Holmes Rolston III is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University.
The Environment and World History
edited by edmund burke iii and kenneth pomeranz
Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2009. 361 pages
Hardback: UK £41.95, US $60.00. Paperback: UK £16.95, US $24.95
“Seek simplicity and distrust it.” That adage from Alfred North Whitehead might have served as an epitaph for this anthology on the environment and world history. The editors seek to find common themes across the millennia and around the world, unity in the diversity of encounters of peoples with their landscapes. Such “a global environmental history” is an “urgent intellectual project” (p. xiii). Their common thread is what they call “developmentalism” (p. 7) or “the developmentalist project” (p. 10). “The concept of the developmentalist project enables us to see the continuities in environmental history” (p. 97). If one looks for the principal driving force, “the most basic is a continuing increase in incentives and pressures to expand economic production” (p. 10). But the contributors are equally adept at finding perennial pluralism and diversity.
Historians look at the past always hoping to see it in deeper perspectives, or, in a more blunt idiom, “to put a different spin” on what others have seen. In this “synthetic volume” (p. 14), the editors promise “the big story”, “the deep history” of humanity and the environment (p. 33). This will call into question the conventional historical narrative which tends to separate an unchanging millennia-long world past from revolutionary Western Enlightenment modernism.
Historians have been rather ambivalent about whether any world history should be undertaken, suspicious whether any of the “grand narratives” synthesising previous world histories reflect much more than the idiosyncrasies of the narrator. The world, they may say, is too pluralist, too patchwork, for any unifying motifs. The most one can hope for is a regional history, or perhaps a global assessment of some particular aspect: a history of landscape painting, for example.
After initial chapters promising this overview, there follows a series of eight regional studies: water in the Middle East; China’s long history of transforming its environment; the Rhine in Europe, laden with commerce and sewage; rice in the deltas of South-East Asia; Africa before and after colonialism; India and its environment(s); Latin America; and Russia as a predatory, tribute-taking state. So we travel around the world and across the millennia, but do we find continuity or difference? The answer is one or the other, depending on the perspective (“the spin”).
Considering water in the Middle East, Edmund Burke argues that the peoples in that region have sought to manage their landscapes for thousands of years, with more or less success. “States and peoples have been transforming the regional environment for millennia, not just since the onset of modern times” (p. 108). Yes, the colonials built paved roads, railways, dams, canals, and ruled with armies, but the ancients and medievals already had their military empires, produced their irrigation schemes and maintained routes for commerce (as did the Muslims, for instance). Cumulatively, the result is a “mess”, as evidenced in the current “desperate struggle over water and other basic resources” (p. 110). “The flayed Middle Eastern environment epitomizes the world as it will be ... the Middle East provides a warning for the rest of the planet.” Alas, and so much for the developmentalist project.
Turning to China, Kenneth Pomeranz summarises his overview: “I argue for long-term continuities that shaped Chinese approaches to economic development and environmental management or have done so until the very recent past” (pp. 118−19). “The Chinese state has been involved in ecological management for many centuries” (p. 121). So, ecosystem management is not as Western as we thought. “Chinese development in the imperial past was not as radically different from stylized Western paths as has often been suggested, and it has not become as similar to them in recent years as many people claim” (p. 119). So, it wasn’t different, and then again, it has not become more similar.
China, of course, is large enough to have radically different landscapes within the one nation, and any people tries to get the most it can out of its agriculture. China has rivers that are difficult to live with, and in recent times there have been more grandiose schemes for their control (as with the Three Gorges Dam). “Meanwhile, approaches to other problems have oscillated between state-sponsored megaprojects and locally funded initiatives more dependent on popular support” (p. 139). Also, China has been radically deforested, resulting in erosion, and sought re-forestation, both for timber and flood control. There are differences, East and West, and Pomeranz asks in conclusion: “Do the differences still matter?” (p. 147). His answer: “China’s environmental future is thus murky” (p. 153). There is no telling where this developmentalist project is going.
Lest we think perhaps the developed nations got it right, we hear next how the Rhine, draining eight European states, “emerged as one of the world’s greatest commercial waterways and how it simultaneously became one of the world’s most biologically degraded rivers” (p. 167). The greatest engineers of Europe did manage to redesign the river as a route for commerce, second only to the Mississippi, and simultaneously to produce an open sewer. Once again, according to Mark Cioc, this forebodes the global crisis: “The Rhine thus illustrates in microcosm the environmental problems besetting many regions that have undergone European-style commercial and industrial development over the past two centuries” (p. 167).
Turning to the great river deltas of South-East Asia, the developmentalist projects there “differed in many important ways from those opened by European settlers.” The great Asian rivers supported agriculture. “Over thousands of millennia their flow formed extensive, relatively flat, and well-watered deltas that have proved superb locations for the cultivation of wet rice, which is the staple food of much of the population” (p. 192).
But here, according to Michael Adas, “the triumphal civilising-mission of the European colonisers” did bring a developmentalist project to improve production, a “boom time ... during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth” (p. 193). Alas, again there was environmental degradation, albeit less than elsewhere. But eventually it was realised that “the paddies ... turn out to be major producers of methane gas, which is one of the main sources of global warming ... Thus the massive extension of rice cultivation presents a profound but little-recognised dilemma for all humankind” (p. 204). The global continuity seems increasingly to be that developmentalist projects fail as much as they succeed.
Turning to Africa, William Beinart wants to “invert” the “colonial stereotypes that celebrated Western knowledge and bemoaned Africans as environmentally profligate” (p. 212). The colonial powers brought their developmentalist projects, but reassessment has recognised indigenous capabilities, with “sensitivity to local knowledge and participatory planning” (p. 217). But Beinart then backs off from “too neat an inversion and analytical closure”, with “a critique of African political practice and African modes of authority” (pp. 217−18). In other words, Africans are as capable as Europeans of corruption and mismanagement. That continuity continues. But if we look for others, comparing, say, Africa with the Americas, both having been subject to colonialism, “the two continents’ experiences differ fundamentally” (p. 218). All this ends in “a profound ambivalence” (p. 224).
In India, there is an old Hindi proverb “observing that the water as well as the language changed with every 10 kos [about twenty miles] traveled” (p. 230). Endless change when moving across the landscape might be the only continuity. But Mahesh Rangarajan wonders whether what British colonisers found was an India more or less the same for millennia. “Despite its merits, this paradigm ... assumes a stasis or a ‘long equilibrium’ in the pre-colonial period. Although the idea of a colonial ecological watershed remains valid, it needs to be critiqued and examined” (pp. 231−2). Rangarajan can say both that “the overall scene was arguably one of harmony” (p. 232) and that “despite the history of attempts at homogenising social and ecological diversity, South Asia retained a level of heterogeneity that is perhaps without parallel” (p. 238). Also: “colonial land management had widely divergent effects on different regions” (p. 240). Apparently, travelling a few miles can produce differences as much as continuity.
The eco-activist and thinker Vandana Shiva has forcefully argued that there is wisdom in India’s local knowledge, even if it does change across the landscape. But she has her critics. “In the bid to give legitimacy to ‘traditional’ resource use, the colonial experience is being seen in a simplistic way,” writes Rangarajan. “In this paradigm, colonial or modern knowledge is seen as being inherently anti-nature and anti-people ... and the systems it displaced are viewed as benign to nature and to people ... This argument has serious limitations” (p. 241). There are “complex ways of seeing the colonial encounter” (p. 241). And the local encounter, too. “The resulting tapestry, of many hues and colors, is not easily amenable to the imposition of homogeneity, whether imperialist or nationalist” (p. 246). Nor is it easily amenable to continuity, either regional or global.
Lise Sedrez tries to “argue that environmental history in Latin America can and should ... develop its own theoretical framework, one that draws from more traditional Latin American historiography, from sister disciplines such as historical geography, and from North American environmental history” (p. 260). This involves reconsidering the “declensionist narratives” (p. 261) that trace environmental decline, and, while admitting failures, finding success stories. The standard account “risks reducing complex histories to linear narratives while reinforcing the dichotomy of nature and culture”; the revisionist accounts will “abandon the economics-oriented unilinearity of history” (p. 262). But much of this effort so far “has been disappointing and uneven” (p. 266). Even with better results, this does not sound as though Sedrez will find much continuity with the “statecraft” and “commerce” of which we heard earlier.
In Russian history, “a succession of militarized, predatory tribute-taking regimes has dominated the Eurasian land mass ... These regimes saw the population and the land as a trove of resources to be mined for the rulers’ purposes.” The result, continues Douglas B. Weiner, is “a region poisoned by a civilisation gone badly awry” and the lessons to be learned are important “for everyone on the planet”. The argument here is that “certain forms of political economy leave their own footprints on the physical landscape and bequeath identifiable environmental legacies” (pp. 276−7). This is an argument for continuity within Russian history, but would translate globally only where there was a similar succession of predatory regimes.
Still, Weiner realises that “different systems with different logics may also generate similar legacies” (p. 276). So, a democratic people can also go badly awry in environmental conservation. The Soviets envisioned “a vast ‘plan’ to reinvent nature, turning it into the obedient servant of human society” (p. 290). That was their developmentalist project. Such a utopian predatory worldview can also be shared by Western engineers and capitalists, resulting in environmental degradation. That is indeed a lesson for “everyone on the planet”.
This is the intent of this anthology: “We treat European capitalism and science as culturally specific variants of patterns found much more broadly: drives to create stronger, territorially defined states, to transform the physical environment for the sake of state power and (often secondarily) the welfare of the realm’s people, and to ‘tame’ or ‘conquer’ nature, making it more predictable and controllable” (pp. 5−6). The contributors regularly make that case in much detail. They find “commercialism without capitalism”; they find “statecraft” (p. 10) around the globe and across the centuries. States want commerce to consolidate their power: “The two phenomena are hard to disentangle” (p. 19). The search for “empire” was not initiated by the Europeans; as every historian knows, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Chinese were fully capable of it. In that sense—increasing state power and commerce, getting the most you can out of a landscape—the developmentalist project has been forever with us.
But spin that idea around and the result is a kaleidoscope of efforts, of frequently diverse activities on diverse landscapes by strong states and weak states with ambivalent success. The book is full of qualifying and hedging words: “although”, “but”, “on the other hand”, “yet”, “whereas”, “nevertheless”. This reflects the determined and commendable effort by the contributors to be true to their regional histories, insisting on diversity (patchwork) as well as unity (continuity). The reader closes the book with a sense of heroic effort and massive scholarship. This is a permanent contribution to global environmental history.
Also, the reader is left wondering whether there is any unity to world environmental history—whether there are only plural histories. Perhaps the continuity is that developmentalist projects continually fail. If that conviction became widespread, we might wonder whether envisioning a sustainable biosphere ought to replace the vision of development—even sustainable development.
