Book Review

Brownlash extremists and Texan Bush-men excluded, there is nowadays not much opposition to the idea that nature is something we need to care about. Environmentalism, only decades ago also a form of extremism, has become mainstream. However, its interpretation in practice is still contested. In Negotiating Nature, Alf Hornborg, professor of human ecology at Lund University, Sweden, and Gísli Pálsson, professor at the University of Iceland, Reykjavik, have assembled a largely Scandinavian group of contributors to discuss the ongoing social practices vis à vis nature. Their common point of departure is that nature is today a partner in that discussion to a hitherto unknown extent. As Maarten Hajer claimed in The Politics of Environmental Discourse (Oxford, 1994) there is an "ecological modernization" making its way into the policy process. With their disciplinary backgrounds in anthropology, ethnology, and human ecology, the contributors to this volume do not wrestle too closely with the policy process. Rather the essays of this book center on different cultural manifestations of this ever-more politicized nature.	1
The discussions among nature's users and practitioners, much neglected in neoclassical economic analysis, is quite relevant for a cultural analysis of the environment. Thus, the book purports to be as much about ecological argument as about culture, but it also raises the question about how environmental argument is embedded in culture. "Culture," with a capital C, has in anthropological discourse sometimes been equated with the Weltanschaung of an Ethnos. Here, we are made aware that this very general level of analysis is rarely relevant. Tim Ingold, in a concluding commentary, relates how Andrew P. Vayda's classic of human ecology, Environment and Cultural Behavior (Natural History Press, 1969), discussed non-Western (but not Western) societies as having had their cultures somehow shaped by their environment, thus making nature a prime factor in essentializing culture. Those were the days of seeing a strong, one-directional ecological influence on (pre-modern) human affairs.	2
Several of the nine chapters steer clear of this deterministic entrapment. Ebba Lisberg Jensen demonstrates the power of professional cultures by examining Swedish forestry, where scientists and bureaucrats made up an expert culture that clashed with that of the environmentalists. However, during the 1980s and 1990s that expert culture went through what seems to have been a major shift. Ecopolitical concepts such as biodiversity and sustainability became part of foresters' vocabulary and created a middle ground on which to meet the environmentalists. Connie Reksten Kapstad examines the Norwegian environmental youth movement Natur og Ungdom (NU). Through careful interviews, she shows that these activists used their bodies as instruments of action, and that action is a self-contained universe of meaning. The nature being negotiated here concerns that of the NU-activists themselves and their own identity, which, in Norway, has turned from the usual activist stereotype with its paraphernalia (Icelandic sweaters, Palestinian shawls) into something more middle of the road-ish, politically and aesthetically. Kapstad's elaborate attempt to detach action from text may not be very useful, but indirectly she demonstrates that negotiations on nature do take place on many levels at the same time.	3
Alf Hornborg attempts to escape the old "man-nature" dualisms by following Dieter Steiner's "human ecological triangle" and including "society" with "nature" and "person" to better understand relationships and exchange patterns in cultures ancient and contemporary. This learned and theoretically well-articulated essay brings on a par today's global exchange patterns with old local notions of reciprocity and personalized relationships between man and nature. However, despite the attempt to bring society in, there is still not a very clear analysis of what power is, as if societies lacked this dimension.	4
These omissions are probably not accidental. They occur, more or less, in most contributions, however subtle and informative they are: Katarina Saltzman's on the landscape controversies on the Baltic island of Öland; Orvar Löfgren's on landscape experiences and aesthetic sensibility in tourism; and Birgitta Svensson's on cultural heritage and the commodification of historical landscapes. They also are conspicuous in some of the chapters on natural resources, like the one by Agnar Helgasson, Odinn Gunnar Odinsson, and Gísli Pálsson on Icelandic fishing, and the one by Hugh Beach on Swedish reindeer-pastoralism. The cultures unearthed in this collection appear to be formed in a reactive fashion. Insofar that there is a power, it is a distant faceless power to which culture responds and then, probably, changes. Although not clearly described, power is taken for granted as a causal external explanation of change.	5
Was this really intended? The editors claim at the outset that several of the chapters do not reify environmental sensibility into an attribute of particular cultures or occupations. Rather they see a more indirect mediation of power, a "discursive interchange between local life-worlds and abstract authority." This is an excellent program, if not for the fact that power is rarely abstract, in reality. When it becomes more concretely pictured, such as in Lisberg Jensen's foresters and their operationalized environmental principles, or in the fishing quotas put into place by the Icelandic government, the "discursive interchange" tends to surface, enigmatically, from underneath some methodological veil.	6
Maybe this flaw in an otherwise interesting book is just a function of the cultural analyst's tools, so rich in theories and methods to decipher the articulations on the cultural level but, perhaps, less well equipped to understand the wider societal forces with which cultures interact. This is not a severe criticism of the individual contributions to this volume; most of them are examples of solid scholarship and, even, healthy signs of a widening agenda of cultural analysis toward what we may call human ecology. But the authors' weak (practiced) interest in society and power reflects a recent tendency in cultural analysis to rely heavily on reading the manifestations of social phenomena rather than looking for their roots. This threatens to devaluate culture in a way these authors may not wish. If they took their own program— "Culture, Power, and Environmental Argument" —more seriously, they would see power in culture and culture in power, and they would probably find an environmental argument that is far more permeated with both than that which they are here able to present. We can only hope that, given some time, the solid training in cultural analysis that these authors represent will blend with social theory to form a human ecology that, instead of providing subtle rehearsals of Andrew Vayda's one-directionalism, can transgress borders interactively. I trust it will.	7
Sverker Sörlin, professor of environmental history in the Division of History of Science and Technology at the Royal School of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, has published most recently an edited volume, with Michael T. Bravo, Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices, (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2002).

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.