Becoming Good Ancestors: How We Balance Nature, Community, and Technology

  • David Ehrenfeld
Oxford University Press: 2008. 320 pp. $19.95, £10.99 9780195373783 | ISBN: 978-0-1953-7378-3

Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment

  • Joachim Radkau
Cambridge University Press: 2008. 448 pp. $24.99, £14.99 9780521616737 | ISBN: 978-0-5216-1673-7

One of the most important questions of our age is when will humankind take action to offset the impact of climate change? Will we do something before the inexorable rise in sea level or wait until the effect is cataclysmic? Can the history of previous environmental crises help us to predict the course of this one?

Two books address these challenges. In the first, Becoming Good Ancestors, David Ehrenfeld, a zoologist and the founding editor of the journal Conservation Biology, examines the destructive tendencies of humankind. He asks if we can “move ourselves and our society toward a more stable, less frantic, more responsible, and far more satisfying life”. The book is an expanded and revised collection of some three dozen essays that Ehrenfeld published first in Orion magazine and then in Swimming Lessons: Keeping Afloat in the Age of Technology (Oxford University Press, 2002). The result is a very good read.

Ehrenfeld believes that we must jettison our arrogant assumption of being able to fix anything through technology, that we forget at our peril what worked well in the past and that economics is a cloudy lens through which to view human behaviour. He says that we must and can reconnect with a nature that is resilient and that, despite globalization, local communities will never completely disappear. The essays retain the qualities that made them appealing when they were first published — brevity, passion and accessibility. However, as satisfying as they are as self-contained meditations, they do not hang together well, either as a sequence or as a complete analysis.

Nature and Power is a very different work, written by an environmental historian who refuses to follow convention unless he finds compelling reason to do so. Joachim Radkau's vision in this broad-reaching history of the state of the environment in — particular, its soils, forests and waters — is from three perspectives, namely German, continental European and global. His unrelenting focus on detail may frustrate the reader who seeks straightforward narrative. Many writers can be said to miss the forest for the trees, but Radkau is extreme, at times abandoning the tree for the twig, bud, leaf or abscission scar.

Radkau's guiding lights are demographer Thomas Malthus, sociologist Max Weber and the nineteenth-century agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig. Radkau draws on von Liebig in his discussions on the chemistry, well-being and degradation of soils; on Weber in his acknowledgement of the crucial role of culture and power in the course of environmental history; and on Malthus for his case that population pressure on resources is the enemy of sustainability. Radkau doesn't just apply these and many other ideas, but tests, refines and refutes them in chapters that range through time and across the globe. The book often startles. Insights come thick and fast with Radkau's ironic and unexpected turns of phrase.

True to form, he refuses to take the easy route. He comes close to declaring that environmental history is mostly about decline, and that human population control is the key to reducing resource pressure, yet he pulls back from whatever precipice he is nearing and complicates his narrative with stories that either offset or flatly contradict his thesis. Rather than close a case with some glib conclusion, he reminds the reader that the course of environmental history is intertwined with human power and inertia, that it is a mix of decline, ascension and stability and that crisis is often contrived. Radkau keeps the reader off balance: “All simple pictures of environmental history are open to challenge.”

Rarely, it seems, have we acted to prevent environmental crises. An exception was the 1987 Montreal Protocol to cease production of chlorofluorocarbons and other compounds that deplete the ozone layer. Will concern over climate change — a greater, more complex and more diffuse issue than destruction of ozone — also produce a pact for change? Given the cost of ramping up such efforts, this seems unlikely before climate change becomes a worldwide cataclysm. Whereas Ehrenfeld may give you cause to hope, Radkau is likely to leave you gloomy. He might even be said to turn philosopher George Santayana's observation on its head: even those who remember the past seem condemned to repeat it.