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Book Review
| City, Country, Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History. Edited by Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. viii + 296 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, index. $22.95.
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| One can judge a broad collection of essays like this in two ways: by assessing the scholarly quality and readability of the individual essays, and by evaluating the theoretical and intellectual coherence of the collection as a whole. By these standards, this new collection earns a mixed judgment. Nearly all the substantive essays are excellent on their own terms, using case-study material to explore the forces that have transformed nature and our attitude toward it. These include chapters on politics and the shaping of environmental and resource policy in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, the Ruhr, and rural Oregon; an illuminating essay by Elizabeth Blackmar on the role of real estate investment trusts in the homogeneous "malling" of America; and chapters that explore the environmental effects of colonial and post-colonial regimes. Taken together, these essays display the growing diversity of the field of environmental history as new work emerges on urban and non-American topics, one of the editors' two main aims. |
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Their other goal was to limn the theoretical underpinnings of environmental history as scholars have moved beyond its early origins in the rural West of the United States. Here, the collection falls short. As the title suggests, the editors emphasize two theoretical themes. The first is the central importance of land and landscape, the material of human work and the broader context of our impact on the world. The other is the theoretical importance of imperialism—as a historical, political-economic force as well as a metaphor for the hegemonic transformations of nature, place, and cultures that characterize modernity. While both strands may be important signals of the directions in which the field is headed, they are not well developed in this collection. Thomas Dunlap makes some headway in his essay on the often contradictory changes in the landscape to be found in Anglo-American settler societies and the role of conquest, science, and other dreams in the creation and destruction of new landscapes. The collection would be strengthened by greater attention to the substantial literatures on (1) place and landscape in human culture, and (2) theories of empire, globalization, and modernity. A connection may well exist between hydraulic mining in nineteenth-century California and maize fungi in twentieth-century West Africa—to take two of the fresh examples in the book—as evidence of the continuing and overwhelming power of imperial ambition and ideology over local place and custom. But this collection merely suggests the scope of the theoretical and historiographic tasks ahead. |
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Robert M. Rakoff is professor of politics and environmental studies at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts. |
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