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Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms
Given the ubiquity of environmental rhetoric in the modern world, it’s easy to think that the meaning of the terms environment and environmentalism are and always have been self-evident. But in Surroundings, we learn that the environmental past is much more complex than it seems at first glance. In this wide-ranging history of the concept, Etienne S. Benson uncovers the diversity of forms that environmentalism has taken over the last two centuries and opens our eyes to the promising new varieties of environmentalism that are emerging today.
Through a series of richly contextualized case studies, Benson shows us how and why particular groups of people—from naturalists in Napoleonic France in the 1790s to global climate change activists today—adopted the concept of environment and adapted it to their specific needs and challenges. Bold and deeply researched, Surroundings challenges much of what we think we know about what an environment is, why we should care about it, and how we can protect it.
Through a series of richly contextualized case studies, Benson shows us how and why particular groups of people—from naturalists in Napoleonic France in the 1790s to global climate change activists today—adopted the concept of environment and adapted it to their specific needs and challenges. Bold and deeply researched, Surroundings challenges much of what we think we know about what an environment is, why we should care about it, and how we can protect it.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
296 pages, Paperback
Published April 27, 2020
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October 15, 2021
In Surroundings Etienne Benson historicises the terms “environment” and “environmentalisms” by writing an episodic history of their shifting meanings since the late eighteenth century. As he clarifies at the start of his book, Benson by no means addresses every kind of “environment”, nor should the book be read as a chronological account of the understanding of this term. Rather, he aims to demonstrate how malleable and historically contingent this term is and has been. Since the book is both about environment and the kind of thinking it produces (environmentalism), Benson adopts a very pragmatic stance towards the concept of “environmentalists”, defining them as ‘everyone who approaches the world in terms of environments’ (218). This is a much broader vision than the liberal tree-huggers often imagined today by people who hear the term. This broadness is by design. The crux of his argument is that we should embrace environmental pluralism (the idea that there are multiple ways of conceptualising the environment). With an optimistic view towards the future, he argues that this pluralism can open the way for future understandings of environment which are adapted to the needs and challenges of today.
Chapter One introduces us to the French concept of the milieu, which grew out of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century habits of collecting and classifying nature. Although it defied a unified definition until the 1830s, milieu denotes the relationship between specific organisms and the external circumstances necessary for their existence. This concept was intertwined with the research programmes shared by institutions like museums and botanical gardens, which collected and classified organisms – organisms that often travelled vast distances to find their way to France, as these research programmes are themselves intertwined with colonial expansion. We also begin see in this period the notion of change over time, both in a ‘degenerative’ sense (as Buffon argued) or in an ‘adaptive’ sense (as Lamarck, and later Darwin argued).
Chapter Two begins in the mid-nineteenth century, when British physicians and army officers struggled with exotic diseases. In this episode it is the ‘statistical turn’ that is given centre stage, as statistical analyses of disease outbreaks at home and abroad were used to investigate the relationships between external conditions and human bodies. By the late-nineteenth century, these new statistical analyses and laboratory experiments helped shift understandings of “environment” amongst British physicians. Although external conditions were still considered important to understanding an organism’s health, this was less because of their direct effect on the body, and more because they provide the conditions under which disease-carrying organisms flourished. This “Germ-Theory” of health was, according to Benson, the first explicitly “environmental” theory of health, emerging in response to the explicit threat of disease to the British Empire.
From the broad British Empire in the nineteenth century Benson narrows his scope to Progressive-Era Chicago in Chapter Three, examining the work of prominent activists and social workers in the Settlement Movement. Environmental language was used to understand (and, importantly, improve) the conditions of existence for the urban poor. Their kind of environmentalism was one which viewed urban populations as organisms in themselves, which could be progressively adapted to better fit with their industrial surroundings.
Chapter Four explains the effect of total war – particularly the importance of resource management – in the first half of the twentieth century on understandings of the environment. This period saw the emergence of concepts such as the “biosphere” and “ecosystems”, both used to convey a broader understanding of environment as the ‘set of external conditions that influenced the functional organization of the system’ (131). This system-perspective, in contrast to earlier perspectives in ecology, understood the environment as a heterogenous set of living and non-living things. These living and non-living things were in symbiotic relationships with one another through biogeochemical processes and flows of energy, which could be controlled and manipulated if understood correctly. Proponents of this view in Germany, Russia, and the United States, were therefore often liberal internationalists and technocratic enthusiasts, envisioning an international community of scientists harnessing the power of the environment. New methods of measuring flows, like the use of radioactive tracers or climate models, were developed to understand and harness this power. Although this optimistic view of controlling the ecosystem soured in the 1940s and 50s (explained in the following chapter), the biosphere concept helped significantly expand environments to include living as well as non-living things (water and sediments were, for example, just as integral to the ecosystem as plants and animals).
In Chapter Five Benson traces the impact of the post-WWII boom in consumer culture in the United States on the understanding of the environment. Not only did this culture visibly change the surroundings humans lived in (think zoning, or the emergence of malls), but it also saw increasing concern for the harmful substances that were being introduced into these surroundings. As such, we see the concurrent emergence of what we now often identify as “environmentalism”, ‘a social movement built around the idea that humanity’s growing power to manipulate the material world was unintentionally harming the very environment on which it depended for survival’ (143). Activist writers like Rachel Carson and Murray Bookchin opened many eyes to the human assault on the environment, which was re-conceived as inherently linked to the American consumer, their health, and the space they share with others. The environmental movement emphasised regulation and the importance of environmental justice”, as it became clear how the burden of maintaining a safe habitat for humans was not distributed equally across society. In contrast to the optimism of the early twentieth century, these environmentalists believed that ‘technological advances are not always an unmitigated boon for humanity’ (161).
Chapter Six takes us from the end of the twentieth century to the present day. It chronicles the emergence of a “global environment”, and the concept of the Anthropocene as the dominant paradigm for understanding it. Helped by trends such as increasing globalisation and interest in sustainable development in the latter half of the previous century, Benson identifies the formation of a global community of Earth-system/climate scientists. Through the use of modelling methods – tracking CO2 emissions or creating “scenarios” for temperature or sea-level rises – these scientists draw attention to the peril facing human civilisation. However, whilst a global scientific community did emerge, it has proved far more difficult to create a similar ‘global humanity’. Negotiations and political decisions produced non-binding or limited targets for countries, and included free-market-loving flexibility measures (think carbon offsets) for many actors who wanted to continue emitting greenhouse gases in a business-as-usual fashion. The concept of the Anthropocene (as well as the -cenes it subsequently spawned, such as the Capitalocene or Plantationocene) tries to remind us that with human civilisation at stake, and that a broader field of expertise is required, including not just geologists and oceanographers, but also historians and filmmakers. Yet the Anthropocene has its own challengers, who argue inter alia that it reduces important differences between different peoples (some with a larger responsibility for getting humanity into this precarious situation than others). The failure of global climate science and Anthropocene discourse to materialise into meaningful political action has led some activists to seriously question or even abandon the term “environment” and start anew. This, Benson seems to imply, would not be an inherently bad thing.
In his Conclusion, Benson provides us with a number of important takeaways. One is that we shouldn’t assume experts on climate science speak for the totality of humanity. Another is that the duality of organisms and their surroundings that so often defines our understanding of environments is not sacred, and can be reconfigured in terms of “meshworks”, “trans-corporeality”, or “vital materialism”, to name a few alternative interpretations (201). Benson also invites the reader to think about the impact of “critical zone observatories” – localised, multidisciplinary research centres that bring to bear a variety of scientists and research methods on a particular site – on our future understandings of environment. A brief mention of the visual arts is made as a driver for reimagining our relationship with the environment. Crucially, he does not suggest the genealogy of the term “environment” he describes is the only – or most important – one that exists. Indeed, for reasons he mentions in the Introduction, he largely neglects indigenous conceptualisations of environment (save for a brief discussion of the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests in 2016/17). Though drawing from the history of science and medicine, economics, and sociology, he does not discuss the impact of fiction literature, theology, or leisure industries, to name but a few, on our understanding of the environment. But, he says, it is in part up to environmental humanities scholars to expound these other avenues. His valuable contribution lies in providing a historical foundation for environmental pluralism, which he argues ‘frees us from the need to decide once and for all on the “best” way of thinking and acting environmentally – a task as likely to be as unhelpful as it is difficult’ (217). This is the key takeaway of the book, and is I believe an important one for academics and non-academics to bear in mind.
Chapter One introduces us to the French concept of the milieu, which grew out of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century habits of collecting and classifying nature. Although it defied a unified definition until the 1830s, milieu denotes the relationship between specific organisms and the external circumstances necessary for their existence. This concept was intertwined with the research programmes shared by institutions like museums and botanical gardens, which collected and classified organisms – organisms that often travelled vast distances to find their way to France, as these research programmes are themselves intertwined with colonial expansion. We also begin see in this period the notion of change over time, both in a ‘degenerative’ sense (as Buffon argued) or in an ‘adaptive’ sense (as Lamarck, and later Darwin argued).
Chapter Two begins in the mid-nineteenth century, when British physicians and army officers struggled with exotic diseases. In this episode it is the ‘statistical turn’ that is given centre stage, as statistical analyses of disease outbreaks at home and abroad were used to investigate the relationships between external conditions and human bodies. By the late-nineteenth century, these new statistical analyses and laboratory experiments helped shift understandings of “environment” amongst British physicians. Although external conditions were still considered important to understanding an organism’s health, this was less because of their direct effect on the body, and more because they provide the conditions under which disease-carrying organisms flourished. This “Germ-Theory” of health was, according to Benson, the first explicitly “environmental” theory of health, emerging in response to the explicit threat of disease to the British Empire.
From the broad British Empire in the nineteenth century Benson narrows his scope to Progressive-Era Chicago in Chapter Three, examining the work of prominent activists and social workers in the Settlement Movement. Environmental language was used to understand (and, importantly, improve) the conditions of existence for the urban poor. Their kind of environmentalism was one which viewed urban populations as organisms in themselves, which could be progressively adapted to better fit with their industrial surroundings.
Chapter Four explains the effect of total war – particularly the importance of resource management – in the first half of the twentieth century on understandings of the environment. This period saw the emergence of concepts such as the “biosphere” and “ecosystems”, both used to convey a broader understanding of environment as the ‘set of external conditions that influenced the functional organization of the system’ (131). This system-perspective, in contrast to earlier perspectives in ecology, understood the environment as a heterogenous set of living and non-living things. These living and non-living things were in symbiotic relationships with one another through biogeochemical processes and flows of energy, which could be controlled and manipulated if understood correctly. Proponents of this view in Germany, Russia, and the United States, were therefore often liberal internationalists and technocratic enthusiasts, envisioning an international community of scientists harnessing the power of the environment. New methods of measuring flows, like the use of radioactive tracers or climate models, were developed to understand and harness this power. Although this optimistic view of controlling the ecosystem soured in the 1940s and 50s (explained in the following chapter), the biosphere concept helped significantly expand environments to include living as well as non-living things (water and sediments were, for example, just as integral to the ecosystem as plants and animals).
In Chapter Five Benson traces the impact of the post-WWII boom in consumer culture in the United States on the understanding of the environment. Not only did this culture visibly change the surroundings humans lived in (think zoning, or the emergence of malls), but it also saw increasing concern for the harmful substances that were being introduced into these surroundings. As such, we see the concurrent emergence of what we now often identify as “environmentalism”, ‘a social movement built around the idea that humanity’s growing power to manipulate the material world was unintentionally harming the very environment on which it depended for survival’ (143). Activist writers like Rachel Carson and Murray Bookchin opened many eyes to the human assault on the environment, which was re-conceived as inherently linked to the American consumer, their health, and the space they share with others. The environmental movement emphasised regulation and the importance of environmental justice”, as it became clear how the burden of maintaining a safe habitat for humans was not distributed equally across society. In contrast to the optimism of the early twentieth century, these environmentalists believed that ‘technological advances are not always an unmitigated boon for humanity’ (161).
Chapter Six takes us from the end of the twentieth century to the present day. It chronicles the emergence of a “global environment”, and the concept of the Anthropocene as the dominant paradigm for understanding it. Helped by trends such as increasing globalisation and interest in sustainable development in the latter half of the previous century, Benson identifies the formation of a global community of Earth-system/climate scientists. Through the use of modelling methods – tracking CO2 emissions or creating “scenarios” for temperature or sea-level rises – these scientists draw attention to the peril facing human civilisation. However, whilst a global scientific community did emerge, it has proved far more difficult to create a similar ‘global humanity’. Negotiations and political decisions produced non-binding or limited targets for countries, and included free-market-loving flexibility measures (think carbon offsets) for many actors who wanted to continue emitting greenhouse gases in a business-as-usual fashion. The concept of the Anthropocene (as well as the -cenes it subsequently spawned, such as the Capitalocene or Plantationocene) tries to remind us that with human civilisation at stake, and that a broader field of expertise is required, including not just geologists and oceanographers, but also historians and filmmakers. Yet the Anthropocene has its own challengers, who argue inter alia that it reduces important differences between different peoples (some with a larger responsibility for getting humanity into this precarious situation than others). The failure of global climate science and Anthropocene discourse to materialise into meaningful political action has led some activists to seriously question or even abandon the term “environment” and start anew. This, Benson seems to imply, would not be an inherently bad thing.
In his Conclusion, Benson provides us with a number of important takeaways. One is that we shouldn’t assume experts on climate science speak for the totality of humanity. Another is that the duality of organisms and their surroundings that so often defines our understanding of environments is not sacred, and can be reconfigured in terms of “meshworks”, “trans-corporeality”, or “vital materialism”, to name a few alternative interpretations (201). Benson also invites the reader to think about the impact of “critical zone observatories” – localised, multidisciplinary research centres that bring to bear a variety of scientists and research methods on a particular site – on our future understandings of environment. A brief mention of the visual arts is made as a driver for reimagining our relationship with the environment. Crucially, he does not suggest the genealogy of the term “environment” he describes is the only – or most important – one that exists. Indeed, for reasons he mentions in the Introduction, he largely neglects indigenous conceptualisations of environment (save for a brief discussion of the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests in 2016/17). Though drawing from the history of science and medicine, economics, and sociology, he does not discuss the impact of fiction literature, theology, or leisure industries, to name but a few, on our understanding of the environment. But, he says, it is in part up to environmental humanities scholars to expound these other avenues. His valuable contribution lies in providing a historical foundation for environmental pluralism, which he argues ‘frees us from the need to decide once and for all on the “best” way of thinking and acting environmentally – a task as likely to be as unhelpful as it is difficult’ (217). This is the key takeaway of the book, and is I believe an important one for academics and non-academics to bear in mind.
September 11, 2023
The notions of environment and environmentalism are relatively new. Today, when we think about environmentalism, we think of activists who want to return our Earth to its pristine state, that is, how it was before widespread human activity transformed it. This is rather unrealistic and reeks of hubris. Another view of environmentalism is learning to live responsibly on an Earth that has been transformed by human life and progress. In other words, those holding the latter view accept that we have entered a distinct geological period, the Anthropocene Epoch, variously considered to have begun with the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s or the Great Acceleration of the 1950s, with certain irreversible changes over earlier eras.
This is a book of history (of ideas, of science, and of technology) which challenges much of what we think we know about environments and environmentalism, making us reconsider the reasons for caring about it and approaches to protecting it.
This is a book of history (of ideas, of science, and of technology) which challenges much of what we think we know about environments and environmentalism, making us reconsider the reasons for caring about it and approaches to protecting it.
October 21, 2022
I couldn’t finish it. I have a BS in environmental management, so I’m always looking for good reads applicable to my profession. This book bored me to death. While I love a good sourced publication, this book felt more like copy and pasted citations one after the other. With that being said, it read like a research paper - lots of information, just super boring/dry. And environmentalism and history isn’t boring(!), so this book was a major let down. I gave a couple stars because I did learn a few things.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews