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Book Review
| Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment. By Joachim Radkau. Publications of the German Historical Institute Series. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xvii + 430 pp. Notes and index. Cloth $80.00, paper $24.99.
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| An English translation of Joachim Radkau's Natur und Macht, published in German by C. H. Beck in 2002, has been keenly awaited by environmental historians interested in the world dimension of the subject, and this book will not disappoint. The title reflects the ambitious theme. Nature is not mere social construction for Radkau. It has a life of its own, he maintains, citing the Roman poet Horace, "Though you may drive out nature with the pitchfork, it will return" (pp. 17–18). The other term, Power, reveals the affinity of environmental history to social and cultural history, since it is collective human power, often political, to which he refers. He asks which forms of power, and on what scale, have the most important effects on nature, and which can produce desired effects. Of course to answer that question requires value judgments, and Radkau demurs, "Environmental history revolves not around 'ought,' but 'is'" (p. 27). Although his descriptive powers are enviable, like most historians he often revisits the normative, and that is where he ends: "a new kind of politics is what environmental protection urgently needs today" (p. 330). |
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Although many environmental problems reached their distinctive shapes only in modern times, the frame of world environmental history cannot be limited to recent events, since both environment and human behavior have been in formation for millennia. Radkau chooses, therefore, to contemplate the sweep of history from primeval symbioses of humans and nature to today's global economy. Looking at modes of human interaction with nature, he discerns five eras within this span. They are the times of subsistence hunting and agriculture, of great civilizations dependent on water and wood, of colonialism, of the Industrial Revolution, and of globalization. These are historical configurations, not strict chronological units, and with the exception of the last one (did it start in the 1950s or 1960s?), Radkau does not argue about dates, and dares to make comparisons far across space and time. His periodization is functional, although since it avoids the customary turns of time, world history teachers will be challenged to fit it to the syllabus, or the reverse. |
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