Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 263

Although Joachim Radkau’s book, now translated into English by Thomas Dunlap, undoubtedly provides students and researchers with a valuable synthesis of the historical literature on global environmental change, it remains in many ways a highly problematic text. The organizing idea throughout is that of sustainability or, perhaps more accurately, how material nature and social and economic power have interacted to create either sustainable or unsustainable societies. In the preface, Radkau is keen to defend the text from the charge of anachronism on this count, arguing (reasonably in my view) that sustainability has long been one of the fundamental problems facing any society. However, if the problem of sustainability gives coherence and legitimacy to Radkau’s attempt at a universal history, it is also the most problematic and under-theorized aspect of his text.

The first problem that arises is that the relationship Radkau sets himself to address is not really followed through coherently. At times it is difficult to decipher whether the author intends primarily to present a new interpretation of world history or a clever synthesis of existing literature in environmental history. Ultimately he is more successful at the latter than the former. Although it displays great erudition, the text contains neither sufficient new primary material, nor a sufficiently coherent interrogation of the interaction of power and nature to present any decisively new interpretation. Indeed, the book often reads more like a series of insightful impressions and interpretations, a commentary on environmental historiography, than a traditional monograph. There is nothing particularly wrong with this approach, and there are moments of real enlightenment contained within this text, but there is also no real sense of a definitive argument. Perhaps this characteristic is a result of the author’s obvious desire to avoid falling into a ‘declinist’ narrative of humanity’s relationship with nature. Radkau certainly views environmental history as much as a particularist as a universalizing activity concerned with the complexities and indecipherability of ecological change in the past.

However, it is also clear that Radkau does not wish to abandon the idea of decline completely; indeed, it is ultimately critical to his narrative as demonstrated towards the end of the book in a chapter entitled ‘The Failed Americanization of the World’. This really deals with the green revolution of the twentieth century and the break up of traditional farming practices and their replacement with intensive methods. This transformation, we are told, represented a shift in the reproduction of agricultural fertility from a solar to a carboniferous energy regime: a shift from a more or less sustainable mode of agricultural production to an unsustainable one. Yet this kind of observation immediately makes one want to uncover the sources of social and economic power that have so vigorously transformed the world’s ecology. On this point Radkau’s position seems remarkably uncritical. One obvious candidate for study, capitalism, is barely mentioned (and indeed receives no entry in the index), which is astonishing. The social relations underpinning the production and reproduction of society and nature are not really subject to any kind of sustained analysis, which is unfortunate considering the wealth of well-informed historical materialist analyses that it is now possible to draw upon. Surely some reference to the eco-socialist literature is necessary when addressing this kind of subject, if only as a point of departure. Technological determinations largely take the place of such an analysis, especially in the final stages of the book, but the role of technology in the making of twentieth-century environmental problems is laid in accusatory rather than critical fashion at the door of the United States ‘whose expansiveness’ we are told ‘became a trump card like never before in the age of motorization and mobility’.

The underlying message of this book is that the solutions to our environmental problems (the road, in other words, to sustainability) can be found in a continental European model of social organization, specifically the example of German forestry, in which limits to growth were recognized and ecologies were sustained and reproduced by communities: ‘second nature’ as sustainable nature. This federalized vision of environmental governance will perhaps be superficially attractive to those of an anarchistic or communitarian frame of mind. However, the failure to question certain assumptions underlying this conclusion is disturbing. Sustainability is the lingering shadow of this book, but it mostly exists at a subconscious level as an obvious ‘good’. It is not brought to the surface, as it should be, to be exposed to critical analysis for the work that it may do in framing and recomposing social relations with the environment, and relations of power amongst human beings. This is a major problem.

One must not be too harsh on Nature and Power; it remains a very valuable synthesis of existing material, including much continental European scholarship. The book will certainly provide an essential introductory text for postgraduate students in the field. Its flaws are in some ways indicative of more general problems with environmental history as a field of study. Having identified the environment, or sustainability, or conservation as key themes of research, these concepts are perhaps too often read back into the past without sufficient consideration of their epistemic status. Much of the power of a word is present at the moment of its creation, which is itself a historic event. There is, therefore, a general need for more attention to be paid to the genealogy of such key terms and the power relations embedded in them. Before a concept is turned to historical analysis, it is necessary to understand what it is we are invoking, and what power relations we may be reproducing with its use.

In a globalizing world, any invocation of ‘sustainability’ is an inherently political intervention. In Nature and Power there is an underlying respect for the principles of locality, a suspicion of an Anglo-American economic and social model, and an admiration for a historical continental European model of human-nature relations. However, all this embodies a political vision of the ideal relationship between humanity and the environment. The politics of invoking terms like ‘sustainability’ or ‘environment’ in historical study has yet to be subjected to adequate self-reflection by environmental historians.