Antipode 30:4, 1998, pp.

395–404
ISSN 0066-4812

BOOK REVIEWS
BOOK REVIEWS
BOOK REVIEWS

Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in

North–South Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
213 pp. ISBN 0-816-62762-2 (hardback), 0-816-62763-0 (paperback).

Imperial Encounters analyzes the productivity of discourses of North–South rela-

tions to understand the role of representation in creating the power dynamics that
characterize “first world”/”third world” relations in several key historical and
contemporary case studies. Doty draws extensively on the work of Edward Said,
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe to under-
take a critical genealogy of North–South relations. Examining the representational
practices employed by northern journalists, politicians, and academics in discus-
sions of the South, the author highlights the constructed and political dimensions
of the knowledge that have guided the North’s colonial policies and development
practices in the South. In so doing, Doty contributes to the rapidly growing litera-
ture on the continuities between the role of colonial discourse in shaping imperial
geographies and the part played by neoliberal discourse in “third world” develop-
ment policies (cf. Latouche, 1996; Escobar, 1995; Crush et al., 1995).
In the first two sections of the book, Doty undertakes close readings of critical
moments in the British and American imperial projects to uncover the discursive
justifications of imperial domination and exploitation. She focuses in particular
on points of rupture in the hegemonic nature of colonial rule to analyze the repre-
sentational strategies through which the colonial powers regained their domi-
nance. The American state’s decision about whether to intervene and halt the
Huk rebellion in the Philippines raised representational dilemmas surrounding
the nature of the U.S.–Philippine relationship. In response to these dilemmas, the
U.S. government produced racialized justifications for its intervention in the
rebellion, rendering “the natives” as poor, helpless, “little brown brothers” in
need of U.S. democracy, itself defined and embodied in “white” American man-
hood. Doty emphasizes the contingent and arbitrary aspects of this northern
discourse on the Philippines in order to make remarkable the assumptions of
North–South relations that are often taken for granted in international relations
perspectives.
Similarly, in her analysis of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, Doty focuses
on the national identity and purpose that informed the British government’s

© 1998 Editorial Board of Antipode

Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108
Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.
396 BOOK REVIEWS

“counterinsurgency” practices. Specifically, British representations of themselves

as the rational, enlightened parents of the irrational Kikuyu children served as the
basis of their rationale for crushing the Mau Mau rebellion. Doty makes clear that
in these colonial discourses the positive normativity linked to white American
manhood and British paternal rationality played a key role in enabling the violent
repression of the Huks and the Mau Mau.
In its final section, Imperial Encounters briefly examines the “contemporary
encounters” of northern foreign aid, democracy, and human rights discourses.
Again, the conclusion underscores the ways in which northern representational
practices fix the South as “unfit for self-government” and reinforce the notion
that the North’s involvement in the South’s affairs is necessary. This part of the
book is distressingly brief, suggesting many dimensions of development dis-
course that require further analysis and making several titillating connections,
but never thoroughly investigating them in the more thorough manners of
Arturo Escobar (1995) or Serge Latouche (1996). While it is true that colonial rep-
resentations of the South as inferior, uncivilized, and irrational show marked
similarities to post-independence discourses on the South’s need for political–
economic modernization, efficiency, and competence, these relationships could
be better elaborated to illustrate more specific contemporary linkages between
neoliberal metaphors and neo-colonial practices. Indeed, a more in-depth analy-
sis would have strengthened the earlier sections as well, particularly, as the
author herself notes, if this analysis had engaged more sources from the South.
These are minor shortcomings, however, in a work that overall meets its clearly
outlined goals quite well.
The book’s main weakness is one that is common with work of this genre, and
one that is difficult to resolve. While one of the central aims of the project is to dis-
rupt naturalized conceptions of “North”/”South” relations and identities, in fact
the analysis at times reinforces the heirarchized discourses of global geopolitics.
The author reifies the equivalencies she is critiquing, despite her continual empha-
sis on the constructed, political, and historically repressive nature of the represen-
tations. Rather, then, than concluding with a clearer understanding of the specific
ways in which these equivalencies (i.e., whiteness, masculinity, Britishness, ration-
ality, civilization) may have broken down or the counterhegemonic southern per-
spectives on the North, one is left with the now quite familiar story of colonial and
neo-colonial discourses perpetuating material domination. Nevertheless, for those
less familiar with Foucault’s and Derrida’s work, Doty’s book serves as a useful
introduction to, and artful application of, poststructural methods of discourse
analysis. In addition, the case studies provide pleasurable, readable forays into the
histories of British-Kenyan and U.S.–Philippine colonial interactions. And overall,
the author’s careful interpretation of the ways in which power and knowledge
intersect to construct political identities and unequal geographies is an engaging,
well-wrought argument for understanding the material implications of the natu-
ralized labels of “North” and “South.”

References

Crush, J. (Ed.) (1995) Power of Development. London: Routledge.

Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
 BOOK REVIEWS 397

Latouche, S. (1996) The Westernization of the World: The Significance, Scope, and Limits
of the Drive towards Global Uniformity. Oxford: Polity.

RACHEL SILVEY
Department of Geography
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-3550
E-mail: silvey@u.washington.edu

Rutherford H. Platt, Land Use and Society: Geography, Law and Public Policy.
Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996. 528 pp. ISBN 1-55963-435-9 (paper-
back).

Platt’s large, lively, and comprehensive overview of land use planning and envi-
ronmental regulation in the United States begins with the description of a plane
flight from San Francisco to Boston, which gives the traveler a “bird’s eye view” of
the major land forms, agricultural and manufacturing production locations, and
settlement patterns of the nation. This device allows the author to introduce his
structuring theme, which is that land-use regulation and the law are aspects of the
development of land and shaping of landscapes that geographers cannot afford to
ignore.
While not discounting the role of physical, economic, and other spatial vari-
ables, the primary focus of this book is the role of law as a major factor in the way
humans use their resources and design their patterns of settlement (p. xiv).
The book is divided into four parts: I. Preliminaries: Land Uses and Concepts; II.
From Commons to Cacophony: Dispersion of Control over Land; III. Reinventing
Cities: Testing the Limits of Intervention; IV. The Search for Broader Land Use Poli-
cies. Each of these parts covers the historical development of legal regulations and
policy statements in relation to urban development and, more latterly, environ-
mental issues in the United States.
By far the greatest attention is given to issues of local control over urban and
suburban environments by local governments implementing zoning controls.
Platt’s wide-ranging approach has the advantage of putting these perennial prob-
lems into historical perspective, tracing the particular ways in which land-use
regulation and local government structures have arisen in the United States. He
describes the development of property rights and property law, from their origins
in English medieval common and individual rights and duties relating to land in
the manorial village, through the rise of the cities and municipal corporations to the
settlement of the American colonies and the aspirations of the first Europeans for
local self-government and autonomy.
The rise of urban planning as a response to the problems of cities of the Indus-
trial Revolution is considered under the headings of: “regulation”—sanitary and
building code reforms; “redevelopment”—urban design on the grand scale such as
Nash’s improvements to Regency London, Hausmann’s to Second Republic Paris,
and Olmsted’s New York Parks; and “relocation”—philanthropic capitalist hous-
ing for workers and more radical attempts to create Garden Cities. This is a useful
device for dealing with a fairly standard planning history (compared with, say,
Christine Boyer’s [1990] more critical approach), and one that Platt furnishes with
398 BOOK REVIEWS

many useful insights into the interconnections between the various strands and
later developments of urban reform.
The confluence of urban reform and zoning in shaping the American city has
been a mixed blessing, giving legal force to the need to control poor development
and manage externalities on the one hand, but on the other, providing powerful
tools for the creation of economically exclusive and racially homogenous neigh-
bourhoods. Platt agrees with other commentators that “zoning has outlived its use-
fulness and probably causes more problems than it resolves” (p. 489). How to
dislodge such entrenched and ubiquitous practices that are enmeshed with power-
ful discourses of property ownership and local autonomy is another matter.
The last part of the book covers state, regional, and federal policies and pro-
grammes relating to land, such as the need to manage fragile coastal environments,
heritage and endangered species, and “the environment” more generally. The
record of success is slow and patchy, with some legislation like the Endangered
Species Act under threat from groups espousing property rights and “wise use”
arguments. The American aversion to government intervention and the reliance on
courts to spell out and protect individual property rights have come full circle in
the 1990s and are weakening the possibilities for the protection of common inter-
ests in land and environment.
As an inhabitant of the Antipodes, I found this book an extremely useful intro-
duction to the issues confronting land-use control in the United States. It is fascinat-
ing to reflect upon the different trajectories of property rights and regulatory
controls in America and Australia, given their common origins in English law and
urban reform and the superficially similar federal structure.
In Australia, at least until the 1990s, the States have been the originators of
land-use control and the sources of infrastructure, housing, education, and trans-
port policies, albeit constrained by funding agreements hammered out between
the States and the federal government. This has meant a far more evenly spread
provision of basic services across metropolitan areas, and the State-based frame-
work for planning regulation has contributed to a muting of the exclusionary
potentials of zoning. However, economic restructuring and New Right agendas at
both the State and federal level have seen the sell-off of public utilities and the
tendering-out of local government services, including building and possibly plan-
ning controls, which may lead to the exacerbation of spatial inequalities in Austra-
lian cities.
The role of the law in Australia is also very different. There is no Bill of Rights or
founding statements of belief in the sanctity of the individual to appeal to, so
defence of property rights and the limits to government intervention are not so
central to legal argument or land-use decisions. As Gordon Clark (1985:xiii) points
out, “Disputes over the interpretation of local government power, like many other
aspects of American society, typically end up in the courts rather than in the legis-
lative system. . . . [T]he judicial system is the major interpreter of American local
autonomy, something unheard of in most other countries.” These differences
shown in the contexts and effects of land-use regulation support Platt’s argument
for the importance of law and policy in shaping geographies.
Nevertheless, the focus of Platt’s book is firmly on the history of planning and
the description of regulations: much less space is devoted to teasing out the multi-
ple flows of influence among geography, land use, and law asserted in the first two
chapters. The original title of the 1991 edition—Land Use Control—might still be
more appropriate to the current focus (I would want to add “in the United States”
to the subtitle).
 BOOK REVIEWS 399

Other significant omissions relate to the historical narrative, which ignores the
prior occupation of the land by the indigenous peoples of the North American con-
tinent. The idea that the land was free of previous forms of land use or, indeed,
forms of land-use control should not be perpetuated. Platt’s only references to the
original peoples are passing notes about the forms of New England settlement that
had to deal with Indian attacks and/or Indian land claimants (pp. 122, 123). Along-
side this is the viewpoint that the “preservation of wilderness” somehow allows
direct access to unspoilt nature, which effectively “airbrushes” out of history all
land use before non-indigenous occupation. This issue is of enormous contempo-
rary import for dispossessed original peoples throughout the world, and hence for
dominant land-use practices and assumptions about property ownership, and
should be addressed in a comprehensive book such as this.
Assumptions about national sovereignty, local autonomy, and property owner-
ship are also being unsettled by international agreements that range from World
Heritage listings and environmental emissions reductions treaties to the North
American Free Trade Agreement and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
These are not addressed by Platt and, indeed, may not currently exert overt influ-
ence on American spatial policies and land-use regulation. Nevertheless, such
issues are central to the interactions among geography, law, and public policy and
must be considered in assessing the future of land-use control.
In general, then, the book does not set out to be critical in a theoretical or radical
sense, although Platt provides plenty of examples of the shortcomings of land-use
controls and planning systems. But it more than amply fulfills its role as a
comprehensive, readable, and stimulating text on the problems and prospects for
land-use control in the United States. It is a great pity there is not yet one like it for
Australia.

References

Boyer, C. (1990) Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning. Cam-
bridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Clark, G. (1985) Judges and the Cities: Interpreting Local Autonomy. Chicago: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.

MARGO HUXLEY
Department of Landscape, Environment, and Planning
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University
Melbourne, VIC 3001
Australia
E-mail: huxley@tce.rmit.edu.au

Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built
Environment in Colonial Singapore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
392 pp. ISBN 9-676-53085-9 (hardback).

Reynaldo (1988:125) remarked that “nationalist writers . . . find it impossible to

interrogate the established notion that among the blessings of American colonial
400 BOOK REVIEWS

rule was a sanitary regime which saved countless Filipino lives.” This is char-
acteristic of most of the postcolonial literature that has emerged over time. As Dip-
esh Chakraborty (1992:545) asks, “Can a modern knowledge transcend this mor-
bidity? Through what historical process of subject formation did long life, good
health, more money, small families and modern science come to appear so natural
and God-given?” The battle then is between sense and sensibilities, between mod-
ern and non-modern. This timely book by Brenda Yeoh brilliantly unpacks some of
the tensions that have become lodged in the archaeology of history, between disci-
pline and order, between surveillance and punishment, and between contested
spaces.
Contesting Spaces provides an admirable repertory of instances of how the urban
built environment of colonial Singapore was shaped between 1880 and 1930 by con-
flict and negotiations between the colonial institutions of control (municipal author-
ity) and the Asian communities that lived and worked in the city. It charts the
development of the municipal government as an institution of control over the built
environment. This is organised around the two themes of maintenance of a sanitary
environment and the promotion of public order in city space of colonial Singapore.
Yeoh’s dialectic adequately focuses on teasing out the tensions in the efforts of
the municipality to improve the sanitary conditions in the city through a variety of
strategies, including surveillance of “Asian” practices. Resistance and evasion by
the natives are as much the order of the daily struggle as those of complicity and
conflict. Municipal order and discipline are invoked to meet the demands of urban
efficiency and development. Contestations and discourse are then tightly knit
around the demands for the accommodation of “Asian” values to the urban built
environment. This book then forms a very important contribution to the historiog-
raphy of colonial port cities. It is readable without becoming mired in the dense
logistics of urban identities. However, there are some caveats that need addressing
in the larger context of theory and positionality.
The theoretical underpinnings of this project assume an undifferentiated cate-
gorisation of the paradigms of urban transition. This is problematic within the
wider tradition of Eurocentric modelling. Inevitably, the author tends to mix the
growth theory model of Rostow (as representative of the urban model) with that of
Friedmann’s urban transition model (chapter 1). This is highly contentious. It
would have been more appropriate to begin with Kingsley Davis, followed by
Hoselitz’s (widely acknowledged) take on urbanisation. The “growth” model
traces its genesis to the German Historical School of Economics. This branched into
two streams, of Petty (1899) and Monoilesco (1931). It was Monoilesco’s stream,
which focused on structural change and capital accumulation, to which Rostow
belonged (1956). Clearly the growth model cannot be directly equated with the
urban transition model. Thus while the 1960s’ literature is ignored, the 1970s are
not accurately represented. Again, McGee’s model (1995) does not subscribe to a
variant of modernisation paradigm and clearly fits the dependency model (Lin,
1994). The binary distinctions between modernised urban space and premodern
urban space are incomplete. A more useful evolutionary approach would have
been the protocolonialist, a pre-industrial colonial, and an industrial colonial
urban space. Here at least the evolutionary character of trading settlements would
have been acknowledged.
In attempting to raise a discourse of peripheral colonialism (of Singapore,
Queen of the East) as opposed to core colonialism (Bombay or Calcutta, as the Jewel
of the British Empire), Dr. Yeoh commits to a Foucaultian terminology of dis-
course, from the objectivisation of the subject to generalised surveillance to
 BOOK REVIEWS 401

normalising gaze and ultimately to power as a microprocess of social life. Here the
“concrete spaces are enframed, constrained, colonised by the technologies of
power as also by the site of resistance and active struggle” (p. 15).
The author firmly establishes the discourse within an Asian episteme. She notes
that, while the colonial built environment is “textual,” the “site of contest,” it can-
not be “interpreted in solely cultural terms [or] reduced to questions of economic
competition. Instead, negotiations of power should be understood in its social
materiality, its day to day operation on the level of micropractices” (p. 315). This is
problematic because, in its epistemic construction, the thought process is framed
neither entirely by the political economic approach nor within a cultural paradigm
or a modernisation paradigm. It effectively takes on board the issues of dominance
and power, but fails to adequately theorise the issue of hegemony (see Ross, 1998,
on “public space”). Any location of discourse within an Asian episteme needs to
take stock of the subalternative construction (Bahl, 1997; Guha, 1997; Kaviraj, 1997).
As Ahmad (1992:99) insists,

The narrative of incarceration and surveillance which Foucault assem-

bled is designed precisely to demonstrate the boundary between the
ancient regime and modern western episteme. A discourse as Foucault
maintained had to be distinguished from the canonical traditions,
from mentality, from institutions. His philosophical distinction
between discursive regularity and personal statement, his historiog-
raphic preoccupations with specifying the form and boundary of dis-
course, his refusal to collapse one discourse with another, e.g., of race
and class, is fundamental to his thought. Austerity of boundaries is
fundamental to Foucault.

Therefore, any discourse on dominance and negotiations around built environ-

ment would have to acknowledge coercion, persuasion, and the related hegemonic
identities in the context of power.
Again, “plebian” classes are not a homogenous category, being composed of
various races, clans, religious, and linguistic denominations. At the same time, they
also differ by way of levels of income. The aesthetics of discourse calls for an under-
standing of the coercive identities, their linkages in isolation and in conjunction
with others. Classes find themselves in societies structured in determined ways in
productive relations. Class and class consciousness are always the last, not the first,
stage of the historical process (Thompson, 1978). In Singapore transnational link-
ages are held together not only by commodity flows, but also by clans, dialects,
marriages, race, ethnicity, and divisions of labour. Thus, a rhetoric of “culture” is
pre-eminent in Singapore, as in other Asian societies. One needs to go beyond dif-
ferences to encapsulate arguments of dominance and hegemony, which cannot be
isolated in a discursive analysis. Negotiations by any agency are then played out
between Select Committees, ordinary Commission members, Memorialists, and
their Collaborators (rate-payers). Prejudices and interests clash with personalities
and agendas. Therefore, dominance and subordination derive their idiom from dif-
ferent political cultures, and Asia is different from Europe.
Dr. Yeoh admirably leads us through history in focusing upon the transition of
Singapore from a “city of mean streets, airless cubicles and dark house interiors, to
one conforming to the visions of order in an open textured city” (p. 167). This book
is an important precursor to the debates embedded on the positionality and reflex-
ivity of urban space in an Asian episteme.
402 BOOK REVIEWS

References

Ahmad, A. (1992) Orientalism and after: ambivalence and cosmopolitanism loca-

tion in the work of Edward Said. Economic and Political Weekly 25
July:PE98–PE115.
Bahl, V. (1997) Relevance (or irrelevance) of subaltern studies. Economic and Political
Weekly 7 June:1333–1344.
Chakraborty, D. (1992) Of garbage, modernity and the citizen’s gaze. Economic and
Political Weekly 7 March:541–547.
Guha, R. (1997) Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kaviraj, S. (1997) Filth and public sphere: concepts and practices about space in Cal-
cutta. Public Culture 10:83–113.
Lin, G.C.S. (1994) Changing theoretical perspectives on urbanisation in Asian
developing countries. Third World Planning Review 16:1–24.
McGee, T.G. (1995) Eurocentricism and geography: reflections on Asian urbaniza-
tion. In J. Crush (Ed.) Power of Development. London: Routledge, pp. 192–210.
Reynaldo, C.I. (1989) Cholera and the origins of the American sanitary order in the
Philippines. In D. Arnold (Ed.) Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies. Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, pp. 125–148.
Ross, K. (1988) The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Thompson, E.P. (1978) The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Monthly Re-
view Press.

M. SATISH KUMAR
Department of Geography
Cambridge University
Cambridge CB2 3EN
England
E-mail: msk26@cam.ac.uk

Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmental-

ism: Essays North and South. London: Earthscan, 1997. 230 pp. ISBN 1-
85383-329-0 (hardback).

Over the last twenty years, environmentalism has proved a popular but amor-
phous subject for social scientists to analyse. Numerous commentators have
applied their wits to phenomena that are forever in “restless metamorphosis”
(O’Riordan and Jordan, 1995:191), as environmental concerns and their social
expressions become bound into and transformative of other social movements.
Attempts to characterise the diversity and development of environmentalism have
tended to emphasise the temporal evolution of environmental concerns and social
movements in predominantly western contexts or tried to illuminate them through
the spotlights of “ecocentricism” and “anthropocentrism.” The limitations of such
analytical devices when trained on less-developed countries or urban environ-
ments made reading Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South an
appealing prospect.
 BOOK REVIEWS 403

In this book, Guha and Martinez-Alier bring together their recent collaborative
work with a selection of individually written essays, some now ten years old. The
result is a singular and eclectic collection, in no sense a review of existing literature
on environmentalism. Ecological history and political ecology provide a broad
analytical context, but Essays North and South is best read as a series of discrete
essays, if only to avoid a slight sense of frustration, since the first half of the book
certainly leads the reader toward a more cohesive set of arguments about the sub-
stance of non-western environmental politics.
This is where Guha and Martinez-Alier develop their core agenda—the identi-
fication and characterisation of an “environmentalism of the poor.” Adopting a
sympathetic, (eco)socialist standpoint, such environmentalisms are deemed to
encompass a wide range of concerns with the iniquities and inequities of indus-
trial development set against a backdrop of visible resource degradation. Strug-
gles over resources are often intimately connected with issues of human rights,
ethnicity and distributive justice. The authors point out the various ways in
which “post-materialist” explanations of environmentalism in affluent countries
have obscured the existence of environmental concerns in less-developed coun-
tries and degraded regions of the North. These initial chapters address the rela-
tionship between environmentalism, affluence, and poverty from a variety of
angles, taking arguments from ecological economics and case studies of protest
movements. Little attention is given to defining or classifying environmental-
isms; scarcely surprising, given the efforts to point out how much “environ-
mental protest” in the South escapes conventional ecopolitical language. One is
left more impressed with the variety of “ecological distribution conflicts” and
“related resistance movements” (pp. 44–45), although, in focusing on particular
axes of distributive justice, ecofeminism becomes classified as a type of move-
ment and receives relatively cursory treatment.
As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that the authors are extrapolating sub-
stantially from pro-peasant agrarian protests, particularly from India, which are
contrasted with quite narrow (if high-profile) forms of American wilderness and
Deep Ecology movements. In short, “[N]o Humanity without Nature,” the epitaph
of the northern environmentalist, is here answered (from the South) by the equally
compelling slogan “No Nature without Social Justice” (p. 21). The general empha-
sis on comparison has meant that moral and practical commonalities between dif-
ferent environmentalisms of the poor—such as between the urban “brown”
agenda of health and water in less-developed countries, indigenous rights activ-
ists, and the environmental justice movement in the North—tend to slip between
the chapters.
Despite their disparate nature, these initial essays leave the reader anticipating
further development of the argument. A sense of momentum is created by a useful
critique of (now rather old) Marxist perspectives that regarded environmental pro-
test as an essentially middle-class fad (chapter 2). Chapter 3 carefully scrutinises
the pervasive historicist myths that affluence is a necessary precursor of support
for environmental protection while poverty is the major cause of environmental
degradation. This includes an excellent analysis of ecological relations between
societies, which undermine simple, territorial assessments of “carrying capacity.”
A discussion of “the merchandising of biodiversity” (chapter 6) places many of
these arguments in context. By comparison, the second half of the book appears
more tangential, presenting essays on urban planning in Barcelona and appraisals
of the ecological thinking of “Mahatma” Gandhi, Nicholai Georgescu-Roegen, and
Lewis Mumford. While individually eloquent, the idiosyncrasies of these chapters
404 BOOK REVIEWS

are rather exposed by the book’s introduction, which commended these thinkers as
a basis for cross-cultural understanding within the environmental movement. Lit-
tle seems to have been done to redirect these reprinted essays toward this purpose.
In conclusion, Varieties of Environmentalism falls shortest from its own slightly
optimistic self-descriptions. “A comparative history, an account and analysis, over
time and across societies, of the varieties of environmentalism we understand to be
characteristic of the modern world” (p. viii) could only ever be a colossal project,
even setting aside Margaret Thatcher’s eye-watering proposition that “we are all
environmentalists now.” It seems appropriate to the subject matter that the book is
an engaging patchwork, knit together from vivid empirical examples, and perti-
nent theoretical critiques, with many interesting debates and ideas left in kit form.
Those interested in the relationships between development, resources, and social
protest will find ideas of considerable interest; researchers of India, something of
appeal; people concerned with environmental protest everywhere, food for
thought.

Reference

O’Riordan, T., and A. Jordan (1995) The precautionary principle in contemporary

environmental politics. Environmental Values 4:191–212.

RICHARD COWELL
Department of City and Regional Planning
University of Wales—Cardiff
Cardiff CF1 3YN
Wales
E-mail: cowellrj@cf.ac.uk