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  • The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000
  • Rosemary Wakeman (bio)
The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000. By Michael Bess. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xi+369. $48/$18.

The Light-Green Society has already received well-deserved accolades, including the American Society for Environmental History's 2003 George Perkins Marsh Prize for the best book in environmental history. With good reason. This is an exciting and original examination of the knotty history of environmentalism and how it has permeated every aspect of French political and cultural life. France is a complicated country, and so is its environmental movement. Michael Bess argues that in the second half of the twentieth century it produced a distinctive kind of social order, which he terms "light-green society." This is meant "to connote not only moderation, compromise, and half-measures, but also the profound ambiguity that has characterized the reception of ecological ideas among the French citizenry" (p. 3). The historical narrative suggests both success and defeat. The more radical aspects of the green vision were jettisoned by a tenaciously consumerist population. Yet in a moderate version, practically every facet of French society eventually accepted an ecological tint; "everyone eagerly donned the green mantle" (p. 4).

The first three sections of the book follow the evolution of French attitudes toward technology and environmentalism. Some of Bess's anecdotes are fascinating—the French government's sinking of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior near New Zealand, for example, and the media impact of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. More important, Bess skillfully evaluates the late-twentieth-century conditions in which French environmentalism was nurtured and operated. He weaves together France's special relationship with high technology, its reaction to modernization and the collapse of the peasant way of life, and its distinctively intellectual approach toward ecology. This contextualization of the green movement includes a groundbreaking analysis of perceptions about landscape, nature, and wilderness. Bess imagines a French green utopia that consists of a traditional village replete with wind turbines and bicycles, boules games in the town square, and markets heaped with locally grown organic foods. It is an arresting image, with important social and cultural implications that belie the scientific neutrality in which environmentalism often wraps itself. Part nostalgia for a world lost, part an alternative vision of the future, French environmentalism, Bess argues, mediated the rapid transformations of the trente glorieuses and eventually fashioned a moderate "age of ecology" (p. 291) that most people adapted to everyday culture and consumerism.

In the final chapters, The Light-Green Society turns into an essay on nature and culture in the postmodern age. In this broader context, France [End Page 217] becomes the model for the acceptance of ambiguity and compromise in human awareness about the environment. Thinking in terms of the global longue durée, Bess poses four philosophical questions. The first two have to do with the meaning and scope of the "artificial" or "tame" versus the "wild" or "wilderness" and whether the concept of pristine nature has become an anachronism. A third question considers the role of human agency in shaping the relationship between nature and artifice. After forty years of environmentalist agitation, much of it remarkably successful in achieving its aims, the old conception of nature as a "separate sphere" has become largely untenable. In the light-green society, where ecology and technological modernity continually flow together, a new hybrid vision of intermingled nature-culture has increasingly taken its place. Lastly, Bess asks whether we will eventually encounter another "natural environment" in the cosmos that will function as an extension of the terrestrial wilderness.

Bess's style is engaging and conversational. This is a tour de force of environmental history. It carries us forward, especially in our thinking about European attitudes toward both ecology and technological modernity. Europe, after all, has also been at the forefront of the movement for sustainability—that is, an integrated approach to ecology, economy, and community. As Bess describes it, this is a humanized paysage that is "closer to the shape of things to come" (p. 294). For these reasons, this study of French environmentalism is an...

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