Rural Mainers like to believe they have a special connection with the natural environment. The forests and the seas sustained them, economically and spiritually, long after other parts of New England – and some might say, parts of Maine – urbanized into the concrete amalgam of Boston-Hartford-New York.

A new book by two Maine historians examines how people’s views of the environment have directed the course of politics here and nationwide.

Richard Judd, a professor of history at the University of Maine in Orono, and Christopher Beach, an associate professor of history and humanities at Unity College, have spent recent summers collaborating on a book called “Natural States.” The authors describe idealized perceptions of nature as environmental imagination, and they chronicle its impact on the real world.

It was the environmental imagination, they say, that led to the creation of the Sierra Club, the Clean Water Act, and the Land Use Regulation Commission. The way we view the natural world is crucial to the policies that we make, said Judd and Beach.

The book focuses on 1954 to 1975, a period of tremendous change that included the birth of modern environmentalism, and on the striking similarities between Maine and Oregon, twin leaders in the national environmental movement.

“If you look at the history of just about any environmental issue that emerged in the ’70s, there’s Maine, there’s Oregon,” Judd said.

Both states are on the edge of large urban areas, but have retained their rural character. The states also share a strong sense of civic responsibility.

“That sense of identity is powerful,” Beach said. “You’re an Oregonian or a Mainer first.”

While Mainers complain about invasive transplants from Massachusetts, Oregonians bemoan the “Californication” of their special places.

“They’re both wrestling with this struggle between growth and preservation,” Judd said.

Maine and Oregon became representative of the city dwellers’ ideal perceptions of nature on each coast. Ironically, the environmental ethics that took hold among residents tended to grow from these outsiders’ perceptions.

Massachusetts residents dreamed about hiking through dense Maine forests, while urban Californians dreamed of salmon fishing in the Columbia River.

“A lot of the environmental imagination was a search for what people felt was missing in their lives,” Beach said.

The authors cite three eras of environmental imagination.

After World War II, urbanites imagined a pastoral paradise of people living and working in nature. A few years later, they looked north for wilderness. Then in the 1970s, they aimed to preserve a perfect balance between wild nature and human life with strict new development rules designed to create an “ecotopia.”

“This whole time is just laced with these revolutionary notions,” Judd said.

None of the movements ever really reached their ideals, but in many ways, Maine and Oregon became representative of those goals, Judd and Beach said.

There would be no Allagash Wilderness Waterway but for the environmental imagination, the authors said. The whole of the Penobscot River would likely be flooded by giant hydro dams without the wilderness ideal. Without a revolutionary yearning for “ecotopia,” land use planning wouldn’t exist.

During a recent interview, Beach and Judd also said that each of the mind-sets discussed in the book are still alive today in rural areas. Those who seek pure wilderness and those who would rather see people logging, fishing and farming in a sustainable way continue to fight it out in policy debates almost daily.

Maine and Oregon have diverged in recent years, with money and development having transformed the tone of Western politics during the ’80s and ’90s, the historians said.

But Maine now faces a similar crossroads.

Natural resource-based industries and urban sprawl have replaced polluting corporations “from away” as the villains of the day, the authors said. Suddenly, we’re fighting against ourselves on both coasts, and the sweeping bipartisanship and civic responsibility of past years is rare.

The whole country has become less connected to land and water and wildlife, and consequently, less involved in protecting it on the local level, the authors said.

“This powerful civic engagement took a lot of energy. Eventually people needed to take a breather. By the time they got reorganized, time had moved on,” Beach said.

The environmentalism of the future may have to take new forms, the historians said.

Some people are seeking a personal paradise in big back yards and vacation cabins. Others have returned to the city, hoping to level the economic and racial playing fields and make a clean environment available to all through the nascent environmental justice movement.

“I’m not pessimistic that we reached the high tide of environmental imagination in the ’70s,” Beach said. “These ideas are still relevant to people’s hopes and dreams.”

“Natural States: The Environmental Imagination in Maine, Oregon and the Nation,” was published by Resources for the Future Press. The book is available online at www.rffpress.org, $32.95 hardcover or $19.95 paperback.