The Turning Points of Environmental History

THE TURNING POINTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY by Frank Uekoetter (ed.), Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press 2010, xi + 206 pages, ISBN 978-0-8229-6118-5 Environmental history has grown beyond its childhood days, the editor says. But the field is learning that adolescence has its problems as well. For instance, where to start when looking for turning points of environmental history? What are those turning points? How to structure them, materially, intellectually, politically? Is it that case studies or key trends should define the field? For the first generation of historians, the turning points of environmental history essentially were shifts from an ecologically benign life to a destructive, or environmentally unsustainable one. The problems with such an approach, the editor believes, were twofold: (1) there was the issue of monocausalism, and (2) a distinction had to be made between 'before' and 'after'. In the first case, the search for a single factor that put the environment on a downward slope was bound to prove elusive, and corresponding attempts often were defied by the complexity of history. In the second case, the turning point was structurally a 'point of no return', a secular watershed that made the course of history flowing in only one direction. The editor of this book wanted to be more flexible with the concept in order to be more realistic with the results. And so he put the task of definition on the shoulders of the invited authors by asking them to respond to two questions: (1) Where do you see the key turning points of environmental history in your respective field of scholarship? (2) What are the reasons of your choice? Just imagine, these questions would have been put on you, dear reader. We certainly could be sure that the outcome would differ greatly between you, me, and others, and that the structure of any book on such basis would be diverse. Starting a collective book project with no strictly defined hypothesis means running a great risk. It may lead to new and unexpected insight, or to controversial and inconsistent output. How did this project develop, and how do the results look like? First of all, the book is a mix of grand designs, sectoral approaches and strange examples. The first author, John R. McNeill rushes to the realm of global-scale history, the long history of human habitation of the biosphere. Deborah Fitzgerald then looks at agriculture and suggests that the real turning points collect around three extensive historical periods: the first revolution from mid-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth century, the second from mid-nineteenth century until World War II, and the third from World War II to the present. Regarding forestry, Bernd St. Grewe identifies major dimensions of change and continuity: the political dimension of forestry, including an increasing influence and power of the rulers and later the state, who established a severe forest administration; the economic dimension, leading from multifunctional use of the woodlands to state-owned enterprises, from common use to commercialized goods; the social dimension, marked by population growth, social exclusion, migration, and the establishment of an 'expertocracy'; and the ecological dimension of forestry, marked by the interaction between humans and the rest of nature. Thomas Lekan then addresses rats, sharks, and the nation state: while homo sapiens, much like the rat and the shark, over long periods used to be master of resilience and of adaptation to existing circumstances, the modern European, North American, and later developing nation states formed their specific economic modes of production and cultural values in an effort to render both nature and society legible, rationalized, and open to manipulation. …