the rise of movement radicalism and its increasingly-recognized insistence that human welfare alone cannot be the sole measure of political thought and behavior. In doing so, he creates a sympathetic defense of the organizations and individual thinkers who emphasized nature-first thinking, one attentive to the limits of radical thought yet also sensitive to the importance of human connectedness to land and nature. We also recognize Woodhouse’s book as a superb model of intellectual history. By considering the connections between human beings and nature beginning with the cultural turn in environmental thought, and simultaneously, as a product of human relationships that were crafted in response to growing world economies and scales of production, Woodhouse has provided a powerful assessment of one of the most pressing issues of our time.
For these accomplishments, we honor The Ecocentrists with the Best Book Prize in Intellectual History for 2019.
S-USIH Book Prize Committee: Ruben Flores (Chair), Sarah E. Gardner, Paul Murphy
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