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Book Review
| Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration. By Marcus Hall. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. xiv + 310 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $35.00.
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| Say you want to restore a human occupied landscape to a state of wilderness or pristine nature. How difficult is such a task, and is it even possible? Do Americans and Europeans see such undertakings in different lights, and if so, what do these differences tell us about the role of humans in their environ-ments? These are formidable questions and the answers have real, ecological consequences for planetary life. Marcus Hall has tackled these matters with vim and vigor, and in doing so has produced an engaging and intriguing study. |
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As an environmental historian and assistant professor at the University of Utah, Hall has already achieved some notable recognition for his work. Readers of this journal will recognized his piece "Repairing Mountains," (2001), which won the Ray Allen Billington Prize presented by the Western History Association for the best article published outside of the Western Historical Quarterly. Prior to this, his dissertation won the Rachel Carson Prize awarded by the American Society for Environmental History. |
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Hall emphasizes that how one works to sustain healthy ecosystems in one's surroundings is a matter of cultural perception. In short, he writes, "that there is both culture and nature in the land" (p. 240). Historically, these worldviews have had decided ecological consequences. Hall begins with an analysis of George Perkins Marsh's writing, which is held as representative of American cultural precepts of nature. In short, Marsh is shown as believing that people are "destroyers" of nature. Then Hall shifts the scene to the Italian Alp Piedmont province of Cuneo, where Quintino Sella and others were working to restore historical cultural landscapes by protecting them from the destructive forces of nature. Marsh resided in this region and was keenly aware of how Italians were approaching their maintenance strategies, which differed from his own recommendations. For Marsh, nature had to be "preserved" from the destructive effects of people whereas for Sella, the landscaped needed effective "gardening" techniques to restore it to some idealized state in the past, perhaps the forests of the Renaissance or the agricultural villas of ancient Rome. In all cases, Italians, because of their awareness of their deep history, viewed culture as an important component of any landscape, and nature as the threatening, destructive force. Hall carries this theme throughout his work and it is with this understanding that he makes it clear just how important a people's history and myths are in shaping their relative approaches to, and their ecological effects on, their environments. Hall's insights about the importance of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis are especially informative. Hall points out how American history really did not have much of an academic standing until the closing of the frontier, and the one unifying concept binding a polyglot, ethnically diverse population was its value placed on "wilderness," the incubator of American culture. Italians, on the other hand, had a deep sense of ethnically occupied spaces over many centuries, and they were more concerned with maintaining a healthy land that would continue to support and nurture cultural occupations. |
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Environmental historians, by and large, have not given much attention to the issues that Hall treats. Of course, there are numerous works on the etymology of "wilderness" and "nature," but little in the way of how the relativism of these words have contributed to actual landscape restoration and/or preservation. In the last few decades on the other hand, ecologists, park planners, and landscape architects have given quite a bit of attention to the issues that Hall raises. It is especially refreshing to see Hall recognize and draw upon the work of ecologists, as his bibliography references articles in journals such as Ecology. So it's a little surprising that one article from Ecology was missed or overlooked. Robert O'Neill, in "Is It Time to Bury the Ecosystem Concept?" Ecology 82 (No. 12, 2001): 3275–84, makes the cogent argument that humans should be considered a "keystone" species in any ecosystem. In this context, culture cannot be ignored as an ecological force along side other biotic and abiotic entities and forces. Perhaps O'Neill's piece marks the emergence of an American recognition of its own history that is beginning to encourage a landscape management approach resembling Italian thinking. |
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Hall does an excellent job of depicting the relative cultural meanings given to words such as nature, wilderness, preservation, restoration, and gardening. Less clear and consistent is Hall's own use of the word "nature." Is there an actual entity, nature, or is nature all together a cultural construct that meshes with other forces creating ecosystems of various complexities? Hall's definition, at least to this reader, is not clear. However, his comparison of ecological restoration and historical preservation is instructive, and one that preservationists have understood for quite some time. When restoring a historic building, one must consider what time period the building will represent, and how to achieve that state given that those historical conditions no longer exist. The same is true in restoring, repairing all landscapes—they are historical in nature, set in time, and consequently humans have to engage in maintenance given that the historical conditions that once gave rise to any particular landscape no longer exist. |
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Hall's work is intellectually engaging and anyone interested in how to approach landscape restoration will surely profit from reading this work. I know that my graduate students will be reading Earth Repair, and it should find a wide audience among environmental scholars, ecologists, and environmentalists. |
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Jim Sherow is an associate professor in the Department of History at Kansas State University. He is the author of Watering the Valley (Kansas, 1990), A Sense of the American West (New Mexico, 1998), and The Grasslands of the United States: An Environmental History (forthcoming in the spring of 2007). |
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