| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.4

Book Review

The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment, 1770–1950. By William Beinart. Oxford: Oxford University Press. iii + 425 pp. Maps, illustrations, tables. $165.00.
William Beinart delivers a specifically and essentially South African history of conservation in this book. To tell the story, he starts with the problem of degradation, when and where South Africans noticed their own deleterious effect on the environment. This was in the Cape Midlands, a region with private sheep farms owned by whites, in the late eighteenth century. Retaining the focus on the arid interior (also known as the Karoo) through nine chapters, the book follows the growing recognition of a problem and the development of measures against it into the mid-twentieth century. The problem in the Karoo was that pasture quality seemed to be declining. Grass cover, water supply, stock parasites, predation by jackals; it all seemed to be getting worse, and farmers, especially Anglophone "progressives," considered and devised ways to do something about it. Eventually, state regulation grew out of these insights and after the early twentieth century, thanks to locally based understandings and locally devised practices, the environment appears to have stabilized.	1
This history is specifically South African because of its emphasis on local origins. Beinart follows Richard Grove in demonstrating that conservation worldwide did not originate in North America. While some connections with the United States are shown, Australia provides, perhaps, the more fruitful comparisons. It is essentially South African because it lays emphasis on the fact that people of all backgrounds participated in the conversation about environmental conditions and shared a history of conservation. Beinart demonstrates that scientists could learn from local observers; wealthier and poorer farmers did share opinions, as did white English-speakers, white Afrikaners, and blacks. Although farmers did not always agree with scientists and bureaucrats, Beinart identifies similar experiences among white and black farmers vis à vis the authorities. Furthermore, he stresses that conservation in black and white areas grew out of the same body of knowledge about degradation and its remedies. Early settlers and travelers provide the best evidence for this point, which is an important one for African environmental history and the history of science.	2
This book emerges as a counterweight to South African environmental histories that make social division and state involvement central to human relations with the environment. The central story is of the conceptual, and to a lesser extent, the physical, relations between these farmers and their environment. In later chapters, nonhumans become actors in a changing landscape. Jackals, in particular, are shown to be lively participants in ecological processes and human schemes. In contrast, the history of the environment itself is a step removed from the analysis in early chapters, since Beinart does not attempt a narrative of environmental change independent of the perceptions of his observers. With such a tight focus on the history of ideas, the first half of book might have been called "Degradation and the South African Mind." We learn in great detail the history of changing understandings —of the destructiveness of transhumance, of the proper use of fire, and of disease etiology. The book lays out an incremental genealogy from local observers of ecological changes in the eighteenth century through self-consciously scientific experts and progressive farmers in the late nineteenth century and eventually state regulation until the middle of the twentieth century. Eventually, the narrative also explores, again based on exhaustive research, the practical solutions that farmers devised against the problem of degradation —dam building, fencing, jackal poisoning, herd management, and Opuntia control. The Rise of Conservation in South Africa provides essential comparative material of wide interest on the specific thinking behind and techniques of conservation.	3
As the problem of degradation and what to do about it became the preoccupation of white male landowners, especially the elite who qualified as "progressive," other participants and folk understandings fall out of the narrative. Beinart gives close attention to individuals, but few other than white male scientists, bureaucrats, politicians, and landowners rise to the level of identifiable subjects. One wishes for a stronger evaluation of the ways that the circumstances of this particular group shaped their thinking and action on conservation. Analysis of the politics of progressivism, for example, is not fully developed and historians of other areas will not find ample material to sustain comparisons on the subject.	4
Having spun diverse strands into one cord of conservationist understandings, practice, and regulation in the Midlands, the tenth chapter traces this thread to black reserves. On the subject of conservation, black reserves have until now received far more attention than white farms, from both the state and historians. Previous histories (including some by Beinart) have characterized conservation on black reserves as ill advised, unpopular, and coercive. In fact, the author explains that his quest to understand conservation on black reserves motivated his research into the development of conservation science. In keeping with the earlier emphasis on connections across South Africa's racial groups, this chapter stresses continuity between conservation on white farms and black reserves. Without a doubt, Beinart has shown that a genealogy stretches back to the midlands, but the heavy emphasis on continuities is not balanced by a discussion of the ways conservation mutated as it crossed racial and economic boundaries. For example, the suggestion that state intervention into privately held white farms provided a precedent to coercion on reserves is not developed. We also learn that some black farmers supported conservation measures, but the chapter does not probe the specific position of black "progressives" in local and national society and how it shaped their support. Coercion in and resistance to conservation are acknowledged, but more attention is given to the debate about problems and the development of corrective interventions. Because conservation measures are portrayed as the expression of an understanding, the point appears to be that an uncontaminated core of well-considered environmental concepts lay encapsulated within coercive racialized programs. Even if it was possible that scientific environmental understandings could inform policy in isolation from racial considerations, in the entirety of factors shaping the rehabilitation on segregated reserves, that core was not large. Beinart does concede that the chapter is "less ambitious" than needed to mount a comprehensive analysis of conservation on reserves (pp. 333–334), but it is striking that such an exhaustively researched book offers this narrow an analysis of conservation on black reserves.	5
The final chapter evaluates the environmental changes, what has been and what might yet be done about them. The measured tone in this chapter suggests why the book has not been more directly about ecological change, as Beinart is cautious about his use of scientific evidence and with his conclusions about widespread ecological processes and land policy for post-apartheid South Africa. The chapter also questions the assertion made in the salvo against apartheid, that white farmers had wrecked the Karoo grasslands, another caution against assumptions about race in environmental history. Historians must denaturalize racial categories. In several instances Beinart has successfully done this, but the book's contention that the Cape Midlands bequeathed the rest of South Africa the essence of its conservation policy and practice leaves much unexplained.	6
Nancy Jacobs is associate professor in the departments of history and Africana studies at Brown University. She is the author of Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South African History (Cambridge, 2003). Her current research is on the relations between people with and around birds in sub-Saharan Africa.

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