Product Description

What we now know of as environmentalism began with the establishment of the first empire forest in 1855 in British India, and during the second half of the nineteenth century, over ten per cent of the land surface of the earth became protected as a public trust. Sprawling forest reservations, many of them larger than modern nations, became revenue-producing forests that protected the whole ‘household of nature’, and Rudyard Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt were among those who celebrated a new class of government foresters as public heroes. Imperial foresters warned of impending catastrophe, desertification and global climate change if the reverse process of deforestation continued. The empire forestry movement spread through India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and then the United States to other parts of the globe, and Gregory Barton’s study looks at the origins of environmentalism in a global perspective.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1814379 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Review
‘The central thesis of this challenging book is that imperialism and environmentalism have a shared past that many scholars, especially those on the political left, wish to deny … I have much sympathy with this brave … deconstruction of the sources of practical environmentalism.’ Philip Stott, History Today

‘This book is well researched, easy to read, extremely good value and, for landscape historians interested in the interaction of human agency and environmental history it provides a succession of interesting case studies grounded in the landscape of the New Orleans river front.’ Landscape History

About the Author
Gregory A. Barton is Professor of British, Colonial and Environmental history at the University of Redlands, California.

Customer Reviews

Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism
In this remarkable book, Gregory Barton answers the most important questions that can be asked in environmental history. Where did environmentalism come from? How did it arise? How did it change the earth? How did it change us? Where is the movement going from here? Most environmental history is centered on the United States and misses the global dynamics of the movement. I am sorry to say that many environmental history books share in the general malaise of bad academic writing, or are such a jumble of superfluous footnotes that little meaning can be extracted, even with the most strenuous effort on the part of the reader. This book can not be more different. Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism place the environmental movement in clear global perspective, giving us the When, Where, Why, and How it all began. It ties together legislation, political propaganda, economics, trade, empire, and of course, forestry, to weave a single explanatory narrative. In this ambitious endeavor, Gregory Barton brilliantly succeeds. The result is a highly readable and convincing argument that introduces a cast of historical actors-wholly forgotten-- that have forever changed the face of the world.

Environmentalism, Barton argues, began in British India. From there it spread to the other colonies and then to the United States. The magnitude of the changes are mind boggling. Lord Dalhousie introduced "the constitution of environmentalism" in India in 1855, the Forest Charter, decisively changing the status of "waste land" into government property. This is a key intellectual revolution. Private property-in the absolute sense-had been carved out by the British land owning elite in England in 1688 and is thought by many scholars to be the foundation of the industrial revolution. Barton reveals how the government of British India extended this private concept of absolute property from the individual to the state. Here also is born the concept of "multi-use," the idea that government land must be professionally and scientifically managed for the whole national family, peasants, industry, and romantic conservationists alike, a concept that still guides the management of most protected forest areas. The Forest Charter became a model that overcame political opposition to conservation and quickly spread to the other British colonies and the United States.

This book clears away long-standing myths. Victorians were not only conservative--but innovative, practical and romantic all rolled into one. Imperialists were not mere exploiters--the altruism of the Indian foresters who sacrificed health and sometimes their life to preserve nature can be described as nothing less than heroic. Christianity did not postulate a radical divorce between God and nature--most of these early environmental innovators were Christian. Environmentalism did not arrive in the early twentieth century from the American frontier full grown, with murky parentage in the Romantic Movement and pagan country dances. Imperialism mothered environmentalism and gave environmentalism all the nourishment it required to grow--the rule of law, absolute property rights (for individuals and government), police action, romantic concern for nature, concern for global climate stability, and great doses of fair play to "settle" the conflicting land claims.

A note on the author's sources. He translates from a variety of languages, and utilizes archives in Europe, the United States, Africa, and the Subcontinent. The book, for all its impressive research, is actually rather short and gives a lot of information for a brief read. But his scholarship doesn't stand in the way of telling an exciting story. Surprisingly, I learned a fascinating fact about my favorite piece of literature, the Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling. I did not know that Kipling wrote his first Mowgli story with Mowgli an adult, discovered by empire foresters in the jungles of India. Kipling wrote a now forgotten short story that preceded the Jungle Book. Mowgli, raised entirely by Mother Nature, became the perfect recruit to join the Queen's service as an early conservator- an empire forester. With a pension at the end to retire on.