A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics.
Nature and Power: a Global History of the Environment is a book of big ideas an attempt to make broad conclusions about the long-term relationship between humans and our world. Joachim Radkau makes some simple, but hugely telling points – about the fact that only 150 years ago (and for all of previous human history and pre-history) we had an almost totally solar and broadly sustainable economy (really on photosynthesis – wood from trees and horses powered by grain and grass).
He’s a man who really can see the wood for the trees – and dispel simplistic claims about why they might be disappearing. He explains how some past “simple” societies were greatly destructive of their environment, and some complex ones had worked it out pretty well – he sees the nature-human relationship “not only as a gloomy, never-ending process of destruction, but as a suspenseful mixture of destruction and creative processes” (p. 26) “One must not think of ‘nature as a stable organic unit in a state of constant harmony, but that nature changes continuously even without human help”. (p. 20)
It might be a lesson for the environmental movement – it is impossible to think about environmental history in isolation from general history, and particularly political history. Radkau never really explains the title explicitly, but is is pretty well covered in a look at how well traditional knowledge understood soil. He quotes Joannes Colerus in about 1600, who told his readers that the good farmer had to understand “rightly and properly the nature of his land and soil… abstain from forcing his fields to grow and produce one thing or another that was contrary and abhorrent to them”. And he notes how weeds were once a useful indicator of soil nature – “corn poppy indicated soil rich in lime, sorrel was evidence of acidic, chamomile of wet, and chickweed of excellent soil”. But …”quite often it was the political, economic and legal conditions that prevented farmers from making use of their collective, experiential knowledge about cautionry behaviour. The pressure of taxes, high rent dues, uncertain inheritance rights, overpopulation poromoted by a governmental policy of boosting human numbers, outside control exercised in distant metropolises, invading armies, the socially conditioned separation of farming and herding, but also the the incentives of the advancing market economy; all these things together probably contributed far more to unsettling the balance between humans and the environment than lack of knowleldge about soil and fertilization.” (p. 77)
Humans should be wary of apparently revolutionary innovations is another of the “big” conclusions. It is, Radkau says “often the pseudo-success of environmental policy that mask a most calamitious decline of the environment”. He quotes the case of marl, made up of lime and silicic acid, which when added to lime-deficient soilds can produce high yields, but over time this extracts other nutrients, which if not replaced exhausts the soil. “Marl makes rich fathers and poor sons” 18th-century peasants said in Germany and Denmark. (p. 76) And he looks at the arrival of guano from Peru in England around 1840, which was reckoned to be about 30 times more effective than farmyard manure. “Henceforth it no longer seemed so important to agriculture to pay attention to a balance of field and pasture, since a deficit of fertilisers, that is, an inherent lack of sustainability, could now be remedied by guano. This opened the door to the triumphant advance of the water closet, which robbed agriculture of human excrement.” (p 191)
He also questions if autarky ever really existed anywhere. “…it would not not be correct to equate the subsistence economy with individualistic narrow-mindedness and to link it only with the individual farmer; the principle of providing for one’s own need radiated far beyond the house economy and was, right into the modern age, a self-evident principle of the economy of village communities, landed estates, vities, and states. This principle meant that providing the local population with basic foodstuffs and with wood took precedence over export. [How different to our current desperate – and practically impossible – bids by many economies for ‘export-led recoveries’.] But while the self-sufficiency of the single farmstead, without the need to purchase anything from the outside, was an old peasant ideal, the reality was often very different. The kind of subsistence economy that was the rule in historical reality was not isolated and cut off from all higher culture, but contained elements of a local and regional division of labor. In many regions of the world we find old, “natural” trading relations between neighbouring regions with different natural resources: between pasture areas of the uplands and the agriicultural regions in the valleys, between wetland areas rich in marine life and zones of deciduous forests in which pigs were pastured.”(p40)
But we’re back to politics – “the chief weakness of the subsistence economy was and is not ecological but political in nature: since it did not generate the potential for power on the same scale as economies geared towards the production of added value, it easily fell under foreign control, and self-sufficiency was disturbed by taxes and dues.” (p. 39) Smallholding is “an economic way of life that is capable of economic and ecological perfection”.
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