| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Imperial Gullies: Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho. By Kate B. Showers. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2005. xxix + 346 pp. Series in Ecology and History. Illustrations, maps, notes, appendices, bibliographic essay, bibliography, index. Cloth $55.00.

Kate Showers carefully documents the history of gulley erosion and its relationship to colonial economies and colonial and postcolonial soil conservation schemes in Lesotho. Imperial Gullies is a thorough well-researched case study that contribes to the work of Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns—Lie of the Land (Oxford, 1996), and James Scott—Seeing Like a State (Yale, 1998). As this book shows, Lesotho is the high-profile dramatic national example linking failed development projects to soil erosion and extreme rural poverty. This is a powerful and devastating critique of colonial and postcolonial soil conservation programs, methods, and administration. The theses are clear: Erosion in Lesotho is a twentieth-century phenomenon brought on by colonial and national economic and development schemes and not the result of local farmers' ignorance and mismanagement. Colonial and national administrators applied projects not with bad intentions, but in haphazard ways with little research or oversight, with disregard for local knowledge, for local social and economic relationships, and for local environments, and with not enough attention to questions of sustainable and appropriate technologies.

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