Caroline Ford. Natural Interests

Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France is a sweeping study of the emergence of an environmental consciousness in France from the 1790s to the start of World War II. Caroline Ford marshals an impressive array of sources and subjects to show the many ways in which ideas about nature developed and took shape in policies and practices that are still in force today. Arguing against prevailing assumptions in French historiography that link the rise of environmental concern in France to the industrial impacts and atomic preoccupations of the postwar period, Ford demonstrates that anxieties about nature’s violence and frailty as well as efforts to protect its beauty were already widely influential in French politics and society from the start of the nineteenth century onward. To understand the overlapping and sometimes competing expressions of environmental concern in her period of study, Ford invokes the French geographer Yves Luginbühl’s concept of nature-paysage-environnement (nature-landscape-environment), a tripartite entity shaped by the diverse aesthetic, utilitarian, and ideological motives of different stakeholders (9–10). Among political ecologists, this interaction among stakeholders’ interests and their influence on environmental governance and ecological change is known as “environmentality.” While Ford does not cite that term, her emphasis throughout is on the interactive role of governmental and civic institutions in formulating cultural, intellectual, and political responses to perceived environmental threats. In this respect, the book’s title aptly conveys the valences of “interest” as a form of curiosity and engagement, a source of economic production, and a return on investment, interests that she explores on a national scale.

Archaeology · CONTEST · Environmental ethics · Natural (archaeology) · Political science · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies