| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

City, Country, Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History. Edited by Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. viii + 296 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, index. $22.95.

One can judge a broad collection of essays like this in two ways: by assessing the scholarly quality and readability of the individual essays, and by evaluating the theoretical and intellectual coherence of the collection as a whole. By these standards, this new collection earns a mixed judgment. Nearly all the substantive essays are excellent on their own terms, using case-study material to explore the forces that have transformed nature and our attitude toward it. These include chapters on politics and the shaping of environmental and resource policy in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, the Ruhr, and rural Oregon; an illuminating essay by Elizabeth Blackmar on the role of real estate investment trusts in the homogeneous "malling" of America; and chapters that explore the environmental effects of colonial and post-colonial regimes. Taken together, these essays display the growing diversity of the field of environmental history as new work emerges on urban and non-American topics, one of the editors' two main aims.

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