Paul Warde, Libby Robin and Sverker Sörlin, The Environment: A History of the Idea Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. 256. ISBN 978-1-4214-4002-6. $27.00 (paperback).
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: Sörlin's book is a sweeping history of the idea of environment.Reaching back and looking ahead, this history focuses on the fifty-plus years after the Second World War, a period not only characterized by further urbanization, by uneven growth of population and economies, and by the consequential unprecedented human impact on the environment, but also by a new 'world-mindedness' (p. 1) that encompassed 'a new unifying power' (p.24).The authors, whose scholarship has significantly shaped environmental history for more than a generation, explain that the environment was a concept both of crisis and of peacetime, born out of a sense of urgency during the post-war period, a political concept that ultimately became policy mainstream.Readers are taken on a rollercoaster ride through this half-century, bracketed on the one side by two American publications from 1948, Road to Survival by ecologist William Vogt, and Our Plundered Planet by conservationist Fairfield Osborn, and on the other by the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio and the meetings thereafter.To keep us oriented and in our seats throughout the seven-chapter narrative unfolding during the Cold War, the authors use four key themes: futures thinking, scientific expertise, quantificationwhat Theodor Porter has called 'trust in numbers'and scale and scalability.The first two chapters introduce the state of the Earth in the immediate postwar years and what environment meant before its understanding became an international, global and finally planetary concept.The authors move from Thomas Carlyle to Herbert Spencer, revealing the legacy of Spencer's ideas of the environment in the thinking of various influential nineteenth-century researchers and intellectuals.Throughout the nineteenth century, environment was used to describe surroundings, mostly of individual organisms or entities.Although this continues to be one of the term's meanings, in the postwar years environment came to describe a unified interconnected system that was threatened.International conferences were held and a suite of new international organizations began to collect data, investigate the workings of the system and implement measures to conserve resources, and to protect species and natural and cultural heritage.The shapers of this new understanding of environment were scientists.In Chapter 3, the authors show how these new experts used new technologies, especially computers, to analyse data and to generate scenarios and predictions, including the well-known Limits to Growth (1972) report.Increased consumption and population growth sparked anxieties about life on Earth generally, and especially about resources, including the predicament of peak oil.The world appeared caught up in the Jevon's paradoxwhich observes that increases in efficiency are commonly offset by increases in consumptionas it was
Author: Sonja Dümpelmann
Institution: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4403951972