| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Agrarmodernisierung und oekologische Folgen: Westfalen vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Edited by Karl Ditt, Rita Gudermann, Norwich Ruesse. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2001. xi + 812 pp. Illustrations, maps. List of contributors, bibliographies. $128.00.
Editors Ditt, Gudermann, and Ruesse have set themselves an ambitious goal. The book, a compilation of papers given at a conference in September 2000, aims at combining the two perspectives of agrarian and environmental history. It tries to foster a new understanding of the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society since the late eighteenth century, and the consequences of this transition for the environment in Westphalia, a region in northwestern Germany. Thirty authors from different disciplines look at a variety of aspects of rural life and work, including agrarian modernization, land consolidation, pesticides, rural tourism, agrarian politics, the rural economy, historical geography, and regional and landscape planning. In most cases, the synthesis of the perspectives works well and provides for a more comprehensive picture of environmental change.	1
The book also places the regional case study of Westphalia in the larger context of German agricultural history. Authors call for an ecological perspective to be added to the classical theories of historical demography (Gehrmann) and to the analysis of the take-off in agriculture (Gudermann). In his discussion of the impact of agriculture on the environment in the twentieth century, Ditt illustrates the interdependence of industrialized agriculture, mass consumption, and the global market and analyzes the reactions of farmers and agricultural legislators.	2
The main part of the book examines the effects of agricultural changes in Westphalia. Authors analyze the effect agricultural modernization had on the forest, the content of agricultural education, and the use of chemical substances, to name just a few. Bueschenfeld's article on pesticides in agriculture since 1945 does a wonderful job of reading "agrarian history as environmental history." He questions the effect of integrated pest control and critically discusses agrarian politics as well as the reaction of the public and agrarian interest groups to the long-ignored ecological damages.	. . .

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