Oysters have served humans and nature well throughout history, sometimes as food, sometimes as natural resources supporting economies and individual livelihoods, sometimes as icons for community identity and regional heritage, and more recently as marine environmentalists filtering and removing pollution from waterways while also providing habitat for other marine animals.

The literature on oysters, while vast, is not an integrated field of scholarship. Scientists, experts and writers stick to what they know best: the marine biologist to the natural history, life cycle and reproduction; the economist to harvests, markets and wealth; and other social scientists to the community and cultural, including considerations of cuisine, regional identity and heritage.

However, a small but increasingly important group of scholars and writers are taking a more holistic look at oysters and asking broader questions about what oysters can tell us about our current and past relationships with the natural world. In the hands of these authors, the oyster is a multifaceted animal, full of ecological, economic, political and socio-cultural meaning. Oysters inform us on how human interests over the use and definition of nature collide and course through history in unpredictable yet understandable ways. For an animal that does not get around much (oysters are stationary bivalves) and looks like a rock underwater to most individuals, its place in the human history of coastal regions offers important human and natural world insights.

Christine Keiner’s The Oyster Question: Scientists, Watermen and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since 1880 is an example of this new scholarship. There is a significant and disciplinary-confined literature on Chesapeake Bay oysters (Crassostrea virginica), and today the Eastern oyster arguably remains the most important animal in the Chesapeake Bay when viewed holistically in terms of ecological, economic and cultural significance. Today, state government agencies and environmental groups are remaking the oyster fishery into oyster sanctuaries and reserves and creating updated legal frameworks and economic incentives for the development of oyster aquaculture to meet economic and food needs. The public common, wild oyster fishery is being scaled backed to fewer and fewer areas. But, as The Oyster Question makes clear, for at least the last 130 years it has been risky to make predictions about the future status of Chesapeake Bay oysters, and in particular how nature, watermen, scientists, resource managers and politics will combine to shape the configuration of the oyster fishery.

Accordingly, The Oyster Question is a must read for those of us who study the Chesapeake Bay and its oysters, for the watermen who still harvest oysters, and for watershed’s citizens whose daily economic, political and cultural life choices affect the health of North American’s largest estuary. The book provides the reader with a wide-range of information on history of the oyster fishery, the harvest practices and knowledge of watermen, race relations on the water, various key legislations and management policies that have shaped the oyster fishery, and the cultural importance of oysters to the region. These contributions alone make this one of the best, recent books written on the Chesapeake Bay.

More specifically, there are three areas where Keiner’s historical analysis is particularly insightful and potentially very useful to future oyster research and management. First, the historical lens for understanding the Chesapeake Bay and oysters has been too narrowly focused on events within the watershed. Keiner blows past watershed boundaries and situates the history of Chesapeake Bay oyster harvesting, science and management within the context of economic modernisation in the United States where state entities, elite economic interests and/or scientific authorities restricted access to common-pool resources in favour of privatisation of land and increased capitalism and industrialism. As Keiner shows, efforts to promote the privatisation of oyster cultivation since 1880 were similar to efforts by agricultural reformers that urged farmers of the postbellum New South and New Plains to modernise by enclosing common lands long used for pasture or subsistence hunting and fishing.

Second, Keiner’s historical analysis adds an additional window through which to understand and value Maryland watermen. Watermen politically mobilised to take advantage of the state’s rurally biased system of legislative representation, which only ended in 1960. By doing so, they were able to fend off repeated efforts to develop capital-intensive privatisation of the oyster fishery based on science-informed aquaculture practices. This political achievement made it possible for rural coastal communities and their county governments to develop a regulated, patchwork commons that evolved depending on the status of the oyster population and markets. While oysters declined dramatically in the twentieth century, due to a combination of anthropogenic and ecological factors, and regional differences among watermen could lead to ‘oyster wars’, this locally influenced management system achieved more success in managing oysters and sustaining communities than is generally understood today. As the state of Maryland today re-starts efforts to privatise the oyster industry through lease-based aquaculture, and closes off more of the traditional oyster commons to establish reserves and sanctuaries, Keiner’s insights on the many positives for rural Maryland and the Bay of past common property regimes for oysters is a reminder that community-based knowledge and participation improves the sustainability of resource management.

Third, a central theme of The Oyster Question is the role of science in shaping restoration and management policies. Since the 1880s, a long list of scientists have argued that management of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay oyster fishery should be based on a scientific, capital intensive approach (i.e., aquaculture), as in other coastal states worldwide. Without question, oyster fishery management requires cutting-edge natural and social science. What is less clear and warrants greater attention is how particular political dynamics, policy environments and economic conditions privilege certain forms of scientific knowledge, as applied to natural resource management, while excluding alternative epistemologies, science-based or otherwise. There is a strong and robust scientific community working with policymakers on the restoration and future management of the Chesapeake Bay. We would all be well served to be familiar with Keiner’s analysis of the co-dependency between science and the political economy of Chesapeake oysters during the twentieth century.

Publication of The Oyster Question is timely. Today, oyster restoration and fishery management are again emphasising privatisation of oystering. Keiner’s historical insights, clear writing and extensive documentation provides us with a wealth of historical information to inform future interdisciplinary research and management of Chesapeake Bay oysters. Through her detailed historical research she shows how we have circled back and over some of the same resource management issues related to oysters numerous times. It makes us realise that our own interests and well-intentioned contributions are not that new or novel, that a good number of the problems and solutions have been implemented to some degree in the past, and by understanding that past we have a better chance to create management paradigms capable of addressing twenty-first century ecological, economic and social challenges for oysters and the Chesapeake Bay.

MICHAEL PAOLISSO
Department of Anthropology
University of Maryland, College Park

This essay by Luigi Piccioni – senior lecturer at the Faculty of Economics, University of Calabria – tells a story so far only known to a small group of scholars and environmentalists: that of the big game hunter of the Alps, climber, and also conservationist (one of the most important in Italy and Europe) Renzo Videsott. Born in 1904 in Trentino, Rezo Videsott spent his youth in study (The Royal Technical Institute Leonardo da Vinci of Trento and the Royal Higher College of Veterinary Medicine of Turin), rock climbing in the Alps and hunting. He gained a position as professor of special pathology and clinical medicine. The first turning point in his life came in the early 1940s, when Carlo De Angeli, the Milanese pharmaceutical industrialist, assigned Videsott the management of a hunting reserve in the Eastern Alps. Here, Videsott – with ‘an approach typical of the hunter’s mentality’ – began to cherish the idea of reintroducing to the nature reserve the ibex, which had become extinct in the area 700 years before. The project was successful and was only interrupted by the requisition of the reserve by the German Army (1943).

In 1944 came the second major turning point in Videsott’s life as he became determined to save the ibexes of the Gran Paradiso National Park from extinction. During the second half of the 1940s, Videsott was able to reorganise the National Park and, at the same time, work out (albeit without success) a general plan for the reorganisation and enhancement of Italian national parks. In 1948, Videsott was among the founders of the Movimento italiano per la protezione della natura (Italian Movement for the Protection of Nature), an organisation whose task was to ‘let grow a novel cultural economy, aimed at a reasonable appreciation of nature, as the only way capable of granting respect for mankind’s broader interests, spiritual and material, present and future’. In the early 1950s, Videsott began to devote himself full time to the job of Director of the Gran Paradiso Park. Under his direction, the Park became a focal point for conservation, tourism and research activities (since the 1950s, the Gran Paradiso Park has published a series of works devoted to scientific investigations of the fauna: the physiology of the hibernating marmot, the geological history of the ibex, the anatomy and pathology of the ibex and chamois). In those years, Videsott elaborated a concept of conservation which acquired an international resonance (in 1964 he was awarded the Von Humboldt gold medal). The starting point of his analysis was to take stock of the contradiction which pervaded the existence of European parks: the ‘need to grant a rigorous protection of all natural expressions in densely populated areas’. Once this became accepted, Videsott’s primary objective was to find a way of really achieving the ‘study and protection of free, spontaneous, natural expressions’ in National Parks. This was to be achieved, he argued, by educating citizens into a new relationship with nature and ensuring that parks could become institutions capable of mediating between the interests of naturalists, political administrators and citizens.

Videsott’s approach was put to the test during the 1960s, a period of great conflicts and tension between the Gran Paradiso Park and local inhabitants, who felt excessively constrained by their proximity to the protected area. At this point the story of Videsott and the Gran Paradiso Park further reflects the wider picture in Italian history and the role of speculation in urban development as a factor capable of affecting (if not of conditioning) choices – both at a local and at a national level – in matters of territorial and natural resources management. Towards the end of the 1960s Videsott was forced prematurely to resign the position of Director of the Park as a result, the book suggests, of attacks from those who appointed themselves as the Paladins of building speculation and tourism development. In an article that appeared on the weekly Panorama (22 January 1970), Videsott himself explained the reasons for his resignations (cf. p. 315): ‘The chief problems to be faced by the new director [...] are twofold: that of fighting building speculation and that relative to the boundaries of the park. [...] Should I have allowed the building of such houses and cottages [...] by now the park would be dotted with large tenements. I have said no to everyone: to the inhabitants of the valley, who offered me a percentage from the sale of their land, to builders who tried to bribe me money in hand in exchange for a building permission.’ It was in 1969, therefore, that Renzo Videsott’s public life came to a close (he died on 4 January 1974).

Primo di cordata is not solely a detailed biography. It is yet another attempt by Luigi Piccioni (the author of, among other works, Il volto amato della Patria. Il primo movimento per la protezione della natura in Italia 1880–1934 [1999]) to personally contribute to the construction of an approach to environmental history with two declared objectives. These are a reconsideration of the interaction between natural balances and humans, and a desire to strengthen the position of environmental history as a discipline (something which remains a challenge) aimed at considering the connections between environment, environmental policies, the social construction of nature and environmental movements. In reading Primo di cordata, even non-Italian readers will be able not only to learn more about the ideologies and life of Renzo Videsott, but also to learn about the complex events which have characterised the evolution of the environmentalist movement and environmental policies in Italy.

FEDERICO PAOLINI
University of Siena

According to Michael Rawson, the way in which many modern Americans relate to nature is a nineteenth-century construct that began with urban growth and more specifically with Boston’s urbanisation. During the nineteenth century the city by the bay was in the forefront of ‘developing progressive instruments of social and environmental reform such as parks, modern tenement houses, playgrounds, and water and sewer systems’ (p. 15). Although the terminology differed from that of our modern day, Eden on the Charles makes it evident that reforms and public programmes that involved environmental concerns were close to the heart of a large number of Boston’s reformers. The divisive debates and related alliances that came and went over potential public projects often cut across class lines, sometimes making unlikely allies of citizens from the elite, middle-class and working-class sectors of the city. At bottom, opinions, proposed programmes and debates were ‘deeply informed’ by contemporary perceptions of, and attitudes towards, nature, the role that local and state government should (or should not) have in municipal works, the tensions between public and private, and the conflicting views of precisely what a ‘city upon a hill’ should be two centuries after Boston’s initial founding by the Puritans.

In five chapters addressing what at first may seem to be unrelated topics (Boston Common, municipal water, suburbs, Boston Harbor, and preserving wilderness), Rawson demonstrates that there are connections, primarily ‘the complex relationships between humans and the natural world that are social, cultural, political, economic, and legal in character’ (p. vii).

As Rawson informs his readers in the first chapter, when Boston incorporated in 1822 the city’s ‘powerful new government’ immediately ‘began to reshape the city’, turning its attention first to Boston Common (p. 42). The goal was to redefine the purpose and aesthetics of this central space, which in the English legal and cultural tradition had been equally available to all Bostonians since the seventeenth century. For nearly two centuries the Common was a place of production as in its use for grazing cows that produced milk, but by the nineteenth century wealthy Bostonians would become a powerful force in transforming the Common to a place of leisure and refinement. Rawson discusses this process including the political and legal wrangling that ensued and how class and status shaped the debate. By 1830 the victors had redefined and refined the Common marking the first step in the creation of an ‘unbroken chain of refined spaces’ from Beacon Hill to Boston Common, the Public Garden and Back Bay (p. 73). From how public space was defined, used and transformed Rawson turns to the political battle which began in the 1820s concerning water supply for the rapidly growing city. The political debate was, however, also a social, cultural and environmental one. Public health issues, the right of the poor to have access to water, public versus private supply, the difficulty of fighting fires, and concerns about taxation constituted just a few of the central arguments in the debate. To humanitarian reformers access to water was a matter of what some environmental historians have termed ‘moral environmentalism’ (p. 92) and to temperance advocates public access to pure water would aid in the fight against intemperance. In his account of this two decade campaign, which ended in 1848 when Boston began operation of its first municipal water system, Rawson captures the intensity and compassion with which Bostonians argued and defended their cause.

Chapter three examines the migration of Bostonians into the city’s surrounding rural areas, or pastoral suburbs, with Brookline and Roxbury as case studies. The new suburbs provided a rural haven away from the growing immigrant population, poverty and industrialisation. In rural suburbs, where one was close to nature, it was believed possible to foster the agrarian ideal (though no residents of the suburbs laboured with their hands); the genteel and refined life could be lived; and democracy would be preserved through small communities with town meetings (which had ended when Boston incorporated in 1822). Rawson is not simply recounting the experience of living in nineteenth-century pastoral suburbs, however. As he notes ‘scholars have paid considerable attention to how certain ideas about nature defined romantic suburbs’ but ‘the central irony on which such places were built’ has not been so carefully studied. The ‘central irony’ for Rawson is that the ‘rural environmental relationship’ could exist ‘only through the seemingly contradictory embrace of urban amenities like water and sewer systems’ (p. 131). Embracing the genteel and rural life was not always anxiety free, however, as the pressures of annexation and overcrowding, and the need for building controls became part of the suburban reality during the 1870s.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Bostonians also settled the newly developed land fill areas that had once been part of Boston Harbor. Chapter four of Eden on the Charles looks closely at man’s impact on Boston Harbor. Extensive filling to create new land and lack of either regulatory protections or a ‘master plan for development’ raised concerns within the maritime community which saw ‘a need for more water rather than more land’. By contrast, their opponents, ‘powerful railroad and real estate interests - tended to see landmaking as indispensable in a city with Boston’s geography’ (p. 202). State and local government, the courts, public and private interests, contemporary scientific knowledge, and the Army Corps of Engineers who engaged in aggressive dredging each played a key role in transforming Boston Harbor. Simultaneously, Rawson notes, over the course of several decades there was a cultural shift in the way in which the city’s inhabitants perceived the harbour. As Boston Common had earlier shifted from a place of production to a place of leisure, now inhabitants ‘reinvented’ Boston Harbor ‘as a leisure-time playground’ (p. 226).

By the closing decades of the nineteenth century Bostonians had dramatically reshaped their environment, so much so that public concern engendered a movement to preserve remaining wilderness area in close proximity to Boston. Once again interesting dynamics and combinations were at play, as environmental concerns melded with those of Boston’s Brahmins who sought to preserve their heritage and settlement history. Having played an instrumental part in transforming Boston and its environs beyond anything that would be recognisable to a seventeenth-century ancestor, these upper-class Bostonians determined to preserve specific wilderness areas as natural and historic sites. Rawson places this movement within the context of larger national trends that drew together conservationists and public health, wilderness and park advocates. By 1893 the state of Massachusetts had created the Metropolitan Park Commission, which had the responsibility of acquiring lands for park districts, which in turn, Rawson argues, had a significant influence on land development patterns. In the concluding chapter of Eden on the Charles the reader is brought full circle to Rawson’s assertion in the preface that the ‘primary goal’ of his work is ‘to shed light on the historical relationship between nature and cities’ (p. xii).

Michael Rawson has drawn upon an extensive number of sources to write this richly detailed and engaging book, which demonstrates with clarity the intertwining of environmental, cultural, social and political history in nineteenth-century Boston. Eden on the Charles is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the city’s past and will be a useful resource for scholars and students alike.

JACQUELINE CARR
University of Vermont

As the title suggests, Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 straddles a number of fields, from environmental history and the history of technology to social and cultural history. In each of her six case studies of Canadian megaprojects, Parr is primarily concerned with the ways humans adapt to the physical or conceptual changes that such projects bring to traditional ways of living and working. These changes often force nearby residents to alter what Parr calls their ‘embodied knowledge’ - the subliminal ways humans sense, understand and interact with the environment - often with limited success. Two case studies are suggestive of this overarching theme. In Chapter Two, Parr describes the effects of the 1952 construction of the NATO base at Gagetown, New Brunswick. Over a period of 200 years, residents had developed a sustainable form of agriculture and silviculture based on knowledge about the natural world that had become ‘internalized as second nature’ (p. 36). This traditional culture was lost when NATO expropriated the land. Through oral histories with former residents, aerial photography and maps, Parr reconstructs the cultural and economic landscape of the region - the smells, tastes and sounds of traditional life that were replaced when the base opened. Some residents moved far away, unable to cope with the changes; others continued to live adjacent to the base and watch their former homes turn to tank mazes and artillery ranges. Periodic visits to the site, first on public roads through the base and later on anniversary tours replete with signs indicating former landmarks, allowed residents to view the disorienting alterations first hand. Murmuring a phrase repeated by many displaced people through this study, one man described the visits as similar to ‘driving around in the dark’ (p. 46). By focusing on the post-expropriation fate of several individuals and families, Parr shows that residents’ traditional embodied knowledge had little value in new lines of work and social arrangements that bore little resemblance to their former lives in the woodlands and meadows of the St. John River Valley.

Workers in Ontario’s Bruce Nuclear Generating Facility, described in Chapter 3, experienced a conceptual rather than physical displacement. Unlike in American and French nuclear facilities, where the mitigation of radiation risk was hierarchical and determined not by workers but by surveyors who measured exposure and assigned tasks, all Canadian nuclear employees received baseline training in radiation science, the functions of the plant, and the technology used to detect and measure radiation. This allowed the administrators of nuclear plants to make invisible risks more tangible, and, in the process, give workers the autonomy to make rational decisions about risks to their bodies. Because many of Bruce’s nuclear workers came from conventional industries such as oil refining and resource extraction in which risks were apparent and sensed by all, the embodiment of radiation knowledge required a transition from a somatic to symbolic understanding of risk. Tools, especially electrical radiation meters, were essential to this process, and after some initial scepticism, their measurements became ‘a form of tacit knowledge with the same credibility as touch, taste, or smell’ (p. 68). Empowering workers to make decisions about risk led to a democratic culture and better working conditions in the facility. For example, the management of federally mandated radiation doses became a collegial undertaking spread across the entire staff. In contrast, contract workers in other nations took their maximum doses in a short period and then left the facility. In other chapters, Parr is transparently critical of the changes megaprojects impose on residents. In the case of Bruce’s nuclear workers, however, it appears that the introduction of new radioactive ‘taskscapes’ and challenges to embodied knowledge had a positive influence on workers’ safety and morale.

In subsequent chapters, Parr draws similar themes from the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the damming of the Columbia River at the Arrow Lakes, hydrogen sulphide releases at Bruce’s heavy water plant, and a nationally-publicised E. coli outbreak in Walkerton, Ontario. In each case, residents were forced to abandon once well-known sights, smells, sounds and tastes and come to terms with new ways of knowing, working and living in unfamiliar surroundings. Adapting generations of acquired knowledge to new environments, however, proved difficult or impossible for many residents. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that decisions about the megaprojects and the regulation of their impact were made by people outside of the affected communities who were either unfamiliar or unconcerned with the potential costs to residents. One unstated but significant contribution of Sensing Changes is to restore the perspective of long-time residents to a history otherwise dominated by distant, technocratic government decision making.

To further flesh out residents’ perspectives, Parr and Jon van der Veen, a communications studies doctoral candidate, created a companion website, Megaprojects New Media (http://megaprojects.uwo.ca/), that features oral histories, maps, aerial photography, music and video related to each case study. ‘Our new media experiments’, writes Van der Veen in a preface to the book, ‘aim to effect a more coherent, sensuous, and memorable reclamation of experience than is possible through textual representations’ (xxiv). Indeed, the website allows viewers to flip through aerial photography of changing landscapes, listen to local music, and, most effectively, follow along on a walking tour of former neighbourhoods as residents talk about their memories. However, the material for each case study is limited, and although readers will enjoy recognising quoted material from the book in the site’s oral histories, there simply is not enough information on any single case study to move beyond the argument in the book or come to new conclusions. One of the exciting promises of new media is to allow for ongoing contributions from the public or, in this case, from residents and workers living near the megaprojects; but the site does not appear to allow for this type of interaction. Megaprojects New Media provides a potentially powerful means of engaging undergraduates with the material but - unlike this innovative book - does not push the boundaries of new media very far.

SILAS CHAMBERLIN
Lehigh University

Landscapes is the second in a new series of affordable environmental history readers (each is priced at #15), designed to appeal to students and researchers. Each volume addresses a different theme in environmental history and is a compilation of papers selected from the journals Environment and History and Environmental Values (in this case dating from 1994-2009). The first, Bioinvaders, investigated the rhetoric and realities of exotic introduced species. Future collections promise to address indigenous knowledge, forests, conservation history and the urban.

This book covers a broad geographical and historical range of landscapes and environments, moving from plantations in South Africa to the Australian outback, and from Medieval Ardennes to nuclear-age America, and comes at a time when the compelling cultural significance of landscape to the public, researchers, and those working in the creative industries is becoming evermore apparent. Public concern over landscape (particularly relating to environmental change) is growing, a development that is evident in recent research initiatives like the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s strategic programme in Landscape and Environment (2005-2011) and the European Landscape Convention (2000).

Early chapters explore landscape and the imagination, values and aesthetics and are drawn from Environmental Values. Ronald Hepburn’s discussion of the ‘metaphysical imagination’ contemplates the many different layers involved in aesthetic appreciation and interpretation of landscape, with landscape revealing or concealing ‘a still greater beauty than its own’ (p. 2). Hepburn is widely regarded as the ‘father of environmental aesthetics’, but for the general reader the opening material is amongst the most challenging in the volume. Emily Brady’s paper argues that a landscape’s aesthetic value should be considered of equal importance to environmental policy debates as scientific or economic considerations. Brady introduces the reader to some key environmental philosophical ideas like Leopold’s ‘land ethic’, discussing the possible links between an aesthetic sensibility toward nature and ethical or moral behaviour. Brady importantly ends by introducing several notes of caution: the difficulties of valuing the not obviously beautiful or the distant and unknown, and the acknowledgment that what we judge as beautiful may be environmentally damaging (i.e. invasive non-native species).

John Benson uses rural landscape to discuss the relationship between aesthetic and utility value, before making distinctions between different non-instrumental kinds of interest in rural landscape. These directly involve the book’s readership, including the interest of the geologist, geographer, natural historian or ecologist in understanding nature, and the interest of the historian or archaeologist in the landscape as the product and record of past human activity. The chapter is concluded with a discussion about preservation and change, with the undesigned aesthetic character of rural landscape problematising any argument for preserving rural landscapes once they have lost their primary function. Haldane’s paper then contemplates whether and how ‘philosophical aesthetics might be brought into contemporary thinking about the natural environment’ (p. 49). Hinchman and Hinchman conclude the philosophical section of the book by considering what modern-day environmentalism owes the Romantics. Identifying the primary concern of the Romantics as the ‘all-sided development of the individual rather than the investigation and preservation of the natural world’ (p. 57), they eloquently explain that many Romantic writers were themselves scientists, fascinated by ‘wild’ landscapes (Coleridge and Wordsworth are described as ‘inveterate hikers and explorers of the remote mountains and forests’ [p. 65]), and being opposed to reductionist forms rather than science itself.

Chapters in the second section of the book feature a series of empirical case studies. Tim Bonyhady’s ‘Artists with Axes’ is a highlight, exploring the actions of artists in physically changing the landscapes that were the subjects of their paintings in order to create more ‘idealised’ views. Damien Shaw then reveals the harshness of the South African landscape experienced by British settlers who arrived at the Cape in 1820. These settlers were wholly ignorant of planting, the history of the region they occupied, and of how to cope with the natural dangers of their surroundings. He details particularly the struggle prospective settlers faced in gaining adequate information about the Cape before departure, South Africa having featured little in the imagination of the British public or the Romantic writers before 1820.

Binder and Burnett’s search for a populist landscape aesthetic in the novels of East Africa’s most prominent writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (written between the mid 1960s and mid 1980s) is set in Kenya. Nostalgia is introduced as a key concept, the wananchi people having lost their land to a foreign power (Britain), and with it their ability to control and manipulate the landscape. Ngugi’s approach questions the western assumption that it is possible to manage a landscape separately from the society that depends on and shapes that landscape. Heike Schmidt uses Eastern Zimbabwe and a combination of written records and interviews to explore the establishment of tea estates in the Honde Valley during the 1950s. The European sexualisation of the landscape through the ‘penetration’ of dense rainforest and opening up of the land, is contrasted with local African beliefs in forest and water spirits which prevented Africans from felling trees in the plantation zones. Schmidt concludes by demonstrating that claims to spiritual landscape have remained an important issue. When faced with drought conditions in the early 1990s, the plantation management made concessions to local access regulations and the rains arrived! Religious landscape is also the theme of Ellen Arnold’s paper, set in Medieval Ardennes. Medieval monks often represented themselves and others as converting the landscape as part of their religious mission. Monks actively engineered water resources and erased the landscape of pagan cult practices, which Arnold explains through the miracle of Remacle’s fountain.

Kenneth Olwig explores the ‘landscaping’ of Jutland heath, Denmark, and considers its value to both culture and biosphere health. The potentially volatile relationship between nature, nation and landscape becomes apparent, and Olwig also provides a useful history of the word ‘landscape’. Kirsty Douglas changes the focus to geological heritage landscapes in Australia, exploring the recuperative power of ‘deep-time’ landscapes, and highlighting how important scientific discoveries in unexpected locations can generate different pictures of past histories. The characterisation of Lake Mungo as poor grazing, fringe and degraded, was redeemed to an extent by its ‘unparalleled record’ of Quaternary climate change, and brought to the world’s attention following the discovery of ancient human remains in 1968, and subsequent designation as a World Heritage Area.

Using the concept of the ‘park’, John Wills explores the differences and similarities between the landforms and mindscapes of national parks and nuclear parks in the United States. ‘The same qualities that marked Diabolo [Canyon] an ideal location for nuclear development also confirmed its potential as a nature reserve’ (p. 228). The setting aside of former nuclear testing grounds as protected park areas prevents ‘nuclear contamination from reaching human settlements while protecting wild nature from increasing urbanisation and tourism’ (p. 234), whereas national parks struggle with an increasing tourism problem, becoming crowded and claustrophobic. Finally, Joseph Goddard explores the urban fringe. Scrutinising changing landscapes and ambience in three edge counties in the eastern US, Goddard explains how these areas were transformed from rural backwaters, improved transport links bringing them closer to metropolitan areas post 1945. Yet despite increasing populations, in the eyes of many these areas have become more rural, greener, more forested and more diverse in plant, insect and animal life. The paper demonstrates the strong influence of farming and agriculture on the perception of place, and documents the emergence of what Goddard refers to as ‘hybridised leisure countryside’ (p. 265).

The fourteen complementary papers in this reader serve to illustrate the inspiringly varied nature of arts, humanities and social science research on landscape, and its interdisciplinary character, whilst also providing a historical perspective on contemporary landscapes and corresponding environmental issues.

LUCY VEALE
Nottingham University

This is a book about how horses shaped South African social and environmental history from the seventeenth century to the present. Swart tells an interspecies story - the ‘adventures of a big gentle herbivore and a small, rogue primate’ (p. 10), both of which are invasive species in the landscape of South Africa. As Swart traces the material and political effects of horse introduction in South Africa, she examines the symbolic and cultural dimensions of horse use, while deftly connecting them to material changes in landscapes and horse bodies, and to the emerging structures of social power in South African society. By emphasizing the ‘ecological imperialism’ of horse introduction, she links South African environmental history to the big questions of global environment history. Horses were constitutive of social power, Swart argues, and those power structures had material consequences. Horses mattered. Swart provides a lucid case for why social history and environmental history each provide strong methodological and theoretical approaches for writing animal history.

The book is organised into eight chronologically arranged, thematically connected essays. In, ‘But where’s the bloody horse?’ Swart discusses why and how animals need to be reinserted into human histories. In ‘Reins of power,’ she explains the arrival of horses in the seventeenth century. Horses were a technology of European conquest and settlement of South Africa, providing mobility for military, hunting and transport purposes. Yet southern Africa was an exceptionally difficult environment for horses because of climate, plants, predators, parasites and pathogens. Initially, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) limited horse importation and encouraged domestication of zebras and quaggas. As this failed, more horses were imported and settlers bred a regional type, the ‘Cape horse’. In ‘Blood horses’, Swart discusses nineteenth-century horse breeding as a material means to power, and a symbolic means of performing and reasserting status among settlers of European descent; and in the next chapter, ‘The Empire rides back’, explores the same process among the Basotho people when attempts to keep horses out of indigenous hands failed, along with attempts to restrict horse ownership to the European upper class. For both Europeans and natives, horses were a means of agency, resistance and state building.

The South African (Boer) War of 1899-1902 played a role in altering the South African horse world. ‘The last of the old campaigners’, shows how horses were critical factors in the outcome of the war. The hardy Boer horses distinguished themselves, while the British had to rely on imports not acclimatised to the region. Equine experiences in the war - poor conditions and care, wounds, disease, death - made horses the symbol of war’s sufferings. In the aftermath of war, in rituals similar to those in the American Civil War and the First World War, memorialising dead warhorses was an important part of how South Africans remembered and worked through the war experience. In ‘The Cinderella of the livestock industry’, Swart explores responses to the ruin of the horse industry and the rural economy in the wake of the South African war, followed by four decades in which the horse-human relationship was radically transformed. Appalling horse casualties and importation to meet war demand had diversified the horse population, but both importation and war movement without veterinary precautions resulted in rampant disease. State and cultural politics shaped efforts to revive the horse industry, yet, despite the renown of Boer horses and horsemanship in the war, emphasised importing and breeding English horses, which paralleled the desire to raise ‘a healthy British Race in Africa’ (p. 141). In general, the adoption of motorised transport and machinery undercut practical horse use, with a brief revival when motor supplies and fuel ran low during the Second World War.

By the postwar period there had been a radical transformation in the horse-human relationship. ‘High horses’ describes the re-invention of the horse industry around importing and breeding show horses. Horse breeding reflected two different kinds of Afrikaner identity, both created through consumption and promoting a nostalgic connection to traditional platteland life. Among newly wealthy rural Afrikaners, importation of flashy American Saddlebreds asserted a newly confident, internationalist pro-American identity. Among other groups, the breeding of Boerperds (the traditional horse of the Boers) became a locus of identity politics focused on celebrating Boer heritage, policing ethnic and racial boundaries, and downplaying class differences within the white population. In her concluding chapter, ‘The world the horses made’, Swart considers the problems and promise of writing history that takes animals seriously.

At her best, Swart is a lively and engaging writer. Like many animal historians, she has a propensity for punning in her chapter titles and sub-headings, which underscores the centrality of animals in human experience. Sadly, the writing is uneven, with disappointing lapses into thickets of theoretical jargon. I also wish Swart displayed a more nuanced view of technological change. For example, efforts to reassert the primacy of horse use in the 1930s, which paralleled a similar movement in the United States, was more than just cultural politics of nostalgia - it reflected the instability and uncertainty of rapidly changing technological systems. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the role that the United States played in shaping the South African horse world, and also comparisons with American horse history. For example, both countries have herds of feral horses, yet these horses have different meanings within their respective national cultures. Most interesting are the introductory and concluding chapters, where Swart explores the problems of agency and environmental impact.

This focused critical study provides a superior model of how to write animal history. Riding High is a substantial contribution to our understanding about how and why horses were important in specific places, periods and situations and a reminder that there is no human history separate from animal history.

ANNE N. GREENE
University of Pennsylvania

The objective of Michèle Dagenais, who teaches history at the University of Montreal, was to ‘demonstrate the centrality of water and its accommodations (aménagements) in the production of new urban forms since the beginning of the XIXth century’ (p. 8). Today Greater Montreal consists of 83 islands on five bodies of water and 315 kilometres of waterfront; these figures (provided near the end of the book) validate Dagenais’s objective.

She examines how, from 1810 to 2010, water was both an asset and a liability, a threat and an opportunity, a source of discomfort and pleasure for Montrealers - political leaders, technicians, businessmen and ordinary citizens alike.

Chapter I studies how previous generations of historians and geographers, such as Raoul Blanchard, approached the role of water in the transformation of Montreal. The ensuing narrative is essentially chronological. Chapter II focuses on the first half of the nineteenth century, the demolition of fortifications, the presence of many small rivers within the urban fabric, the use of river banks, the development and improvement of harbour facilities by private entrepreneurs, in sum the emergence of a ‘new vision of the river as an artefact to develop in order to sustain economic growth’ (p. 62). Chapter III primarily studies sanitary measures from the 1840s onwards and the increasing commodification of water. Chapter IV analyses the transformation of the harbour around 1900, rising concerns about epidemics and new sanitation measures spearheaded by civil servants. Chapter V focuses on an overlooked but enlightening case study, the industrialisation of the Rivière des Prairies: on this river bordering the main island to the north, the opening of a hydroelectric dam in 1930 had unexpected consequences, favouring instead of hampering swimming and fishing leisure activities. Chapter VI deals with the creation of the St Lawrence Seaway, the decline of the harbour in the 1960s, the ‘marginalisation’ of water due to the omnipresence of automobiles, the suburbanisation of the Rive Sud, the increasing popularity of water sports, and the first survey of river conditions spearheaded by a consortium of hunting and fishing clubs in the 1950s. Chapter VII explores the ‘novel representation of Montreal as archipelago’ (p. 198) resulting from a new planning framework for the city as well as from the trauma caused by major floods in the 1970s. Commissioned by the provincial government, the Archipel Project of the early 1980s produced 400 reports; it offered an ‘idyllic representation of the relation between residents and waterfronts’, focused on leisure activities and ‘underestimated physical and technical constraints’ (pp. 212-13). Archipel was abandoned with the political turnover of the 1985 elections, to be superseded by a municipal initiative, Réseau Bleu, promoting again the right to water and the reclaiming of banks for recreation. In the conclusion, Dagenais deplores the lack of realism of environmentalists, who do not take into account the realities of the physical milieu and of historical processes of constant transformation which she has uncovered. From her standpoint, history tells us that the relation between Montreal and its rivers have never been symbiotic, that water was rarely used for leisure in the distant past; it is time to debunk this myth which, against the backdrop of de-industrialisation for the river and Canal de Lachine, has been propagated by the media.

Dagenais pinpoints a major issue in environmental history: the conflict between the desire to democratise access to natural resources, in this instance water, and the increasing technical sophistication and expenditure of rehabilitation efforts, handled by experts supported by politicians. Her analysis is well informed, if convoluted at times. Some chapters rely on a large amount or archival and primary research; others rely on recent books by other Montreal scholars. Readers who, like this reviewer, do not have an intimate knowledge of Montreal’s entire metropolitan region, especially the hydrography of the Saint-Lawrence River and its tributaries, may not comprehend all the nuances of Dagenais’s analysis. Comprehensive and legible maps are sorely missed. Overall the illustrations and their captions are lacking in quality and relevance.

There seem to be two other missed opportunities to broaden readership beyond Montrealers, students of Canadian urban history and scholars specialising in water history and water policy. Nowhere in the main text does the author differentiate between what is specific to Montreal in its relation to water and what is applicable to many Western cities of the same size. Comparisons with the physical use and socio-cultural significance of water in other cities are in the endnotes. That is where, for instance, Dagenais sketches a parallel between the recent rehabilitation of the Vieux-Port and similar undertakings in San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston; exploring these parallels would have been a worthwhile contribution to environmental scholarship. The generic vs. specific dilemma is an important methodological question for authors working on the environmental history of water. To what extent do phenomena (which Dagenais analyses with diligence and finesse for Montreal) such as the ‘obsessive fear of bad smells from stagnant waters’ (p. 52); the perceived indecency of bathers in the nineteenth century; drainage and sewer construction following urban growth; sanitation philiosophies; flood control techiques; conflicting industrial and recreational developments for waterfront, change from city to city? Which circumstances are proper to Montreal? Its climate, entailing excessive icing, thawing and flooding? The enormous width of the St Lawrence ? The fact that in Canada the management of navigable rivers is handled by Federal authorities and that of ice and water by municipal entities? Montreal’s peculiar ‘sociolinguistic conditions’?

The author’s ambition to combine environmental and urban history seems to have been slightly short-changed, as far the latter discipline is concerned. To measure its impact on the ‘structuring of urban space’ (p. 9), water, of course, had to take centre stage, but locales, people and artefacts we can regard as holding important ‘supporting roles’ could have been better fleshed out: the lower working class districts most affected by flooding; the various protagonists of Dagenais’s story - river barons, reformer, engineers, physicians; bridges, jetties, reservoirs, public baths, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 on the Ile Sainte-Hélène, all Montreal landmarks devised for, and using, water from a practical, visual and symbolic standpoint.

ISABELLE GOURNAY
School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
University of Maryland

At first, this book seemed like a companion to Barber and Harper (2010) which accompanied an exhibition on cartographic history in the British Library. Instead it is an eclectic collection of maps, some of North America, but most of the United States. The emphasis is on recent maps and images. There is some commentary, but it is mainly descriptive. The book itself has six sections. Two are introductions - one by Frank Jacobs, author of Strange Maps: an Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities, and the other by Fritz Kessler, editor of the academic journal Cartographic Perspectives. They are followed by four thematic chapters: ‘Mapping the continent’, ‘Describing the continent’, ‘Navigating the continent’ and ‘Imagining the continent’. At the end is a short list of references.

The early maps show amazing detail. A remarkably accurate map from 1804 shows the outline of the eastern side of North America (pp. 160-1 - a ‘map of post roads situations and connections’). As early as 1804, Great Slave Lake, even today barely accessible by road, regularly appears on maps. However, we are not told how these maps were made, nor where the information came from. There is nothing on the history of exploration or of history of cartography. How did maps evolve? What were they trying to show, and why? How did they show it? How did early explorers like Lewis and Clarke, create maps and add to map-makers’ knowledge? The book lacks notable historic maps, such as those from 1870 Census which first mapped census data. There are maps from the 1890 census, and recent screen shots from a variety of US government sources, including the National Atlas, the United States Geological Survey, and the US Census Bureau. However, there is no discussion of the differences behind these maps, or of their standardisation, including the issue of ‘metadata’.

The book offers fascinating perspectives on how things can be viewed differently. On pp. 174-5 the Interstate system is presented in the form of an underground map, and on pp. 222-3 as a numerical topology - the US is divided into a 100 x 100 grid, reflecting the numbering system of the interstates, from 1 to 99. Neither map reflects geographic ‘reality’, but the underground-interstate map was one of my favourites. I have never seen the system so clearly. As a reader, I had other ‘favourite’ maps. They include an amazing diagram of the United States showing bearings and distances of the main places from Washington, and local times in relation to Washington (pp. 162-3). Places are shown in relation to each other, but the map shows no land features, coasts, or rivers. Another was ‘Keep America healthy’ (pp. 138-9) - not a map but a statement in the shape of the continental US, which strongly resembles the map of interstate freight flows (p. 20) from the US Office of Freight Management. Other highlights include: 1) the Singles Map, showing areas with more single women than single men, and more single men than single women (pp. 128-9) - amazingly, the East Coast, except Florida, has more single women than single men; the west coast and Florida (!) have more single men than single women; 2) maps of crop and livestock density by county (pp. 104-5); 3) a geological map of the entire North American continent (pp. 84-5); 4) an amazingly complicated map showing wildlife, alongside a simple one showing state birds (pp. 98-99).

Other maps, such as ‘The cottage ornament’ appear to have been a combination of world almanac, map and picture book. It contains a map of the US, a world map, illustrations of coins from different countries, pictures of famous people, and a table of clocks showing times around world (pp. 10-11). Similarly, ‘Our country’, from 1859 shows the US and central America, state seals, and different times in relation to New York (pp. 68-69). Sadly, the book has few examples of cartographic ephemera: for example, table mats from motorway restaurants showing maps of states or regions, which were once common in diners. There is an early map of the Rock Island Line, a Greyhound bus map, and a recent Amtrak map, but no railway maps from the 1920s to the 1950s, the high-point of passenger rail. The railways fostered the national parks and a new kind of tourism, promoted through illustrated magazines like National Geographic, which themselves popularised maps. Also missing are board games and travel games.

There are no maps of America’s place in the world - of overseas territories, overseas bases, trade links or wars fought abroad. It is an interesting comment on the editors that the maps they selected generally have a state orientation. Other representations are possible: climate zones, crop regions, livestock zones, wildlife zones, economic regions, metropolitan areas, catchment basins or land management zones. Even the map ‘Lost’, which shows only places with Lost in the name (pp. 194-5), shows state borders. What about maps of barn types across US, or maps showing the distribution of supporters of professional sports teams?

The rationale for the chapters is unclear. There are two maps of tornadoes: in the introduction (p. 27), and in ‘Describing the continent’ (p. 92). Why are they not together? Their styles are different, but there is no discussion of this. Similarly, one can contrast maps of the distribution of religions (p. 71: ‘The Washington Map of the United States’, 1860) and pp. 122-3 (‘Leading church bodies’ and ‘Old Amish’, 2002). These maps are particularly interesting for the different ways they show information. The mid-nineteenth century one suggests that, even then, Americans were fascinated by regional social differences. Equally, one can contrast ‘Proportion of foreign born to the aggregate population’ (1898, pp. 116-17) with pp. 118-21 (Census demographics, 2006-10) and the US Census’ Population Distribution, 2000 (pp. 126-7). Each map ‘reads’ differently. However, the book’s editors call the cartographer of the map of census demographics an ‘artist’ and the map ‘art’ without going into the deeper implications of this. Surely, to some extent, all maps are art.

Accompanying explanations are often simplistic. For example, on p. 100, a commentary on a map of farm sizes argues that high population density in the Eastern US led to smaller farms. Perhaps, but when the map was made, poor transport links meant that land was isolated from markets. Western farms were characterised by ranching rather than intensive agriculture. Thanks to the Homestead Act of 1862, ‘farms’ of 160 acres - one quarter square mile - were given to settlers. Western lands were arid, and in arid areas farms could be larger. The east had been settled longer and land was more costly; once-large farms had been passed down and divided through several generations. Americans have long viewed their country as a work in progress and used maps to depict change: the spread of the frontier, the spread of the railways, and the growth and development of the country. The blurb on the back of the book claims that the book ‘traces the formation of the United States of America - from its origins as a colonial backwater, through periods of ever-changing country and state borders, to the global and cultural superpower it is today - through the medium of cartography’. Not exactly. However, it contains a sample of historic and contemporary maps which describe the United States, sometimes in its broader geographical setting. Perhaps this book is best described as a collection of cartographic curiosities. However, reading this book posed deeper questions. What is a map? Is it a precis of a landscape, a place, or a region? Is it an essay? Is it an art work? Is it a form of shorthand? An illustration? An analytical tool, allowing us to identify places by their differences? Perhaps the authors meant us to think about these questions in reading the book.

ANDREW RYDER
University of Portsmouth

This book is presented in three parts: Tree Symbolism; Trees and Woodland in the Anglo-Saxon Landscape; and Individual Tree Species in Anglo-Saxon England. The first part occupies something over a third of the book, and it should be noted that here Hooke is painting her picture with a very broad brush. This is very much putting the cults and cultures surrounding trees into context and, in terms of both geography and period, extends far beyond Anglo-Saxon England. The first chapter takes us on a journey through Europe and beyond, introducing us to trees in many and varying cultures, often tracing the very earliest origins of some myths.

This broad focus is pulled in a little for the other three chapters in the first section. The opening of the second chapter looks at Christian symbolism and primarily at the conversion period (i.e. the earliest phase) of Anglo-Saxon history, although Hooke’s examples are very widely selected. Much of this chapter, and the next two, involve presenting the theories of those who have investigated Old English texts in the past, and many of her conclusions are reliant upon the work of academics who were literary specialists or historians or folklorists, so that not all of the findings sit comfortably side by side.

Hooke really hits her stride once we move to the second part. She begins by addressing the issue of just how much woodland was left after prehistoric clearances, and how woodland regeneration might have taken place in the post-Roman period. Once we move to woodland terms, the level of Hooke’s expertise is evident in her analysis of such Welsh variations as ced and coid (for Kinver), and of the Latin recording of woods and the different descriptions for woods, small woods and thickets. Where this work goes beyond more general surveys of place-names is in the examination of lesser-known words like grafa (grove), and what this might have meant in real terms.

The sixth chapter contains a good analysis of charters, in particular, for information such as the high value put on trees which provided pasture for pigs. These instances are often well documented, and the evidence is examined in depth for the Kentish Weald. The discussion continues by addressing the question of just how densely forested the regions traditionally regarded as woodland would actually have been, and methods of pollarding and coppicing are discussed and illustrated with plentiful examples. Less obvious uses for woodlands included bee-keeping, and examples presented here reveal the rare glimpses we have of such industries. Also shown is evidence for industries such as charcoal-burning and building timber, specifically exemplified by West Midland charters.

Moving to focus on individual groups of trees, with place-names used as one way of identifying tree species, Hooke qualifies the charter evidence by pointing to the less than complete coverage of the country with surviving charters. Trees often marked the place of hundred meetings - the local government - with hundreds often taking their names from the landmark e.g. Longtree Hundred, Gloucs. However, other examples Hooke brings to our attention reveal a more sinister use, as in gallows trees - the kind of analysis not usually found in such depth and detail in other histories of the countryside. The most plentiful examples she explores, though, are the trees which appear as boundary clauses in charters, demonstrating expertly just how valuable these sources are in revealing the appearance of the early medieval landscape.

The final, third part looks at the difference in distribution of named species, and why some species appear more in the records for certain counties than others, and where the explanation can be attributed to different geology or land-use. Instances of trees being distinguished by appearance are given, as are associations with certain animals, although species such as oak were singled out because they were likely to be visually distinctive. However, despite the ash’s place in Old English poetry for its association with spears - the weapon of most soldiers in Anglo-Saxon times - ash trees do not attract qualifying words in the way oaks do, but crop up in many combinations in place-names. The yew is discussed for its mythical roles, while the holly comes in for consideration for the difficulty of pinning down references given the linguistic closeness of words meaning ‘hollow’, while the final tree looked at is the lime.

The alder is introduced for its practical uses before moving on to written evidence, since truly ancient specimens do not exist, and place-name evidence unsurprisingly shows a coincidence with damp areas of land. With the willow Hooke reveals a greater spread of references, sometimes as sealh (sallow, as in Selborne) and the different variations of welig/wiig (willow/withy as in Wythall). Despite being singled out for its cultural links to witchcraft, Hooke reveals that the elder is the sixth most cited tree in boundary clauses, while her discussion of the thorn shows that despite also being considered unlucky, it nevertheless crops up more often as a marker than might be expected.

The penultimate chapter deals with other varieties which appear in charters and place-names, such as fruit and nut trees, the commonest being the apple - a tree which also appears in other Old English texts for its medicinal uses. Rather more surprising are Hooke’s revelations over the scarcity of references to birches and beeches. Other trees considered to a lesser degree are aspen and the Sorbus species, and some shrubs such as gorse and broom. Pines appear in Old English literature yet are totally missing from charters, as are poplars and hornbeams, while there are trees mentioned which remain unidentified - examples considered include the cwicbeam, and the mysterious elebeam which appears in several charters of southern England.

The purpose of analysing all this data is expertly shown in the way Hooke draws a picture of the Anglo-Saxon countryside, both in its appearance and in the value which was put upon it as a valuable resource. Her ability is strongest when getting to grips with the detailed extraction of meaning from these scattered surviving words. The appeal for historians will no doubt be in the latter two sections of the book, although those without a historical background may enjoy the broad scene setting of the first part.

LINDA HUTTON
Independent Scholar

‘It’s good to see you here. Ellen Semple was one of our greatest.’ Thus Griffith Taylor, President of the Institute of Australian Geographers welcomed me at its 1961 conference. One of about five women present, I was about to leave for graduate study in the United States. It was an unusual moment. Semple’s interpretations of environmental influences on human geography had long been dismissed as irrelevant or just plain wrong. Taylor, however, was ‘quite willing to be classed as one of those geographers who is tarred with the determinist brush ... I have spent a considerable part of my life studying the conditions affecting man in the immense areas of Empty Canada, the Sahara, Empty Australia and Empty Antarctica. No geographer who has this experience could ignore the paramount control exercised by the environment’ (Taylor 1951, pp. 3–4; 13). He contrasted his vision with that of geographers ‘who base their philosophy on conditions...in Western Europe and much of the United States’ (1951, p. 13).

I recount Taylor’s remarks first because they relate to themes in Keighren’s book – the significance of context and of professional connections in shaping the reception of a theory, and second because Keighren reveals that Semple’s connections with women were important at various points in her career. Since I am interested in gender and the social history of geography, I read Keighren’s text partly through a gender and class lens.

Bringing Geography to Book explores the geography of the production, circulation, and changing critical reception of Semple’s monumental Influences of Geographic Environment in which she interpreted ‘anthropogeography’ in relation to geographic location, area and environments such as coastal, riverine and mountain settings. She aimed to bring the perspectives of the nineteenth-century German geographer Friedrich Ratzel to Anglophone audiences, not simply to translate his work but to elaborate on it, by comparing ‘typical peoples of all races and all stages of cultural development, living under similar geographic conditions (Semple 1911, p. vii). Though long labelled a ‘determinist’, in her preface Semple wrote that she ‘shuns the word geographical determinant, and speaks with extreme caution of geographical control’ (Semple 1911, p. vii). Examining the book’s creation and reception, Keighren is especially interested in ‘interpretive communities’ within academia and beyond in the United States and Britain. He asks why Influences conveyed different meanings to different readers and what differences in reception reveal about the circulation, consumption, and development of geographical thinking.

In six chapters Keighren first addresses emerging approaches to studying the reception of books and ends by reflecting on the geography of how and why Semple’s book rose and fell from favour. The intervening chapters offer a biography of the book’s creation, assessment of popular and scholarly reviews, Semple’s post-publication efforts in travel, field study and lecture theatre to verify and disseminate her ideas and the uneven unravelling of acclaim for her ideas. He separately examines American and British contexts considering where support was sustained (e.g. at Clark University and at Oxford), the book’s use as a stimulus for critical thinking at Aberystwyth, and its rejection as new perspectives emerged on human modification of landscapes, especially in the 1920s work of Carl Sauer at Berkeley and in the growing interest at Cambridge in the perspectives of French geographer Febvre.

Keighren reveals the importance of social networks both in the book’s ascendency and in its decline. I see Chapters 2 and 4 on Semple’s development as an author and on her promotion of the book via public lectures as the two strongest. They situate her in the gender and class cultures of her times. Beyond her well-known origins in an affluent family, we see the ways in which women’s institutions contributed to her development. Keighren describes her undergraduate education at Vassar, the private women’s college, though he does not comment on its eliteness compared with more common normal schools widely attended by middle-class women preparing as teachers. Semple’s Vassar friendships later enabled her extensive field travels in Japan. Following graduation she taught Latin, ancient history and physical geography in her sister’s private school, honing her pedagogical skills while fostering her writing style as a member of the Louisville (women’s) Authors’ Club. A social welfare project of the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs led to her later extended field research and acclaimed 1901 article on the Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains in The Geographical Journal. Her critical contact with Ratzel and subsequent study at Leipzig followed connections made during a tour of Europe with her mother. While the Leipzig study is well reported in the geographic literature, less well known (or mentioned by Keighren) is that it was not unique for North American women of her era to undertake graduate study in German-speaking universities at a time when they could not gain access to American universities (Singer, 2003).

The significance of Semple’s trajectory is most evident in Keighren‘s new material on her use of networks and public lectures to advance her book in Britain. Connecting with influential men such as Keltie, Herbertson and Chisholm, she built her reputation and that of Influences in her lectures at the Royal Geographical and Royal Scottish Geographical Societies, illustrated with lantern slides from her field travels and at the Oxford biennial summer schools. She furthered her library research and writing while staying at the Lyceum Club, the first women’s club in central London for those engaged in literary, artistic, and scientific pursuits.

Chapters 3 and 5 are devoted to popular and scholarly reviews and to the reception of Influences as a text-book. I found them less satisfying than the other chapters, particularly because of methodological challenges. The authorship and audiences of popular reviews could often not be readily identified, so that Keighren found it difficult to discern how place might be reflected in reception. The academic reviews include some within and others beyond geography and indicate how disciplinary affiliation is reflected in reception. In studying textbook use, he identified networks that affected placement of the book on syllabi but this analysis does not reveal how the book was actually used or received by readers. He identified a few marginal notes on copies of the book in American and British libraries, but it is not possible to ascertain when the notations were made nor or contextualise their meaning to the writers. He does not address the challenges of getting a substantial representation of institutions where the book might have been used. Views of some well-known geographers are discussed in the American context, yet it is important to recall that even in early 1920s most universities still did not offer geography courses, and these were often in physiography (Dryer 1924). In contrast, the normal schools commonly included a range of geography courses. What perspectives did they offer? Examination of articles in the Journal of Geography might have confirmed or altered Keighren’s intepretations. As Dryer (1924) commented the Journal ‘offered not only a teacher’s guide but a record of the development of geographic thought in America’ (p. 149).

I commend Keighren for his substantial and innovative study of how the book was received in the U.S. and Britain, but note that future research might consider its history in other contexts.¹ I would also have liked to see the book more fully and explicitly situated within the wider social and intellectual milieu of the period. My qualifications, however, are not meant to detract from the value of Keighren’s study, which is an innovative approach to assessing a work still recognised, if denigrated, as a landmark in the history of geography and environmental thought.

References Cited
Chen, Zhihong. 2011, in press. ‘Climate’s moral economy. Geography, race, and the Han in early Republican China’. In Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold and Stéphane Gros (eds.), Critical Han Studies: Understanding the Largest Ethnic Group on Earth. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dryer, Charles Redway. 1924. ‘A century of geography in the United States’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 14(3): 117–149.
Semple, Ellen Churchill. 1911. Influences of Geographic Environment: On the basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropogeography. New York: Henry Holt and Company; London: Constable and Company.
Singer, Sandra L. 2003. Adventures Abroad: North American Women at German-Speaking Universities, 1868–1915. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Taylor, Griffith. 1951. ‘Introduction: The scope of the volume’. In Griffith Taylor (ed.), Geography in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Growth, Fields, Techniques, Aims, and Trends, pp 3–27. New York: New York Philosophical Library/London: Methuen.

1. My opening comment on Taylor hints at this possibility. Recent research by Zhihong Chen (in press) takes up the significance of environmental determinist perspectives by early twentieth century Chinese geographers, though she notes the significance for them of Ellsworth Huntington’s writing over that of the original Ratzel or Semple works.

JANICE MONK
University of Arizona

The Seine is the defining geographical feature of central Paris, a gracefully curved line of beauty that divides left bank from right and gives unity and balance to one of the world’s most recognisable urban landscapes. But as Jeffrey Jackson shows in this excellent book about the ‘great flood’ of 1910, the harmonious relationship between river and city occasionally breaks down. For the first three weeks of 1910, Parisians watched with growing concern as the gentle Seine was transformed into a raging torrent, its waters rising to ever more dangerous levels following months of wet weather and an unusually mild Christmas and New Year during which the Massif Central’s winter stores of snow and ice gradually melted. The crisis moment on the evening of 21st January was marked with curious precision when flood waters percolated into the system of compressed air that regulated the ornate clocks in the city’s railway stations and public buildings, most of which stopped at exactly 10.53 pm. The waters rose continuously over the following days, seeping upwards into cellars and ground floors and eventually spilling onto the city’s elegant boulevards and avenues across an expanding area of the central district and the eastern and western suburbs adjacent to the river. Electricity supplies faltered and then collapsed, bringing the Métro to a halt and plunging the night-time city into darkness. Hundreds fled their homes as police, firemen and soldiers, many brought into the city from the provinces, struggled to maintain public order. Precarious wooden walkways were hastily constructed above the swirling, stinking waters to allow at least some movement of people, food and rescue equipment. In a surreal moment, a vinegar factory in the south-eastern suburb of Ivry exploded when water mingled with its volatile chemicals. The flood finally peaked, 25 feet above normal mid-winter levels, on 28th January and then slowly fell back, leaving mud, filth and destruction in its wake.

Jackson creates a compelling day-to-day narrative of the flood and the subsequent clean-up using an impressive range of documents gleaned from Parisian archives, newspapers and magazines, including postcards bearing photographs of water-logged scenes that began to circulate as mementos of the crisis shortly after the flood waters subsided. His account highlights several important lessons that have enduring significance today about the resilience of modern urban infrastructures in the face of extreme environmental challenges, and about the difficult political calculations that determine official responses. In early twentieth-century Paris, a city re-built a generation earlier to facilitate the over-ground circulation of people and commodities along spacious boulevards and the underground clearance of effluvia through capacious drains and sewage channels, technology was deployed not merely to control nature but to replace it with an integrated life-support system that provided the city’s inhabitants with water, food, heating and lighting while also removing unwanted and unhealthy waste products. Far from protecting Parisians from environmental catastrophe, these modern technological systems increased their vulnerability to the vicissitudes of nature, though the scale of the crisis in 1910 was also determined by geographically variable official responses. When the waters finally subsided, the worst loss of life and the greatest damage to property had taken place in the suburbs, a consequence of the decision by prefect of police Louis Lépine, a former governor general of Algeria, to devote his over-stretched resources to saving the architectural and cultural heritage of the city centre. The Louvre was the focus of especially intensive efforts, its priceless treasures preserved from the rising waters by an improvised but effective levée of sandbags, paving stones and top-soil constructed by a small army of labourers working round the clock.

Jackson uncovers ample evidence of selfishness, bureaucratic incompetence, looting and violence, all of which stretched social and political cohesion to its limits, but his conclusion is ultimately up-beat, emphasising the good humour, heroic self-sacrifice and dogged determination of ordinary Parisians, as well as the bravery, efficiency and dedication of the emergency services. In so doing, he makes a significant historical point about the nature of Parisian society in the years before World War One. As that infinitely greater catastrophe would reveal, despite their obvious social, political and geographical divisions, early twentieth-century European cities could be remarkably resilient and surprisingly efficient in times of crisis. This is an important argument though Jackson wisely acknowledges that a sense of orderly efficiency and social cohesion was precisely the message that officials sought to convey in their reports and documents. Newspapers reported tales of looting and violence more readily, of course, sometimes in lurid detail, as did at least one of the aforementioned flood postcards which showed a dramatic re-enactment of a lynching by angry residents in Ivry (p. 171). Jackson might have made more of this rich archive of flood photography but, insofar as this can be construed as an omission, it does not seriously diminish this impressive, well-written book.

MIKE HEFFERNAN
University of Nottingham

Nature’s ubiquitous presence in book titles usually announces a study of the rearrangement of nature to suit the interests and designs of culture. So it is with Jessica Teisch’s work. Her Engineering Nature follows the not-too-original theme of the inventive American in the nineteenth century bent upon altering the natural environment. What stands out here is a fresh conceptual framework - California and the world. That is to say, California’s environment provided an inspiration for talented engineers working in mining, agriculture and urban water supplies to take their careers to new levels on the international stage in the first awakenings of American imperialism. Engineers, and for that matter the energies of ordinary people, changed the face of California’s landscape with dams, reservoirs and water delivery systems. These skills eventually found application in similar environments across the world - Hawaii, Australia, South Africa and even Palestine.

Engineering Nature’s international scope makes it a contribution to the recent burst of ‘settlement literature’ in the Anglophone world that until recently traded in the now out-dated parlance of ‘comparative frontier studies’. Both engage themes of nature-culture interaction, political adaptation, and also the fate of indigenous peoples under pressures of European expansion. In this instance, the international engagement does not occur before a thorough examination of the California experience (engineering water systems for mining, cities, plans for the irrigation of the Central Valley, and the founding of irrigated agricultural cooperative communities in southern California). All of which provided the environmental launching pad for world adventure.

California is a peculiar environment even by American standards. Its Mediterranean climate delivers moderate moisture in the winter and early spring months, but almost none through summer and fall. The topography is a study in diversity. A narrow coastal strip, including San Francisco, enjoys mild and even chilly temperatures in contrast to the hot interior Central Valley bounded to the west by a low coastal mountain range and to the east by the high Sierra. The Sierra foothills rise to form the once mineral-rich Mother Lode Country of the California Gold Rush that put California on the global map and into the global consciousness. California’s northern mountains hold most of the state’s water resources. Teisch stresses the engineering challenges of redistributing water. Water in the mountains served mining, but agricultural users in the valleys and California’s urban coastal centres also demanded a share of the resource. Still, it should be noted that by the end of the Nineteenth Century the hydrological rearrangement of California existed mostly on the drawing boards.

In 1875, on a visit to India, California engineer George Davidson exuded admiration for British irrigation developments, but noted that the top-down administration of the system was impracticable for the American situation. On an investigative sojourn in the 1880s, Alfred Deakin, future prime minister of the drought-plagued island-continent of Australia, established an Australian connection with the American West and future California water engineer Elwood Mead. In what some might consider Teisch’s overly-ambitious exposition, California emerges as the nexus for knowledge exchange. In 1915, the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco celebrated not only the opening of the Panama Canal but also more generally the triumph of technology over nature: an American success story that helped to propel the nation and California into the affairs of the wider world.

Teisch describes Hawaii as an economic province of California. The successful sugar plantations, especially Claus Spreckles’s enterprises, required the talents of California water engineers. William Hammond Hall, first State Engineer of California, was among the first to embark for the islands to assist irrigation and water storage efforts. Hall and his engineer cousin John Hays Hammond eventually found themselves working in South Africa with mining water and engineering problems and even dabbling in the volatile politics that led to the Boer War. In southern California the brothers George and William Benjamin Chandler developed Ontario into a successful agricultural cooperative colony. From there, they took their experiences to Australia where they attempted to replicate the success of Ontario (‘with uneven outcomes’) in Victoria's Murray River Valley.

Teisch seizes upon the career of Elwood Mead as an example to support her world- dimension thesis for the careers of California engineers, although his early connections to California are at best tenuous. Although Mead’s star rose in Wyoming where he pioneered administered water law under a State Engineer’s Office, his career eventually took him to California via the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Along the way he became a critic of the new U.S. Reclamation Service established in the Department of Interior in 1902. His study of the trials and errors of the Reclamation Service gave him an expertise in the development of irrigation communities that brought him to California whence he departed for Australia to direct the building of irrigation settlements in the state of Victoria. He returned to California in 1914 to work at the University of California’s futile efforts to establish state-irrigated communities in the Central Valley at Delhi and Durham. His career also took him to Hawaii to aid in the Native Hawaiian Homestead program, to Palestine to assist Zionist settlements, and eventually to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (formerly Reclamation Service) where he became Commissioner in 1924.

The story assembled by Teisch presents a compelling argument for the prominence of California engineers in water development schemes throughout the world. Yet the argument is a subset of a larger and older thesis that American economic and technological development (from an agricultural to an industrial nation) offered a model for the underdeveloped world to follow. The argument assumed some cogency during the height of the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the United States competed for influence in those parts of the world undergoing decolonisation and the Revolution of Rising Expectations. In effect, these California engineers were forerunners of some of the talented and devoted characters, as well as rogues, described in William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s classic 1958 novel, The Ugly American.

WILLIAM D. ROWLEY
University of Nevada, Reno

Several edited volumes on the scope and character of environmental history have been published recently, as the field tracks its development. Among them this volume presents several distinctive characteristics. As a collection it is diverse and therefore not closely integrated; its variety is deliberate and intriguing. Presenting the work of nearly twenty authors, it features young historians. One virtue of the collection is that it brings a range of research in Finnish to an English-reading audience for the first time. It also includes important coverage of German-speaking and eastern Europe. Outside Europe, papers also consider Sudan, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Australia and the United States.

The editor’s preface, ‘Methods in Environmental History’, recognises a wide variety of methods, a ‘methodological arsenal’, as Myllyntaus calls it. This raises the familiar problem of multidisciplinarity, its confusions and uncertainties. Fiona Watson probes this theme in ‘Interdisciplinarity as Disciplinary Co-operation: A Plea for the Future of Environmental History’, in which she explores complex working relationships among palaeoecologists, soil scientists, ecologists, environmental economists and historians in the interdisciplinarity programme at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

Myllyntaus also highlights the value of environmental historians as policy advisors to governments and environmental organisations, in Finland and other European countries. This is not a straightforward matter, as Frank Uekoetter illustrates in an essay on nature protection in Germany under the Nazi regime. Surveying many German conservationists’ choice to work within the Nazi system, he points to ‘a disturbing fact: one did not have to be an ideological fanatic to cooperate with the Nazis. One did not have to be a racist and anti-Semite. ... All that it took was a narrow focus on conservation issues - and a readiness to forget about the rest.’ (pp. 56-57)

Today’s situation is very different, especially regarding climate change and the adaptations that societies will have to face. Myllyntaus notes the field’s reputation as ‘dismal history’, and proposes the value of studies that indicate possible lines of improvement in environmental policy and management. He writes that as the climate challenge increases, ‘... the significance of environmental history will increase. The change may be shocking and society will need explanations as to what has happened in the environment and why profound changes have taken place. In such a situation, environmental history may find a new growth path by being able to assist societies in adapting to significant environmental change’ (p. 11). As climate becomes more unstable, valuable historical perspectives can be derived from this volume’s two studies of social responses to previous natural disasters in Saxony (1784-1845), by Guido Poliwoda, and southwestern Germany (1824), by Jochen Seidel and colleagues.

Professor Myllyntaus uses the European bison as the symbol of the book’s central theme, the decline of natural systems and recent efforts at restoration. The return of the bison exemplifies provisional success in reconciling nature protection with economic development. A somewhat complementary study looks at the history of modifying or domesticating rivers, then restoring them, in Erik Törnlund’s study of timber floating in northern Sweden. Törnlund’s explicit purpose is to use historical knowledge to help guide restoration of a damaged river.

Ethical issues are implicit in several authors’ concerns with the environmental knowledge and adaptations of indigenous cultures. Two essays from Finland feature the Sami people of northern Scandinavia: Helena Ruotsala, ‘Ancestors’ Wisdom or Desktop Reindeer Management? The Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Contemporary Reindeer Herding’, and Jukka Nyssönen, ‘Identity Politics and Alliance Building between the Sami Delegation and Conservationists in the Kessi Forest Dispute’. Lena Rossi adds the individual dimension of nature perception through a study of the Finnish folk painter Frans Lind.

Other studies of individual and cultural perceptions of Nature include two examples from eastern Africa. Anu Eskonheimo’s essay, ‘Desertification - A Significant Problem: Diverse Environmental Literacy in the North Kordofan Area in Sudan’, studies the contrasting perceptual fields of farmers and herders, as they cope with uncertainty and adaptation to severe drought. Timothy Clack, in ‘Thinking Through Memoryscapes: Symbolic Environmental Potency on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania’, writes of ‘indigenous memoryscapes on Mount Kilimanjaro as they pertain to the loci of spiritual power, supernatural agency, attachment to land, ritual activities and religious experience’ (p. 115). This essay adds an essential dimension of consciousness among many traditional cultures, one that industrial-era people often fail to see.

In ‘Perceptions of Place and Deep Time in the Australian Desert: Using Art in Environmental History’, Libby Robin surveys aboriginal art forms, as an extension of her multi-faceted research on aboriginal culture in the demanding outback. She presents this study as an example of science for sustainability. From a strikingly different perspective, the architect Dilshad Rahat Ara surveys architecture, culture and the natural environment in the tribal areas of the Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh.

In one of the most clearly articulated statements of theory in the collection, Donald Worster’s essay, ‘Living in Nature: Biography and Environmental History’, presents an incisive consideration of scale of analysis, viewing general issues through the work of two famous American conservationists. Given the distinctively white North American experience of Nature as wilderness, as reflected in the lives of John Wesley Powell and John Muir, this essay suggests the question of how these biographies compare with the significance of Europeans or others whose environmental, institutional and cultural settings were distinctly different.

This volume is in many ways a continuation of themes explored in a previous collection: Marcus Hall, ed., Restoration and History: The Search for a Usable Environmental Past (London: Routledge, 2010). The two volumes together will appeal to many who work for ecological restoration in both university life and public life.

RICHARD TUCKER
University of Michigan

[P]robably grass land, equally with the sea, is to be regarded as one of the corner-stones on which the greatness of the British Empire has been built.¹

The brief of this fine study led by leading scholars of New Zealand’s environment, Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson, is to examine the reasons for and consequences of that country’s remarkable transformation from native species to introduced grasslands. Marshalling a team of prominent environmental historians and historical geographers, Seeds of Empire is a multi-faceted study that provides lively and important new perspectives on environmental history. The book is a very successful example of the benefits of collaboration and the richness of perspectives gained therefrom. Also its funding through a New Zealand Government Marsden Grant reinforces the relevance of environmental history to governments and societies today. Indeed, it’s a powerful testimony of the strengths of our discipline at a time when the arts are under threat at so many institutions.

What are the contributions of this book to scholarship? First, as the main authors note, despite its signal importance - economically, environmentally and, not least, politically - there has been remarkably little scholarly attention given to the dramatic process of grasslands transformation, either in New Zealand or, really, worldwide. The primary economy, which the grasslands revolution sustains, remains to this day New Zealand’s most important export earner. It is also responsible for a host of environmental issues which challenge policymakers today: high fertiliser run-off, pollution of waterways, and the long-term viability of using soils in this fashion, to name but a few. As the authors note, ‘only an understanding of the past ... can reveal that strategies adopted many generations ago mould patterns that are hard to break’ (p. 206). This volume therefore fills a significant gap in our understanding of past environmental change and provides deep insight into management issues today.

Second, the work forcibly demonstrates New Zealand’s importance as a case-study of processes of grasslands transformation evident elsewhere, and also as an actor itself in global environmental change. Through innovative use of a variety of rich documentation - visual, statistical and textual - the authors present multiple perspectives on the local and international factors shaping grasslands transformation. Environmental factors (including soil structure, climate, etc.) contributed to the form grasslands modification took, as did colonists’ early environmental learning (sometimes also from Mori), and the role of global capital and markets.

Political issues, likewise, shaped the grasslands transformation. In the nineteenth century private farming enterprise and innovation, the authors show, was supplemented by cautious and limited government support. Following World War One, government science took on a much greater advocacy role - indeed by the 1930s virtually dictating farmers’ choice - of genetically-selected grass and superphosphates. Imperialism aided New Zealand’s cause too. The assumption of the League of Nations mandate of the islands of Nauru and Ocean Island, provided New Zealand (as well as Britain and Australia) with cheap and easy access to guano, thereby helping supplement and artificially maintain high levels of productivity.

As well as providing a fascinating narrative of environmental change - not least in emphasising that there was nothing remotely inevitable about New Zealand’s grasslands transformation - Seeds of Empire also demonstrates wonderfully well the complex patterns of exchanges of technology, seeds and ideas. For example, who knew that a small area of New Zealand (Akaroa peninsula, near Christchurch) in the 1880s to 1920s for a time became a world leading exporter of cocksfoot?

Space prevents me from providing detailed discussion of each chapter’s contribution. Chapters 1 and 2 (Pawson and Brooking) overview the book’s structure and grasslands transformation. Chapters 3 (Peter Holland, Jim Williams and Vaughan Wood) and 4 (Holland, Paul Star and Wood) respectively examine early settler environmental appraisals and knowledge transfers, and experimentation. Chapter 5 (Robert Peden) presents new interpretations of settler use of fire and stocking rates in the high country. Chapter 6 (Jim McAloon) examines flows of capital and trade in establishing the grasslands industry. Chapter 7 (Pawson and Wood) examines seed development and transfer; chapter 8 (Wood and Pawson), flows of agricultural information. Star and Brooking delineate the relationships between the state and science (chapter 9), and later the remaking of the grasslands in the 1920s and 1930s. Brooking and Pawson summarise the main grasslands developments since the Second World War, as well as a synopsis of the book, in the final chapter.

My only minor gripe (directed to the publisher) in this otherwise excellently produced and designed book, is the failure to reference endnotes to the relevant pages of chapters to which they refer.

Seeds of Empire, in short, is a deftly crafted work that should appeal to historical geographers, environmental histories and agricultural historians both inside and outside New Zealand.

1. R.G. Stapledon, A Tour in Australia and New Zealand: Grassland and Other Studies (London, 1928), p.v cited in Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson, Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand (London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2011), p.1.

JAMES BEATTIE
University of Waikato