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Technology and Culture 47.4 (2006) 862-864


Reviewed by
Harold L. Platt
City, Country, Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History. Edited by Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. Pp. vii+288. $50.

Does every history conference deserve packaging its proceedings into a book for a broader audience? I would answer from personal experience that some presentations merit publication while others only flesh out the books that follow in their wake. But in City, Country, Empire, Jeffry Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey of the University of New Hampshire aspire to much loftier goals. They hope this collection of essays on "landscapes in environmental history" provokes controversy equal to that stirred up by Donald Worster's The Ends of the Earth (1988) and William Cronon's Uncommon Ground (1996).

Diefendorf and Dorsey deserve credit for making every effort to stitch together a mixed bag of pieces into a seamless set of themes. They construct a geographical framework in their introductory essay, "Challenges for Environmental History," insert thoughtful headnotes to the three sections described by the title, and enlist a pioneer in the field, Alfred W. Crosby, to write a brief afterword. Moreover, they make a reasonable case for expanding [End Page 862] the intellectual boundaries of the field from the linkages of urban and rural drawn by Cronon in Nature's Metropolis (1991) to embrace the global connections of colonial and contemporary empires.

Yet, the value of this kind of book rests ultimately on the quality of the individual contributions and their accumulative effect in advancing its larger goals. Five of the ten essays in this volume have already been published, and the arguments advanced by several of the better-known scholars are familiar, which undermines the book's aim to set a new gold-standard of inquiry. Some of these essays present more troubling questions than novel approaches to the history of technology and the environment. Joel Tarr, for example, lays out a model of organic metabolism to frame the study of the urban infrastructure. Yet what he provides is a traditional narrative of institutional response to a succession of public health and environmental crises. Missing here is a sense of the subtle dynamics of the feedback mechanisms between human bodies and urban ecologies. In a similar way, Elizabeth Blackmar supplies a finely grained account of the financial and policy history of the shopping mall. But she leaves out any picture of how the mall changed the social, cultural, and physical landscapes of the countryside, let alone how it contributed to larger environmental problems such as automobile emissions, waste water run off from parking lots, energy consumption, and sprawl.

In contrast, the best essays achieve Diefendorf and Dorsey's ambition of forcing us to reimagine the parameters of the human footprint on the landscape. Sarah Elkind expands them by illuminating the complexity of the business community's responses to air pollution in post–World War II Los Angeles. Her sophisticated analysis shows that environmental politics involves a kaleidoscope of interests, not just a ceaseless duel between capitalists and greens. Ursula von Petz also helps draw a more nuanced topography of the formation of environmental policy by shedding light on the ways in which business groups promoted regional planning in Germany's heavily industrialized Ruhr district during the twentieth century. Although green space has been "more or less what is left over in between the built-up areas" (p. 53), the fluctuating fortunes of the coal and iron district were closely reflected in reverse in public policies of environmental conservation.

James C. McCann explores the relatively new frontiers of global history in his essay on the spread of a virulent corn fungus from the Americas to Africa after 1945 and the reactions of an international network of scientists to the crisis. Even more expansive, Thomas R. Dunlap pushes the field to the virtually infinite borders of the imagination. "We live amid the wreckage of landscapes and dreams" (p. 208), he explains. Looking at the process of empire building by the Europeans...

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