Reviews for Nature's economy

The average rating for Nature's economy based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-03-30 00:00:00 Christopher Haas In a narrow sense, Nature's Economy could be considered a counterpart to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. While Kuhn looks at evolution of scientific knowledge from the inside, looking for moments when accumulated evidence pushes scientists to a new paradigm, Worster looks at the mind of the scientist, examining how his (well over 90% of the players in the book are male) own predilections and his cultural frame guide his work. I found this fascinating, because it reveals that paradigms in ecology have been perhaps one part observation for every nine parts extrapolation, values, and ideology. Through that lens, Worster's narrow history of ecology becomes a much broader history of the value sets applied to nature and its relationship with human society throughout the last 300 years of Western history. The first few parts focus on individuals - Gilbert White, Linnaeus, Thoreau, Darwin, - while as time goes on, the conversation becomes more rich and complex. The format of the book makes it surprisingly diverse. The milieu and locale within which each author developed are incredibly distinct, and it's kind of stunning whenever Worster points out that the debates of an era would be largely incomprehensible to authors of previous eras. It's stunning because nearly every debate and conversation in the book feels familiar and fresh. I have often defended science from detractors who claim it abandons warmth, feeling, and an appreciation for holism in its pursuit of objectivity. Worster makes it clear that this argument has been going on since the emergence of science has a common and institutionalized pursuit, and that the Romantic sense of nature largely arose in response to that critique (incidentally, my response to that criticism is both deflated and upheld by Worster's analysis: I argue that science is a tool, and it is quite independent of the values scientists hold and by which they live their lives; Worster points out that it's not at all independent of those values, but those values can really be anything). The section on Thoreau was especially fun. I realized that he was a badass, of course, but not how completely that was true. Worster implies he basically came up with the idea of environmental history, using tree rings and vegetation to read the history of land use and colonization. He also almost completely anticipates David Abram's argument, minus the bit about writing. Whenever he escaped Emerson's clutches, Thoreau embraced his body and looked for a totally sensual, physical embrace of nature - doing natural history with his nose, hands, and tongue as well his brain and eyes. The central conflict, especially in the pre-crisis years, was between the Arcadian school, dominated by natural history, observation, and a portrayal of nature as warm, mutualist, and beautifully life-affirming; and the Imperial school, which emphasizes the violence, competition, waste, and annoyance in nature and invites human guidance to fix some of these issues and increase productivity. It was surprising to me how much the Imperial school seemed to be congruent with and suggestive of permaculture, adjusting nature to produce more human food and less human nuisances. In the meantime, of course, none of the ideals the early thinkers suggest were actually implemented in any meaningful way, and the planet was utterly trashed. The transition to post-WWII ecology was a rather abrupt one. As Worster really tells only the story of how people think about the land, not how it is actually treated, you get the impression that people in the 1960's just looked around one day and realized "shit, we're really screwing this place up." By that point, ecology had developed a set of observations from which somewhat empirical principles could be derived. Society looked to the profession for guidance on how to deal with the problems their damage was causing, and, as far as Worster is concerned, they utterly failed to answer the call. While early naturalists spent much of their time doing observational natural history and extrapolating what they noticed into sweeping pictures of nature, modern empirical scientists do much the same thing with experimental data. Nature is vast and complex enough to supply convincing evidence for nearly any vision; it is full of stability and disturbance, competition and cooperation, profligacy and thrift. Worster's story of modern ecology depicts competing schools differing in their focus (and, since what they look for determines what they find, their conclusions), driven in competition by faddism. Succession, food webs, chaos, complexity, mosaic landscape ecology, and more had their moment in the sun, and each contributed to a more complete knowledge of nature. Unfortunately, it seems that this conflict of opinion, especially the realization that nature relies on its own disturbance, destruction, and catastrophe, has been taken advantage of to push preservationist logic off kilter. A nearly equal contributor was the New Ecology school's emphasis on reducing ecosystems to mathematically described populations and energy budgets. This may be how science moves forward, and ultimately it is neatly compatible with a Deep Ecological viewpoint (I find the whole thing rather magical) but at the time it was associated with a scorn for subjective attachments, an unrestrained willingness to destroy ecosystems to dissect them, and the sense that science didn't yet know enough to guide policy. Worster plays into this too. His epilogue makes it sound like the shifting sands of environmental value systems (what he describes as "historicism") invoke moral relativism, setting our policy makers and citizens adrift in a moral ocean with no anchor. He does helpfully suggest that environmental history and paleoecology can contribute to grounding ecology in a value system that makes some sense, and I agree with him strongly on that point. Like most environmental historians, Worster does a great job with prose and narrative. He very carefully manages his own voice, assiduously avoiding inserting his own perspective and opinion in the story until the very end. It's interesting, because what he does throughout the book is essentially to deflate earnest ecological thinkers' ideas by pointing out their recapitulation of ancient tenets of Western thought, so when he does reveal some of his own thoughts at the end, it's clear they are subject to the same critique and limitations. And I guess that's his lesson, that no matter how far you push into new territory, your ideas are always just going to be variations on these same old themes. Kind of discouraging, if you find Western thought to be fundamentally violent, imperialistic, and placeless.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-09 00:00:00 Alan Dineen We don't hear it as much these days, but the notion that we are living in an Age of Ecology persists. Why don't we hear of it more often? Why doesn't it feel like we're living in an Age of Ecology when the effects of other Ages--the Industrial Age, for instance--offered far more tangible experiences? Because, as Worster outlines here, the idea of ecology itself still lacks consensus regarding its fundamental claim: that people and their environments are codependent. And it's not just a matter of political intransigence on the part of conservatives or liberals or whatever. The science behind ecology shows both innate stability and instability in our oceans, our atmospheres, and our many hot, cold, wet, and dry terrains. Both sides of the debate are right, in a way, and neither are unique in their positions. Which is to say, the debate is an old one. That's always the story of history. Worster tracks Western civilization's shifting opinion about mankind's relationship to nature: from the pastoral view of naturalists like Gilbert White to the rise of scientific naturalism at the turn of the century and finally toward uncertainty as scientists began to find themselves alienated by nature's almost impenetrable complexity. I'm giving very broad strokes here, of course. Worster includes the ideas of Alexander von Humbolt, Rachel Carson, E.O. Wilson--you know, the biggies. The beauty of this book, besides its layman accessibility (you do not have to be a scientist to understand Worster's wonderful prose), is its contextualization of an idea that, for the uninformed, seems new and relevant only to our moment in history. This is not a didactic or moralistic treatise on the human impact on planet earth. It is simply a series of historical vignettes meant to capture the prevailing and changing sentiment regarding nature over two or three centuries. I highly, HIGHLY recommend this book, not only for the insightful connections it makes but for the influential authors it recommends. There are some beautiful editions of Gilbert White's Selborne out there. Enjoy!