Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment
Joachim Radkau, Thomas Dunlap translator, 2002, 2008 tr.
Joachim Radkau was aware of all the pitfalls faced by authors of big histories when he chose to write a global history of the environment. But he argued that several themes including European Exceptionalism, the dialog between the ideals of wilderness and sustainability, the effects of state, local, and individual control on environmental engagement, regulation of sexuality and xenophobia deserved greater attention. His decision to allow Nature and Power to be translated into English was motivated by these issues and also by a belief that “Old World” experience was key to 21st century environmentalism. American textbooks already have forgotten Chernobyl, Radkau said, and “continental Europeans have rarely lived with the illusion of unlimited resources.” The result was a book that surveyed several fascinating ways that people have interacted with their environments, acknowledged the particularity and contingency inherent in these accounts, and tried to draw some tentative conclusions and lessons for the future from them.
In his 2002 Preface to the German edition, Radkau wondered what the “ecological and economic disaster of the communist bloc mean for that kind of environmental history whose basic assumptions would have led one to assume that a socialist state-run economy would be able to undo the environmental damage caused by the private profit motive?” Radkau examined several ancient and modern societies, including Maoist China and Nazi Germany, and ultimately concluded that “effective environmental protection requires” neither strict laissez faire capitalism nor top-down, totalitarian central planning, but rather “a spirited civil society, the courage of one’s convictions, citizen initiatives, and a critical public.” Environmentalists looking to the past for a definitive answer on how to move forward may be frustrated, he said, but history seems to suggest that environmental failure or success has little direct connection to the political and economic forms a society chooses. While “in the end, the apparatus of the state remains the only - at least potential - counterweight to the omnipotence of private capital interests,” Radkau admitted that even though its environmental policy was less totalitarian than its social theory, national socialism “wrecked” any chance for idealistic Hegelians to believe “that the state by its very nature embodies the common good and higher reason above all human selfishness.”
That this should be a surprise may illustrate the most problematic element of Nature and Power. Radkau dipped one foot into the ecological experience of several ancient cultures, including some like Egypt whose history extends to the present. But he kept the other foot firmly in the present, both in his analysis of ancient social/environmental interactions as they may relate to present problems and in his narrative of the history of modern environmentalism (and the somewhat parallel historiography of environmental history). Part of the problem, probably, is that major environmental changes are still happening in the present and environmental awareness has changed dramatically in the immediate past. Radkau himself is known in Europe as both a biographer of Max Weber and as an anti-nuclear power activist.
“Sometimes the problems become worse if one strives for a grand solution,” Radkau warned. His analysis of ancient China, Egypt, and the Inca empire improved on K. A. Wittfogel's theory of the “hydraulic society” (most familiar to Americans through Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire). Ancient public forest and water projects were not motivated solely to consolidate the elite’s power, Radkau said, but “ecological necessities often [went] hand in hand with opportunities for the exercise of power.” This is a general human tendency, he reminded us: even German environmentalism tended to devolve “from a movement into a bureaucracy.” In the end, Radkau agreed with Max Weber that “many historical experiences suggest that powerful historical movements require both a solid foundation of material interests and a vision that transcends daily life, that inspires and arouses passionate emotions. The strongest impulses,” he concluded, “are often generated by a fusion of selfishness and selflessness.” The same might be said about powerful historical explanations.
The population problem, and the “Epochal development of effective contraceptives,” was a recurring theme. “The potato and coitus interruptus are key innovations of the eighteenth century that are environmentally relevant,” Radkau said in a memorable line that suggested a useful widening of the traditional definition of environment. When the “Bhutanese ecotopia” was shown to be sustainable only through the expulsion of 100,000 Nepalese refugees along the Indian border, population control in democratic societies became an issue. Not only was “Bhutan ecology...intertwined with the preservation of the political system,” but so was the country’s culture and existence, as shown by “the fate of neighboring Sikkim, which lost its independence when Nepalese immigrants had grown into the majority of the population.” If environmental disasters forced large-scale migrations in the future, what does Radkau’s skepticism of “Bhutanese exceptionalism” suggest about the tension between local identity and global governance?
“After the collapse of Socialism,” Radkau said, “environmentalism is left as the only ideological alternative to the absolute hegemony of the quest for private profit and consumption.” Even if we agreed that environmentalism’s role is to take on Neo-liberal economics, Radkau seemed to ignore other (actual and possible) directions from which to critique capitalism, and assumed a unity of outlook and purpose on the part of the “bad guys” that was not demonstrated by his historical examples. This is the point where Nature and Power’s tension between the historical and the environmental seemed to reach a breaking point. Although Radkau argued that “Not in every situation are the nature protectors the ‘good guys’ and their adversaries the ‘bad guys’,” (especially in the third world where colonialism and tourism motivates approaches that may exclude locals from the “environment altogether); the real issue is that in history, unlike environmental politics, there are no good guys or bad guys: there are just a bunch of guys (with apologies to The Zero Effect). This is especially true because, throughout the history Radkau described, the actors making environmental policy were almost never ecologists. They were national leaders, or village elders, or farmers making political, or social, or agricultural decisions. Their awareness, their motivations, and their goals may have had a vaguely, more-or-less environmental element, but their attention was almost always dominated by other considerations.
Throughout Nature and Power, Radkau provided valuable glimpses into distant cultures, from the unfamiliar angle of their relationship to their environments. These perspectives complicate the reader’s understanding of these cultures and widen the scope of many environmental issues we may have believed were recent. In some cases, his interpretations may have been skewed by inadequate context. Radkau mentioned, for instance, John Stuart Mill’s “belief that the discomfort every sensitive person felt about a world in which every scrap of land was cultivated” suggested an instinctive realization by Englishmen that “it was dangerous to live without reserves.” The actual context of Mill’s statement (which Radkau may have been unaware of), however, was a political argument over compulsory cultivation of thousands of acres of “waste” land held by aristocrats as game reserves. Mill was (as usual) a middle-of-the-road land reformer, facing pressure from a much more radical “Land and Labour League” led by working people and their champions (such as Charles Bradlaugh). Radkau may have been right on the interpretation, if we privilege the subset of Englishmen represented by Mill. But this tension between forest and trees was an ever-present danger in this wide-ranging synthesis. In another case, though, Radkau persuasively argued against monocausal explanations like Jared Diamond’s Collapse, on the basis of data as well as interpretation. According to pollen evidence, Radkau said, Easter Island was “nearly treeless” for a millennium before the Dutch discovered “a flourishing agriculture with a rich variety of fruit” in 1722. Far from eco-suicide, the culture’s destruction was “completed in 1862 when the majority of the population was dragged off by Peruvian slave traders and the island was transformed into a large sheep ranch.” So much for blaming the natives.