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Reviewed by:
  • Incorporare la natura: Storie ambientali del novecento
  • Dario Gaggio (bio)
Incorporare la natura: Storie ambientali del novecento. By Simone Neri Serneri . Rome: Carocci Editore, 2005. Pp. 335. €24.20.

The title of this book, which the author himself would translate as "Embedding Nature," is intended to render in Italian the English-language metaphor of "embeddedness," made famous by Karl Polanyi. Revealingly, however, the Italian language can only approximate the English term by resorting to a human-centered image, that of incorporation. The dilemma of recalibrating the relationships between "natural" and "social" change in a symmetrical and critical direction lies at the core of Simone Neri Serneri's book and the discipline to which it primarily contributes—environmental history.

Serneri, a pioneer in opening up the historiography of Italy's environmental past to international debates and concerns, aims to transcend the dichotomy of ecocentric and anthropocentric approaches and—in tune with recent trends in environmental history—challenges the notion that [End Page 630] industrial modernity can be defined in opposition to nature and its constraints. Serneri argues instead that the relevance of ecosystemic processes is nowhere more evident than in the arguably most anthropized context, the industrial city. Therefore, in contrast with an older historiography concerned primarily with rural and wild contexts, his focus is on urban change.

The book comprises a collection of essays published mostly in Italian during the last fifteen years which examine the mutual construction of social and ecological processes in the Italian peninsula as industrialization and urbanization radically (but also unevenly) reconfigured the relationships between Italians and the territories they inhabited. It opens with an erudite introduction that charts the evolution of environmental history in the United States and western Europe and identifies the peculiarities of the Italian experience in its late and extremely uneven economic transformation, which also explains the traditional conflation of environmental and agrarian history by Italian scholars. This introduction, which should be made available to non-Italian speakers, leads to a series of distinct essays on modern Italy grouped in two sections—the first about the relationships between natural resources and economic development, and the second about policies and cultural understandings of environmental change.

In the first section, which historians of technology will find particularly useful, Serneri focuses on the ways that local and national elites embedded water in emerging urban-industrial spaces. Aware of the damaging impact of many of the new activities but reluctant to intervene in a systematic way, in 1888 the national government decided to follow a narrowly "hygienist" approach by mandating the relocation of the most harmful industries away from the urban centers, thereby scattering sources of water and air pollution and making coordinated interventions even more costly and less likely. Moreover, this legislation had to come to terms with powerful local interests, which negotiated deferrals and exceptions, and produced extremely diverse and incoherent patterns of practices.

Serneri tells a similar story about the restructuring of the urban water supply and sewerage systems, which began around the same time and in many cases took decades to complete. In the face of devastating cholera epidemics, Italian cities turned first to the reorganization of water supply by drawing from a bewildering variety of sources, sometimes dictated by ecological considerations but often informed by political and economic constraints. As was the case in Milan, Italy's premier industrial city and the focus of one of the essays, a unified sewerage and water-disposal system was built later and with the single intention of driving dirty waters away from the city.

The essays in the second part of the book deal with a variety of topics linked by Serneri's attention to the relationships between political culture and environmental change. Especially noteworthy is a discussion of the Italian socialists' contradictory approach to the ecological dimension of industrial [End Page 631] change before the rise of Fascism, in which the ambivalence of the Marxist left toward nature and modernity is illustrated and dissected. Equally useful and informative is a historical reconstruction of the Italian environmental movement from its emergence within the New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s to its increasingly autonomous presence in civil society and the...

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