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Book Review
| Storia dell'Ambiente: Una Introduzione. [History of the Environment: An Introduction]. Marco Armiero and Stefania Barca. Roma: Carocci editore, 2004. 211pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Paperback, 16.80 euro.
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| It is with great anticipation and some trepidation that I sit down with a non-English book about environmental history. I have found that more often than not, such works are either rough approximations of what has by and large already appeared in my mother tongue, or else are so far from what most practicing ASEH members consider their pursuit as to hardly qualify as environmental history. But there is always the exciting possibility of discovering new nuggets, uncovered and gleaned in someone else's intellectual tradition, which just might offer new sparkles for illuminating my own past environments—and so reward me for the efforts I spend looking up words or sending them through translator programs. Happily for readers of Italian, Armiero and Barca have produced what may be considered a new synthesis, providing environmental historians with an up-to-date synopsis of the field and a baseline from which to craft their own research. One may quibble with how they have organized their survey, or why they praise one classic more than another, but there is little question that this book is a model of how other historiographic surveys in yet other languages—including English—might be done if environmental history is to reach its full audience and potential. |
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Theirs is true global environmental history, which by all signs this field aspires to become. In five short chapters ordered around the keywords of History, Nature, Economy, Resources, and Ecology, the authors summarize nearly every major book or article in environmental history along with many lesser known works, jumping disciplines and oceans to suggest central themes and ways that such themes overlap. While they focus most of their discussion on North American scholarship, they also review classics published in every major European language about events happening in every continent. And true to their readership, they round out their comments by discussing how Italy's own historians and publications have or have not addressed issues raised by these events, offering candid praise, critique, or prescription for how to move the field forward. Surely there is no other book sporting a bibliography with Cronon next to Corona, Guha next to Gobbi, Pyne next to Prosperi. This is a book by Italians for Italians who are thinking globally but are researching locally, and the rest of us can surely learn by its example. |
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The authors therefore faced a double epistemological challenge: identifying while evaluating an enormous, rapidly-expanding body of environmental history literature, and interpreting it for a scholarly audience largely unfamiliar with the field's main questions. Armiero and Barca are at their best when they explain simply that "there are many ways to write a history of water" (p. 137), offering up analyses centered on ideas or markets or justice, or combinations of them—as expounded by Rivers of Empire, The Fisherman's Problem, andThe Organic Machine—before fading to Piero Bevilacqua's classic three volume Storia dell'Agricoltura Italiana (Marsilio, 1990) that, among other subjects, details power struggles between canal builders, rice growers, and irrigation farmers in Italy's Po river valley. The reader learns that other watery subjects, such as flooding, over-fishing, dam-building, and especially land-draining (or bonifica) have all received sophisticated historical treatment in Italy; but that these studies have focused on politics more than justice, Marxism more than markets, goods and services more than environmental changes or gender issues. And such studies have been carried out within separate historic subdisciplines, rather than as a unified pursuit to understand humanity's past relationships with the natural world. |
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This extended survey, we are told modestly, is necessarily a review in progress, serving merely to plumb today's incoming tide of environmental history scholarship. We are still waiting for a thoughtful treatment, for example, of the Seveso dioxin spill that occurred near Milan in 1976, which attracted worldwide attention and pushed several Italian environmentalists into the limelight (p. 161). I add that a future survey should include mention of studies now being carried out, say, on paleobotanical measurements in the Venetian lagoon or GIS analyses of Tuscan vegetation—a flavor of environmental history that finds short shrift in this book. |
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There is also little discussion or acknowledgement of the recent wave of so-called environmental biographies, for which one Adolfo di Bérenger would be a good candidate; this first director of Italy's Vallombrosa forestry school also authored Studii di Archeologia Forestale (1859–63), a thick volume about forest management since Roman times that another proto-environmental historian, George Perkins Marsh, called "the most learned work ever published on the social history of the forest." That Italians have paid such little attention to their environmental heroes, and that Italy's rising stars of environmental history hardly acknowledge them, is itself an indication of the breadth of the field and of the different social and political agendas that must be accounted for when academic fields cross international borders. |
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Indeed this ambitious, multi-lingual survey may represent a supreme transfer of ideas—a tool of globalization if you will—and future historians of environmental history will surely single it out as the way Italians first learned about mainstream (primarily U.S.) interpretations of the field. One can only wonder how far Italian scholars will be willing to accept its main message: that nature needs to be returned to history; or rather, that "nature never left history to begin with. It was always there" (p. 198). Realizing that some of their colleagues are dismissing environmental history as academic imperialism, with its traditional focus on frontiers, parks, and wilderness—subjects distant from the Italian heart—Armiero and Barca demonstrate that their co-nationals have produced and will produce studies that can shape the field: on agriculture, landscapes, nations, cities, energy, sustainability, class, and even historical seismology. They also mention (but should have stressed) that Italy of all places, with its rich stockpile of archives and artifacts, can provide the raw material fordeeper environmental histories, ones that begin with Galileo or else Dante or even Lucretius, author of De Rerum Natura—On the Nature of Things. More than most, Italy is a place for histories about histories of nature. |
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Marcus Hall teaches at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Research Institute. He is the author of Earth Repair (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming). |
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