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Book Review
| The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment, 1770–1950. By William Beinart. Oxford: Oxford University Press. iii + 425 pp. Maps, illustrations, tables. $165.00.
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| William Beinart delivers a specifically and essentially South African history of conservation in this book. To tell the story, he starts with the problem of degradation, when and where South Africans noticed their own deleterious effect on the environment. This was in the Cape Midlands, a region with private sheep farms owned by whites, in the late eighteenth century. Retaining the focus on the arid interior (also known as the Karoo) through nine chapters, the book follows the growing recognition of a problem and the development of measures against it into the mid-twentieth century. The problem in the Karoo was that pasture quality seemed to be declining. Grass cover, water supply, stock parasites, predation by jackals; it all seemed to be getting worse, and farmers, especially Anglophone "progressives," considered and devised ways to do something about it. Eventually, state regulation grew out of these insights and after the early twentieth century, thanks to locally based understandings and locally devised practices, the environment appears to have stabilized. |
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This history is specifically South African because of its emphasis on local origins. Beinart follows Richard Grove in demonstrating that conservation worldwide did not originate in North America. While some connections with the United States are shown, Australia provides, perhaps, the more fruitful comparisons. It is essentially South African because it lays emphasis on the fact that people of all backgrounds participated in the conversation about environmental conditions and shared a history of conservation. Beinart demonstrates that scientists could learn from local observers; wealthier and poorer farmers did share opinions, as did white English-speakers, white Afrikaners, and blacks. Although farmers did not always agree with scientists and bureaucrats, Beinart identifies similar experiences among white and black farmers vis à vis the authorities. Furthermore, he stresses that conservation in black and white areas grew out of the same body of knowledge about degradation and its remedies. Early settlers and travelers provide the best evidence for this point, which is an important one for African environmental history and the history of science. |
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This book emerges as a counterweight to South African environmental histories that make social division and state involvement central to human relations with the environment. The central story is of the conceptual, and to a lesser extent, the physical, relations between these farmers and their environment. In later chapters, nonhumans become actors in a changing landscape. Jackals, in particular, are shown to be lively participants in ecological processes and human schemes. In contrast, the history of the environment itself is a step removed from the analysis in early chapters, since Beinart does not attempt a narrative of environmental change independent of the perceptions of his observers. With such a tight focus on the history of ideas, the first half of book might have been called "Degradation and the South African Mind." We learn in great detail the history of changing understandings —of the destructiveness of transhumance, of the proper use of fire, and of disease etiology. The book lays out an incremental genealogy from local observers of ecological changes in the eighteenth century through self-consciously scientific experts and progressive farmers in the late nineteenth century and eventually state regulation until the middle of the twentieth century. Eventually, the narrative also explores, again based on exhaustive research, the practical solutions that farmers devised against the problem of degradation —dam building, fencing, jackal poisoning, herd management, and Opuntia control. The Rise of Conservation in South Africa provides essential comparative material of wide interest on the specific thinking behind and techniques of conservation. |
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