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Book Review
| The Origins of Modern Environmental Thought. By J. E. de Steiguer. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006. x + 246 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $24.95.
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| J. E. de Steiguer, a professor of natural resource economics and policy at the University of Arizona, provides readers with concise chapter-length introductions to key writers contributing to the American environmental movement in the decade following the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The volume is an updated and expanded version of the author's earlier The Age of Environmentalism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997) and is suitably intended for college-level classroom adoption. In addition to Carson, from whom de Steiguer clearly derives inspiration, he summarizes the major works of such expected writers as Kenneth Boulding, Garrett Hardin, Barry Commoner, Herman Daly, and Arne Naess. New to this volume are discussions of Stewart Udall, E. F. Schumacher, and Roderick Nash. Likely to be less well known, even to scholars, are environmental economists such as Harold Barnett, Chandler Morse, and Ronald Coase. For each of the fourteen authors surveyed, de Steiguer provides a brief biographical sketch and a textual analysis of the author's major work, including an assessment of its major strengths and weaknesses and how it was received by the reading public. He often uses a given author's work as a springboard for discussing issues not directly related to that individual's personal work, for example, James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis in a chapter on Lynn White and China's current population problem in his discussion of Paul Ehrlich. Also included is an assessment of the MIT/Club of Rome Limits to Growth computerized world model simulation project. |
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An introductory chapter on the foundations of environmental thought includes sketches of earlier thinkers and writers ranging from the classical economists Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill to environmental philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, among others. A second introductory chapter sketches out the socioeconomic conditions that underlie and help to explain the timing of the emergence of modern environmental thought, while a new concluding chapter looks beyond the early 1970s to bring the story up to the present. It is de Steiguer's hope that a complementary "accommodation among worldviews," particularly among neo-Malthusians, modern neoclassicists, and steady-state theorists, could work toward a resolution of environmental problems (pp. 214–215). |
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De Steiguer has offered up a useful complementary text for a range of undergraduate environmental studies courses, especially for the modern period that is its focus. That he goes beyond the more philosophically oriented household names to include key environmental economists is an especially welcome aspect. Beyond classroom adoption per se, instructors may well find the volume useful as a source of concise lecture material on specific individuals. The book's bibliography tends to focus on works by or about the writers and their works that de Steiguer profiles but would provide a starting point for students wishing to pursue research papers on related topics. In summary, this volume is an accessible introduction to environmental ideas and their "power ... to influence public opinion" (p. ix). |
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Stephen H. Cutcliffe is professor of history at Lehigh University, where he also directs the Science, Technology, and Society Program. He is currently co-editing with Martin Reuss a volume of essays on the intersection of environmental history and the history of technology to be published by the University of Virginia Press. |
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