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REVIEWS
| The Light-Green Society. Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000. By Michael Bess (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xix plus 369pp. Paperback $18.00).
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| Michael Bess acquits himself brilliantly of a tempting but risky task—making sense of popular wisdom—in this case, the belief that France is "less green" than other nations. He coins the epithet "light-green" to more accurately reflect how environmental concerns eventually merged with chronic doubts about modernization to temper half a century of rapid economic growth driven by imperatives of national independence. In the process, he exposes the analytical power of the recognition of all "entities in our world as an infinitely variegated continuum of natural-cultural hybrids" (p. 270), rejecting a rigid distinction between the natural and the social. Modern historians will welcome the new light that an environmental approach sheds upon familiar territory and the conceptual tools offered to assess an on-going transformation of modern societies. |
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Bess first re-visits the post-war decades of economic expansion that radically transformed France. He reaches back to the traumas of defeats, demographic decline, and other dark landmarks of modern French history to explain the public's faith in a succession of "grands projets"—from the Concorde to a massive investment in nuclear energy, all shaped by the dirigiste hand of a state that remained gaulliste well after the general's retirement. Similarly, he digs deep into French ambivalence towards modernity to justify a surprising embrace of environmental ideas, once the 1960s had opened up the political arena. A potent attachment to an agrarian past only partly shaken by industrialization and latent concerns about Parisian hypertrophy facilitated a reassessment of the costs and benefits of the productivist agenda. This amounts to a convincing sketch, even if social tensions are perhaps given less attention than they deserve. Although aware that none of these mutations went uncontested, Bess cannot fully avoid giving an overly consensual image of several decades marked by social strife. |
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