Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (review)

William Beinart and Peter Coates are, respectively, specialists in South African and American history, both at the University of Bristol in England. They have followed in the tradition of George Frederickson, John Cell, and James Campbell by writing a comparative study of an aspect of U.S. and South African history. Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa is an environmental history published in a series designed chiefly for student use. By and large it should succeed as a school text. In any case, it makes a rewarding read for anyone interested in environmental or comparative history.

The authors begin with a chapter about the nature of environmental history, which draws mainly on American historiography, and about parallels in U.S. and South African history. They use the works of Donald Worster and William Cronon in particular to raise the question of the relationship between capitalism and environmental change. Chapters follow on hunting, forests, agriculture, parks and park policy, and, lastly, environmentalism and environmental thought in the two countries. The hunting chapter deals with the impact of late nineteenth-century hunting on populations of large mammals, such as elephants and buffalo. The chapter on forests is mainly about forestry and forest policy, and suffers somewhat because forests were such a large part of U.S. history and such a small part of South African history. The agriculture chapter is mostly twentieth-century material, with a heavy emphasis on the 1930s in both cases. This chapter leans a bit toward the American case, with lots to say about the Dust Bowl and the policy responses it provoked. The chapter on parks focuses on the period 1870-1920, when national parks were first formed in both countries, and connects this trend to a search for a distinctive national identity on the part of ruling elites. The final chapter takes up the history of environmental thought, popular environmentalism, and the social con-texts of environmental change and policy.

In their introduction, Beinart and Coates say they hope to "balance discussion of political economy and ecological change, illustrating their interaction" (p. 13). In the conclusion they say they attempted an examination of "the interrelationship of ecological and economic/cultural change" (p. 108). In the end, these goals are only partly realized. They succeed in connecting ecological change to politics, to culture, and to intellectual life. But the connections to economic themes (industrialization, overseas trade, population growth) are not so well brought out. The potential of the book to contribute to the debate on the relationship between capitalism and environmental change goes entirely unrealized. The authors do not raise the matter again after the first chapter.

Although the book may not do all that its early pages lead a reader to hope for, it does many useful and interesting things. For one, it is a fine piece of comparative history. U.S. and South African materials are interwoven within almost every paragraph. It treats both societies equally, although the environmental historiography is far richer on the U.S. side. The final chapter includes an excellent section on how the racial policies of both countries played out in environmental terms. The authors make occasional use of examples from the Caribbean or East Africa to help provide perspective. To date no one has written a general environmental history of the United States or South Africa. This little book attempts to synthesize both those histories, and to compare them in detail. That is no small contribution—to U.S. environmental historiography, to South African environmental historiography, and to the comparative historiography on the United States and South Africa. Last but not least, the book is clearly and concisely written.

The book has, in my view, only one major intellectual...