Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century ed. by Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome (review)

The eleventh volume in the Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture brings business history and environmental history together to discuss the "complex and changing relationship between business and the environment" (ix). Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century is an edited collection of essays that emerged from a 2014 conference cosponsored by the German Historical Institute and the Hagley Museum and Library. The question at the heart of that conference, and thus this book, was a deceptively simple one: Can capitalism be green—or at least greener?

The book is organized into four parts. In Part I the volume's editors, Adam Rome and Hartmut Berghoff, along with Hugh Gorman, offer some big-picture essays that pose questions about business's participation in modern environmentalism, historical precedents for environmentally informed enterprises, and the role of business in the creation of the legal, material, and cultural frameworks that circumscribe economic activities. Part II features a set of essays by Christine Meisner Rosen, William Bryan, and Julie Cohn that describe various environmental considerations present in business ventures well before the modern environmental movement. In Part III David Kinkela and Leif Fredrickson shed light on some "Failures and Dilemmas" that have plagued efforts to make capitalism green, while Part IV, "Going Green," follows several stories of businesses that somewhat successfully managed to incorporate green principles into their operations.

There is a lot to digest in this volume, and many suggestive avenues of analysis. David Kinkela's history of the plastic six-pack ring, for example, is a sobering story of how addressing one environmental issue with new material technologies created unintended consequences that were perhaps even worse ecologically than the original problem. Christine Meisner Rosen challenges conventional portrayals of business leaders as single-minded pursuers of economic gain by revealing that some notable businessmen in the nineteenth century were vocal proponents of smoke-abatement efforts, despite being leaders in the very industries that were doing the polluting. Brian Black offers an intriguing tale of the American automobile industry's efforts to circumvent new government regulations, which counterintuitively precipitated increased sales of less efficient vehicles while simultaneously carving out a viable market segment for hybrid and electric vehicles. Efficiency is a common theme throughout the book, and Julie Cohn details how the goal of conservation through efficiency sometimes has the paradoxical effect of increasing rather than decreasing overall consumption. What Cohn is describing (although she does not use the term) is the double-edged sword of efficiency known as the "Jevons paradox," which Hartmut Berghoff briefly explains in Chapter 2.

Alongside the quest for efficiency, the thread of environmental governance also runs through Green Capitalism? It is most directly addressed in Hugh Gorman's essay, which argues that the rules set by these systems of governance are more important than the decisions of individual producers or consumers, because these rules emanate from and reinforce the legal, political, social, and cultural contexts that define markets and establish the boundaries of business activity. Systems of governance figure prominently in nearly every essay in this volume, validating Gorman's point.

These are all suggestive insights, but Green Capitalism? has its weaknesses, too. First and foremost, terms could be better defined. The meaning of "green" is never clearly explained, and as a result it seems to serve as a catchall for anything from regulating food safety to productive efficiency. The word "capitalism," when it is used at all, is similarly vague and ill defined. That is problematic, because the question of whether or not capitalism can ever be green depends greatly on our understanding of the fundamental tenets of capitalism itself. Several of the authors in this book seem to hint at this. Kinkela questions whether any industry based on disposability can ever be green, while Rome acknowledges the "problematic" reality that nearly all...