Book review: The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change

Three signature aspects of contemporary thinking about the non-human world are as follows. First, it is arguably dominated by various environmental sciences, the global prominence of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change being just one example of this. Second, it focuses on the global scale as much, if not more, than the national or local scales. Third, it is highly future orientated, with debates about ‘necessary’ changes to present-day actions being framed by predictions about a world to come if humanity does not alter its ways. The grand idea of ‘the Anthropocene’, first proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stormer in 2000, encapsulates these second and third characteristics of current environmental thinking with some drama. In The Future of Nature, environmental historians Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde present the back story to all this. Their 38-chapter anthology, subtitled ‘Documents of global change’, assembles from across the disciplines germinal writings that, with hindsight, can be considered part of a single intellectual field. As they put it:

It was not until the turn of the millennium, with the advent of the Anthropocene, that a collection of documents [like this] … published over a total of three hundred years, could be seen as forming a corpus of work belonging to, or leading up to, ‘global change thinking’. (p. 3)

The book’s contents are organized thematically into 10 parts, each framed by a question. The parts and questions are as follows: ‘Population: Are we too many, or are we too greedy?’; ‘Sustainability: Are we limited by knowledge or resources?’; ‘Geographies: Are human and natural futures determined or chosen?’; ‘“The Environment”: How did the idea emerge?’; ‘Ecology: How do we understand natural systems?’; ‘Technology: Does technology create more problems than it solves?’; ‘Climate: How can we predict change?’; ‘Diversity: Why do we need it, and can we conserve it?’; ‘Measuring: How do we turn the world into data?’; and ‘The Anthropocene: How can we live in a world where there is no nature without people?’. Each part contains at least three excerpts from old and new published writings that speak powerfully to the relevant theme and question. Among the many short chapters, there are pieces by Thomas Malthus, Alexander von Humboldt, John Tyndall and James Rennell, as well as much more recent pieces by the likes of Michael Soulé, Nicholas Stern and Gretchen Daily. In fact, most of the excerpts date from the post-1945 period, with four of the source documents published since 1999. Most of the authors of the chapters are or were scientists, with biologists and meteorologists looming large.

The book is very handsome indeed. It is also excellent value for money. For just £20 or US$30, readers get a volume of well over 500 pages with short commissioned commentaries on each chapter, brief section introductions by the editors, a general introduction and a select bibliography. Many of the commentators are distinguished individuals, such as Richard Norgaard and climate scientist Will Steffen. Given that the editors are historians, the book’s title can be read as both descriptive and quizzical. On the one hand, it describes the incontrovertible fact that biophysical scientists have been key spokespeople for the present and future of the non-human world for many decades. On the other hand, it invites us to ask what is gained, and what is lost, when particular forms of knowledge come to overshadow others. This invitation is formally extended to readers in the final editor selection, a recent (2011) essay by Mike Hulme (formerly head of the UK Tyndall Centre and author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, 2009). Entitled ‘Reducing the future to climate’, the essay explores how human agency and choice can all-too-easily be written out of discussions of present-day policy decisions designed to anticipate future problems. On several other occasions Hulme has called for different forms of knowledge – artistic, humanistic and social scientific – to assume greater prominence in current discussion of ‘global environmental change’. Echoing Hulme, the editors ask:

Who are the ‘experts’? How do we, the ‘global citizens’, access such expertise? How can we move beyond … system science, which is a tool for describing a problem, and empower people to act? In seeking better rather than less good outcomes for the planet, including all its humanity, we need to hear many different voices, and we need clear and careful words to frame the problem. (p. 521)

This book has obvious appeal to environmental historians seeking to show their students how ‘the human impact’ has been registered empirically and normatively over the course of modern western history, especially among various scientists. For others teaching introductory or more advanced courses about environmental thought, The Future of Nature offers an accessible treasure trove of resources to be used selectively. Many of the excerpts in The Future of Nature are, or should be, familiar to geographers who teach about human-environment relations. Aside from the part entitled ‘Geographies’, which contains pieces by Ellsworth Huntington and Griffith Taylor, there are excerpts from classic writings by Rachel Carson, Eugene Odum, Vladimir Vernadsky, Donella Meadows et al., and Ramachandra Guha. The other selections may be familiar by name (e.g. by economist William Jevons or ecologist William Vogt), but having the chance to read them first hand may be valuable for many students and their teachers alike.

Even so, I suspect most readers might struggle to use this anthology in its entirety. Quite aside from its sheer length, the short editor introduction largely fails to either justify or properly connect the themes and questions of the 10 parts. More generously, one might say that the justification offered begged questions for me and the connections made were too cursory. What is more, because of the major focus on science writers, the excerpts provide a rather narrow range of responses to the 10 big questions posed. Indeed, the above-mentioned Hulme essay is among the very few excerpted pieces that seek to challenge the necessary, but insufficient and often problematic, scientific discourses that have for decades structured non-scientific thinking about ‘global environmental change’. Several of the chapter-by-chapter commentaries also challenge these discourses, but readers have to work hard to join the dots between them. By contrast, a previous Yale University Press anthology – the excellent, nearly 1000-page Environment (Adelson et al., 2008) – has much greater reach than the present volume, although its aims are admittedly much wider than those of Robin et al. Ultimately, this book is more likely to be used as a secondary resource, rather than a primary text, in some modules about past and present-day environmental thought. It highlights the recurrent concerns and gradually changing discourses of the many ‘experts’ who have pronounced on the human impact on environment. That is all to the good, and I for one will be dipping into this book for years to come. Yet, by failing to venture much beyond various sciences, it inadvertently perpetuates a problem it is, in part, concerned to address. Since social scientists and humanities scholars are more likely to use an anthology like this than are most biophysical scientists, this failure may limit the book’s utility as a pedagogic resource.