Children are the future. Or so we like to tell ourselves. In the wake of the Second World War, Americans took this notion to heart. Confronted by both unprecedented risks and unprecedented opportunities, they elevated and perhaps exaggerated the significance of children for the survival of the human race. Razing Kids analyzes the relationship between the postwar demographic explosion and the birth of postwar ecology. In the American West, especially, workers, policymakers, and reformers interwove hopes for youth, environment, and the future. They linked their anxieties over children to their fears of environmental risk as they debated the architecture of wartime playgrounds, planned housing developments and the impact of radioactive particles released from distant hinterlands. They obsessed over how riot-riddled cities, War on Poverty era rural work camps and pesticide-laden agricultural valleys would affect children. Nervous about the world they were making, their hopes and fears reshaped postwar debates about what constituted the social and environmental good.

'Jeff Sanders has a well-deserved reputation as one of our most astute analysts of environmentalism. In this engrossing, compelling work, he reframes our understanding of the modern American West and the planetary history of which it is part. No reader of Razing Kids will see the world in quite the same way.'

Mark Fiege - Professor of History, Montana State University

'If you think today’s young climate activists are the vanguard of a child-centered movement to save the planet, Razing Kids will open your eyes. Sanders demonstrates that young people have stood, bodily and imaginatively, at the forefront of a wide variety of urban environmental movements in the post-war era. This highly readable, sometimes chilling study suggests that the slogan ‘the children are our future’ is more than a cliché.'

Marsha Weisiger - Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of US Western History, University of Oregon

'… smart and fascinating … An insightful and thoroughly professional book.'

Robert O. Self Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

‘… an ambitious, well-written, and well-researched study of relationships, imagined and actual, between the environment and children from roughly 1940 to 1990 … The author’s focus on the intersection of youth and environmentalism sheds new light and insights on familiar topics, such as the Summer of Love, and enriches diverse fields of study, including western history, environmental history, and the history of the family.’

David Peterson Del Mar Source: Pacific Historical Review

‘… a meticulous, compelling work on environmental policies about children in postwar western America that should become a pivotal work in the field.’

Elizabeth D. Blum Source: Agricultural History