Content area
Full text
PEDER ANKER, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. vii + 343. ISBN 0-674-00595-3. L41.50 (hardback).
DOI: 10.1017/S000708740332504X
Imperial Ecology is a significant work in the history of ecology that deserves a place on the bookshelves of all those historians and philosophers of science who delighted in the attention to the ideological agendas that have framed ecology's development, and in this respect Imperial Ecology stands alongside both Greg Mitman's State of Nature (Chicago, 1992) and Doug Weiner's A Little Corner of Freedom (Berkeley, 1999). Importantly, however, environmental historians and environmentalists alike should also read Imperial Ecology. Anker suggests that they might be discomforted by the use of similar ecological arguments to their own to advocate nationalism, apartheid and the Zionist oppression of Palestine (pp. 241, 127).
Anker is concerned with the historical dynamics of the human relationship with nature and the naturalization of politics. He explores these themes through a study of the evolution of the science of ecology in Britain and South Africa from botany, through forestry and animal ecology, to the point where the human species also became a legitimate object of ecological knowledge. To this end Imperial Ecology is 'an in-depth study of how a handful of highly influential scientists and politicians established a three-part ecology of nature, knowledge, and society' (p. 2). Leading scientists created a new and expanded language of ecology which borrowed from...