Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 243

On the make or in the making, modern environmental history contrives to ignore, absorb, resurrect and elaborate any number of established scholarly pursuits, profoundly influencing most of them. It is difficult to predict the outcome in the world’s older and larger academic cultures, but in the case of southern hemisphere groups, recurrent funding crises and coarse instrumentalism seem to favour pragmatic accommodations. The transition is reflected in this multi-disciplinary, five-part collection of 244 the agricultural commissioned essays, which builds upon New Zealand’s distinctive legacy of environmental narrations, academic and otherwise.

Encounters opens the proceedings with three interpretations of early Maori and Pakeha transactions with the new country, explaining that intercultural relations pivoted on contrasting modes of resource appraisal and environmental management. Colonizing and Special Environments consider environmental change between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century – on the grasslands, in the mines and forests – and the range of reaction in utilitarian and preservationist orientations to conservationism. A subsequent Modern izing bracket relates the evolution of the state’s assertive application of science and technology to New Zealand’s agricultural, pastoral, forest and water resources, deepening opposition from its largely urban environmentalists, and the gamut of hazard-prone town residence and comprehensive withdrawals into suburban gardens. A final section, Perspectives, supports environmental history’s ‘moral tales’ characterization. It consists of four discussions of the longitudinal themes of pests and weeds, the problematical interweaving of cultural disruption and Maori attitudes towards environmental change, inherited legal biases towards development imperatives, and a sketch of radical alternatives nominating greater reliance on organic production and the confrontation of presumptuous global traders.

The editors (a geographer and a historian) reasonably suggest that this collection indicates a number of opportunities for increasing New Zealand’s output of environmental history. If that claim warranted the insertion of more comprehensive guides to sources and national and international exemplars, perhaps the too-obvious rejoinder would be that it is better left to a companion volume. But the associated list is ambitious enough: it includes such topics as coastal management, environmental hazards, the changing roles of the state and its major resource agencies, the environmental impacts of transport and tourism, and the production and dissemination of environmental ideas. As for the organizational home or homes of those projected endeavours, the editors are less confident about the prospects of full-blown interdisciplinarity, inclining instead towards retention of individual essayist formats. That may indeed be the wiser course: the heyday of the specialist or connoisseur is far from spent. It remains to be seen whether the managerialists will approve.

In the interim, the old ‘relevance’ defence is strengthened by an attention to style as well as content in this welcome volume. Certainly, its accessible prose and rich illustration bid for a comparatively wide circulation, but on balance it seems more likely that an accusing gap will history review be filled in the armoury of main and supplementary texts designed for geography, history and environmental studies programmes. Reward enough. Through similar sets of concise expositions, as well as by means of more extended individual inputs, New Zealand society may soon be encouraged to revise a troubled transaction with some of the world’s most engaging environmental settings.