During the “cultural turn” of the 1990s, leading environmental historians deconstructed one of the field’s key terms. Nature, they contended, should not be defined in opposition to society. William Cronon influentially argued this was “the trouble with wilderness”; environmentalists idealized pristine worlds that had never existed and left no place for people. A generation of environmental historians have since spent their careers writing about hybrid natural-cultural landscapes, but through this reflective turn, the term that actually gave the field its name remained surprisingly underexamined. Etienne S. Benson’s Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms joins a crop of monographs, especially Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin’s The Environment: The History of an Idea (2018), that historicize the field’s framing concept. However, Surroundings performs a deeper and broader archaeology of the contexts that shaped the term’s meaning than comparable texts. This wide-ranging yet nuanced survey demonstrates the concept’s extraordinary adaptability from its origins in late eighteenth-century colonial natural history to global warming and the current proliferation of environmental humanities programs. “Environment” lacks “nature’s” romantic allure but, as Benson shows, its interpretive flexibility attracted an eclectic cast of scientists, doctors, social reformers, technocrats, and activists whose environmental projects had profound consequences. This array of “environments and environmentalisms” matches the diverse interests of a mature field that, like the movement with which it coevolved, is no longer (and never really was) preoccupied with preservation. Surroundings provides historical contexts for environmentalisms framed in terms of justice.