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Is the environment worth the effort? The environment often seems far too easy, far too obligatory, and far too footloose a concept to warrant serious attention. It somehow evokes both bookish abstraction and populist rousing, it cobbles together science and advocacy only to blunt their conjoined insights, and it continues to elude fixed definition even while basking in stately recognition. The banalities of this mess can give the impression that the environment has no real history, no critical content, and heralds no true rupture of thought and practice. The environment, in the eyes of some, is mere advertising. If there is a story to the environment, others suggest, it’s largely one of misplaced materialism, middle class aesthetics, and first world problems. Such has been the sentiment, such has been the dismissal. In the rush to move past the environment, few have attended to the history of the concept. This is curious as the constitution of the environment remains a surprisingly recent achievement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the environment shifted from an erudite shorthand for the influence of context to the premier diagnostic of a troubling new world of induced precarity (whether called Umwelt, l’environnement, medio ambiente, huanjing, mazingira, or lingkungan). The environment – a term “once so infrequent and now becoming so universal,” as the director of the Nature Conservatory commented in 1970 (Nicholson: 5) – soon came to monopolize popular and scientific understandings of damaged life and the states’ obligation to it worldwide. Even as the environment has been immensely productive for research and policy in the following decades, the formation of the environment itself remains understudied. In the United States, this is particularly clear in two aspects of the environment: 1) the role of fossil fuels in making the environment visible, factual, and politically operable; and 2) the precocious if weightless critique authorized by the environment.