Book Review

Comparative/World

This ambitious, provocative, original book argues that late nineteenth and early twentieth-century reformers in Australia and California attempted to create or restore a rural landscape characterized by variety, beauty, harmony, justice, and productiveness. Neither Australia nor California turned desert into garden or democratized rural society, but the failure resulted more from each region's role in a global capitalist system than from national, cultural, or political differences.

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The book builds on three theories: the relationship of core and periphery in international capitalism; the influence of export markets on the nature of agriculture; and how conceptions of the ideal physical environment help shape economic development and public policies. Ideas and institutions passed freely from one region to the other. The book begins with a summary of the perceived need for a balance between forested and cropped land in the works of George Perkins Marsh and Baron Ferdinand von Mueller. Both became interested in the transfer of plants and animals from one continent to another. The author of Man and Nature (1864), Marsh is well known as the founding father of human ecology in the United States. Mueller, however, is little known. A German transplanted to Australia, he became a major figure in the "acclimatization" of plants and animals: their adaptation to new environments. Succeeding chapters treat the export of such plants as eucalyptus and Monterey Pine trees, attempts to create family farms and dense agricultural settlements, the political economy of horticulture, the evolution of irrigation, and efforts to control insect pests through biological agents rather than pesticides.

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