| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Marcus Hall. Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 310. $35.00.
We must credit the insights of this book to Marcus Hall's creative use of comparative analysis. After introducing George Perkins Marsh's analysis of the human causes of Mediterranean land degradation, Hall writes of the work by Italians in restoring Cuneo province's degenerated alpine uplands and of American efforts to restore degraded Wasatch mountain and plateau meadows. Most importantly he applies his creative ability to compare and contrast the ideological interpretations of the reason for land degradation and restoration.	1
Hall finds that Italians and Americans have divergent views of the causes of degradation. Italians and most Europeans see degradation as resulting from acts of nature. Americans and Canadians, by contrast, tend to see such destruction as caused by humans. The Italian point of view has resulted from the nation's long history of human interaction with the land. Humans in the Italian view restore the land by cultivating and domesticating it. Italians argue that human gardeners restore the land that nature has degraded by constructing such works as check dams, diversion ditches, and retaining walls, and by planting forests in a practice called bonifica. Significantly, much of the extensive restoration of degraded lands in Italy occurred under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.	. . .

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