Book Review

There is something of a vogue at the moment for producing regional and global environmental histories. For example, recent works have examined the whole world since the Holocene (Donald Hughes, An Environmental History of the World, 2001) and during the last century (J. R. McNeill, Something New Under The Sun, 2000); Britain since the industrial revolution (B. W. Clapp, An Environmental History of Britain Since the Industrial Revolution, 1994) and since the Pleistocene (I. G. Simmons, An Environmental History of Great Britain, 2001—so this review is not totally disinterested); and now the twentieth century. John Sheail is a historical geographer who has worked for government environmental bodies for most of his career and has produced a formidable series of detailed papers on a number of environmental themes and their regulation, along with books on nature conservation, on national parks, and on pesticides, all in the United Kingdom. Much of this work is now brought together in a book that focuses on the way in which the United Kingdom has dealt with perceived environmental problems and changes in the century ending in 1999.	1
The themes discussed, with a chapter on each, are planning mechanisms, water, forestry, environmental protection, agriculture, transport, hazards, and to end with, "The Century of the Environment." There is introductory material that sets out the variety of approaches adopted by some of the pioneers of the field (Donald Worster and William Cronon for example, though here amplified by landscape historians like W. G. Hoskins) and then looks at sources. As an organizing framework, though, Sheail decides to "temper generalisation with down-to-earth instances, drawn in large measure from archival sources." This latter phrase is the key to the volume for it is a history seen through the lenses of government, with other influences such as popular demand for open space or the findings of the natural sciences largely seen through the government's responses in committee minutes, white papers and acts of Parliament. Hence it is a book without maps, diagrams, or pictures.	2
It is, as anyone who has read one of Sheail's papers or books will expect, meticulous in its attention to detail, judicious in its selection of material, and ruthlessly detached in its view of our past. What becomes quite clear is that anybody interested in any segment of British environmental management in the twentieth century will have to start here. It is a foundational work that cannot be ignored in later writing and research, whether that be of a sectoral or temporal focus, though Northern Ireland is excluded. There are lots of things it is not, but more relevantly it fulfills the author's intention to produce a conspectus of environmental themes that have necessitated official attention. So it is no surprise that he ends by suggesting that incremental improvement (lacking entirely any revolutionary element) has been the outcome and this leads to Prime Minister Tony Blair's words in an address in 2000 that say that we can be richer by being greener and that by being greener we will enrich the quality of our lives. The British have a reputation for muddling through (Isaiah Berlin put it more elegantly) and here Sheail sets out a firm empirical case for the success of that way of doing things.	3
Reviewed by Ian Simmons FBA, who recently retired from his chair at the University of Durham, U.K. His book on Great Britain was reviewed in this journal in April 2002 and a nested volume on the moorlands of England and Wales went to press in autumn 2002. He hopes to enter the "world history" lists before too long.

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