The Environment

Reviewed by: The Environment: A History of the Idea by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin Florian Sprenger (bio) The Environment: A History of the Idea. By Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 244. Hardcover $29.95. Without doubt the term "environment" is one of the central concepts of Western self-understanding. It allows one to negotiate the relationships between man and nature as well as between nature and technology. This intellectual history of the idea Environment, by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, demonstrates the significance of this term's transformations after the Second World War and works to reconstruct its current meaning. In 250 pages of collaborative effort, the three environmental historians describe the emergence of a new narrative about the influence of humans on the planet around the year 1950. In this new conceptualization, the term environment effectively explained local environments as elements of an interconnected global environment. The term also intertwined human action and the nature of human environments. The question guiding the book is how this idea emerged out of the interplay of expertise, technology, institutional power, and the imaginary dimension tied to the term nature. The authors describe how "the environment was envisioned and imagined through the activities and outputs that these networks produced—imagined as a kind of networked planet" (p. 138). The seven chapters each introduce an historically situated constellation of topics in which environmental issues were reformulated: survival, the future, limited resources, conservation and environmentalism, climate and earth science, sustainability, and ecosystem services. The book spans a dense network of actors, institutions, interests, and practices by following different areas of expertise. It describes how environment became a counter-concept to modernization and technology, a framework for politics, and an object of planning and management. On the basis of this parallelization of the rise of environmentalism and globalization, the [End Page 900] appellative structure of the term emerged as a projection surface for social negotiations. This framework helps us understand how incomprehensible the term was at first and how self-evident it has since become. In the introductory chapter, the authors work out four dimensions underlying this appellative structure: the term's orientation towards the future and the possibility of destruction, but also the chance of improvement; the importance of expert knowledge; a new understanding of objectivity, calculability, and predictability; and scalability between local and global levels. Through the framework of these four developments, the authors reverse the current perspective on the emergence of environmentalism: while in the dominant narratives, alarmed scientists raise an issue that is then handed over to institutions, the authors show how the crisis of the environment is negotiated in institutional interplay: "Diplomacy, policy, and, indeed, the environment, were created in tandem (or 'co-created', as historians of science like to put it) through the formation of an internationally active and restlessly conferencing alliance of scientists" (p. 137). The book's benefit lies in showing how this concept of the environment was produced within institutional negotiation, ecological expertise, technology, and political appropriation. As inspiring as this perspective may be, some premises are problematic, especially regarding the claim to write a "history of the idea." The authors understand environment solely as a natural environment to be protected, as a "conceptual framing of the growing and largely negative consequences of human activities on the earth" (p. 4), and they ignore all alternative uses. Accordingly, this history has no room for non-natural or technological environments. The authors also assume a paradigm in which the organism has an active role and the environment simply supports its action—an idea that had already been abandoned in the late 1800s. In the emerging sciences of ecology, the term always was used in a dyad with an organism or a population and described a reciprocal, non-deterministic relationship. A history of ideas would have to problematize the concept, while in this book it is set from the beginning. The book follows a methodologically unstable division between the history of "environment as a word" (200 years) in the sense of an "external thing that could shape our interior life" (p. 176), and

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