Reviews for Ecology in the 20th century

The average rating for Ecology in the 20th century based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-12-25 00:00:00 Ben Erlacher Ecology is everything, so writing a history of ecology could be considered a history of everything. Right away in the introduction, the author tells us she's not going to do that. Uh oh. Instead, she is going to write about the ecological movement "in Britain, Europe and North America." OK, proceed. The book is choppy and sometimes hard to follow. Dense, academic run-on sentences slow the reader down and silly little errors are bumps in the road. Carolyn Merchant's name is spelled incorrectly on one page, then spelled correctly on the next. That may be an editor's mistake, but there's other evidence of sloppy research. Some of the juiciest "historical facts" are cited without specific dates and personal communications as the source. The premise and conclusion are worthy of better scholarship, but the way the premise is framed is flawed and the conclusion reach seems unsupported by the evidence marshalled by the author. "Ecologism" defies a simple left-right categorization. Her perspective is Anglo-centric, and the book is mostly about a small but influential and well-connected Anglo-German group of activists. North America is barely mentioned and influential non-German Continental Europeans are given little notice. I picked this up because it provides some insights into the early history of the organic movement, which could be characterized as both reactionary and radical. In the UK, it was dominated by High Tories, some of whom had fascist ties and were interred during World War II for being Nazi sympathizers. However, guilt by association does not prove that all members of overlapping movements are tainted. Rudolf Steiner got a whole chapter named for him, but he barely makes an appearance in it. The chapter is mostly about the power struggle and in-fighting both within the Anthroposophic movement between 1925 (Steiner's death) and 1933, and within the NSDAP from 1934 to 1942. As a dead man, Steiner was not around to comment on how his followers used his ideas. While there was overlap, not all anthroposophists were Nazis and not all Nazis were anthroposophists. Bramwell also wrote a book about the enigmatic (Ricardo) Walther Darré, Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942. Darré comes off as an aloof pragmatist and theoretician of improving rural society. Prior to the war, his program differed little from the New Deal programs of Henry Wallace and Rex Tugwell, right down to the overt racism. After all, the New Deal needed to placate racist Dixie Democrats to get their programs through the Agriculture Committees. While knowledgeable about Steiner's work, he could hardly be characterized as a supporter or promoter of the biodynamic approach. He wasn't opposed to it either, unlike many technocrats in the Ministry and the Reich. While hardly innocent of the various crimes committed by the Reich, Darré was sentenced to seven years at the Nuremberg trials, which could be considered relatively light under the circumstances. Perhaps my biggest complaint is how Bramwell implies she recognizes the importance of the North American ecological movement, but then gives it very little credit. The American movement merits two pages at the end as an afterthought, and then is presented as one that is following the Anglo-German examples, rather than independent or leading Europe. Aldo Leopold is not mentioned once. Rachel Carson makes a couple of appearances, but sometimes in the context of trying to prove that some Brit or German got there first. Carolyn Merchant is cited and dismissed. The Jewish JI Rodale is conveniently ignored as a counter-example to all the anti-Semitic organic food enthusiasts. Conservationists of the 20th century like Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Hugh Bennett are not recognized. New Deal conservationism is briefly mentioned in passing, but again as an echo of European thinking. I'm not suggested that we should ignore or cover up the racist past in environmental / ecological / organic farming movements. Far from it. However, we should not fall into the trap that it defines the environmental movement. The movements continue to overlap, and this remains problematic. Learning from the past requires a better written history than this.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-09-26 00:00:00 Chelsea Mauck Interesting and frustrating in almost equal measure. This book is very much an academic view of the topic, and if it is missing things or lacks polish, a lot of that may be down to being one of the first, or the only, books on the subject. This is a book about political ecology, not the science - although the former has roots in the latter. It covers the UK, Germany and US, though without much about the US, and being published in 1989, only really goes up to the end of the 70s or very early 80s. Bramwell makes the case that ecology is a distinct political ideology that cannot be defined clearly on a left-right axis or as part of other political ideologies. It's worth going through her definition of the ecology, that it:  - is a normative philosophy    - is a total world-view which does not allow for piece-meal reform  - believes truth to be attainable, and its attainability to be desirable    - fears the dissipation of energy and resources  - is not anthropocentric. Second order characteristics are the desire to reform man, society and their relation to the world, with reform motivated by scientific knowledge (or theories about man and the world and their fundamental reverence before the beauty and order of nature. Her view excludes much "environmentalism", though the lines between the two are not explored as much as I would have liked. It needs to be emphasised just how radical ecology is - it can be anti-trade (even the idea of a peasant selling a cow to someone in the next village!), propose dividing the world up into self-sufficient 'bio-regions', depopulating towns and cities... Four areas stand out for me as most interesting. The first is the history of attempts to make ecological communities and the tensions inherent in these ideas. Ecologists are ideologically anti-urban, anti-large-scale agriculture and pro-peasant. The general belief is that while peasant agriculture is more labour-intensive, this is not the main limiting factor we face - land and other resources are the limit. This is an argument you can see persisting today in places. However their attempts to show the greater productivity of peasant and organic agriculture have never exactly been conclusive, and attempts to protect or promote small-scale farming limited in their success. Attempts to take urban dwellers 'back to the land' have been even less successful, with people unable to survive on much larger areas of land than conventional small farmers require. Most of these communities required steady injections of cash; the longest surviving ones tended to be religious ones. There's also a political-social problem in the implementation of an ecological vision of radical change. While the ideology emphasises the small-scale, getting from here to there seems to involve top-down planning and compulsion. In cases this is explicit - particularly in early ecologists who had visions of societies run by enlightened industrialists and scientists. This is another challenge you can quite clearly see continuing today. The second interesting area is the status of ecology in the inter-war years. These are the main focus of the book. The inter-war years are weird politically, with lots of people searching for political alternatives. This period is key to Bramwell's argument that ecology is not a left- or right-wing ideology. Lots of ecologists ended up associated with fascism, but not all, and many seem like they could easily have gone different ways, to any political movement that would accommodate them. The idea of a link between people, land and tradition has an obvious connection to fascism. The tendency in ecology towards pacifism and anti-modernity not so much. Nazi Germany was, at least ideologically, pro-peasant, and there was a vigorous political contest within the leadership about the merits of biodynamic agriculture. This connection with fascism and Nazism unsurprisingly gave ecology a problem after the war. Many of its proponents in the UK narrowly avoided being interred, and after 1945 tended to retreat into personal spiritualism. That wasn't always the case though. The Soil Association was founded in the UK in 1946, with the support of Lady Eve Balfour (niece of the former Prime Minister). Among its founder members was Jorian Jenks, an ecologist associated with the British Union of Fascists, and the Association retained links to the far right in the 40s and 50s. The resurgence of ecology came when it merged with left-wing politics in the late 60s and early 70s. This is one of the most disappointing parts of the book for me, even though it has some interesting observations. Bramwell is pretty dismissive of Green politics, for mostly promoting left-wing ideas and losing the more distinctive and radical ecological ideas, viewing it as a new vessel for middle class activism and guilt. She doesn't include any discussion of ecological elements in more radical 60s & 70s groups - perhaps these don't fit into her intellectual & political genealogy. Perhaps the effective end of peasantry in the countries she focuses on leaves ecology with no foundation. Frustratingly there's no clear discussion of the relationship and differences between ecology and the larger domain of environmentalism. In the end, though, Bramwell can hardly be disappointed at the decline of contemporary ecology, which she describes as "a death-wish", "their hope of regeneration [presupposing] a return to primitivism, and thus ... concomitant anarchy ... an utter rejection of all that is, and for at least three millennia all that was." It sounds exaggerated, but maybe it's not, if we think about the number of people in the world and how they live, and then think about some of the proposals of ecologists - ideas you still hear occasionally today.