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Technology and Culture 47.4 (2006) 860-862


Reviewed by
Mark Cioc
Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration. By Marcus Hall. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Pp. xvi+310. $35.

Marcus Hall's Earth Repair is a well-written book that offers a rare glimpse at environmental-rehabilitation projects in North America and Europe over the past two centuries. It focuses primarily on watershed restoration in the Rocky Mountains of Utah and the Piedmontese Alps, which Hall uses to highlight the differences in how Americans and Italians conceive and maintain their respective landscapes. But his broad and sophisticated analysis of Euro-American cultural attitudes makes his book worthwhile for all scholars interested in the environmental, cultural, and technological transformations of the modern era.

Hall argues that "enlightened" Europeans of the eighteenth century, most notably the French naturalist Comte de Buffon, tended to view natural events—fires, floods, landslides, droughts, earthquakes—as the prime instruments of environmental destruction. Restoration in the Buffonian sense means repairing the damage that natural forces wreak on civilized areas over time. With the publication of George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature in 1864, a new viewpoint emerged: that humans through their economic [End Page 860] activities—land reclamation, river straightening, deforestation, overgrazing—have a far more destructive impact on the landscape than do natural events. Restoration in the Marshian sense is largely synonymous with reducing the unintended consequences of human activity. In the twentieth century, Aldo Leopold added a new wrinkle to Marsh's perspective: not only were humans destructive in their initial activities, but they could be equally destructive in their restoration efforts. Restoration in the Leopoldian sense is often best achieved by relying on the recuperative powers of nature alone.

In Hall's terminology, Buffon believed in "maintenance gardening," Marsh in "reparative gardening," and Leopold in "reparative naturalizing." Buffon saw culture (including agriculture and horticulture) as a source of redemption against the slow decay and sudden ravages of nature. Marsh saw cultural activities as a potential source of damage, which could be rectified through the adoption of different practices. Leopold, by contrast, saw nature as a source of redemption; the bad practices of humans could often be undone by just allowing nature to "rewild" itself. Some of these differences in perspective, Hall notes, fall along an Old World/New World divide. The main reference point for Europeans in general (and Italians in particular) was a cultural–historical landscape, a geography of human endeavor. The main reference point for Americans in general (and those who moved westward in particular) was untrammeled nature: large stretches of land that had never been plowed or fenced and vast forests that had never been felled or replanted. Old World thinkers saw a cultural landscape that was constantly threatened by the forces of nature; New World thinkers saw a pristine landscape that was constantly imperiled by the intrusion of humans.

As Hall amply demonstrates in his excellent case studies, these differences in perspective led to differences in restoration practices. From the Italian vantage point, the main problems besetting Piedmont's Cuneo province were floods, landslides, and avalanches, all natural agents. When the Italian government decided to restore this region in the 1860s, it concentrated on buttressing mountainsides with masonry and rock, most characteristically with the construction of "check dams." By contrast, when the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) set out to rehabilitate Utah's Manti National Forest in the early 1900s, it blamed the damage on loggers, miners, and sheep grazers. Initially, the USFS tried restoration gardening by planting exotic species of trees in plantation-like fashion. A half-century later, after it was clear that these efforts had failed, it began to scatter native seeds and let nature do the "rewilding" on its own.

Largely missing from Hall's otherwise fine analysis is the economic backdrop to these evolving perspectives. Buffon lived at a time when disease and natural catastrophes placed enormous checks on human activities, and the human footprint was still relatively small. Marsh and Leopold, [End Page...

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