The environment: a history of the idea

By Philip R. Conway. Canadian field-naturalist, 2019

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Paul Warde, Libby Robin and Sverker Sörlin ’ s book is a sweeping history of the idea of environment. Reaching back and looking ahead, this history focuses on the fifty-plus years after the Second World War, a period not only characterized by further urbanization, by uneven growth of population and economies, and by the consequential unprecedented human impact on the environment, but also by a new ‘ world-mindedness ’ (p. 1) that encompassed ‘ a new unifying power ’ (p. 24). The authors, whose scholarship has significantly shaped environmental history for more than a generation, explain that the environment was a concept both of crisis and of peacetime, born out of a sense of urgency during the post-war period, a political concept that ultimately became policy mainstream. Readers are taken on a rollercoaster ride through this half-century, bracketed on the one side by two American publications from 1948, Road to Survival by ecologist William Vogt, and Our Plundered Planet by conservationist Fairfield Osborn, and on the other by the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio and the meetings thereafter. To keep us oriented and in our seats throughout the seven-chapter narrative unfolding during the Cold War, the authors use four key themes: futures thinking, scientific expertise, quantification – what Theodor Porter has called ‘ trust in numbers ’ – and scale and scalability. The first

Subfields: Microbiology, Sociology and Political Science

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