Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 229

A history of conservation by white farmers in selected livestock grazing areas in South Africa might seem a limited topic, but Beinart uses it to study a much larger one, the interactions of science, local knowledge, and the state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Notcontent with that he includes a study of ideas about erosion and land failure in Western cultures, a collective biography of South African conservationists, a survey ofchanges in the South African land and among its peoples, and some observations about the ‘rural political economy’ of the region (p.xv). To complicate matters further, he speaks not only to academics, South African and abroad, but to South Africans interested in their history. Such a complex narrative demands, and receives, a careful organization. Two introductory chapters, one on the ways travellers, scientists, and Africans understood the Cape in the early years of settlement, the other on science and conservation to the mid-nineteenth century, establish the dimensions of local and Western knowledge and conservation’s deep roots in settler society. There follow chapters on the graziers’ major problems and the applied sciences that studied them. Among these studies of fire, livestock diseases, erosion, irrigation, predator control, drought, and imported plants are two biographical accounts, one on a major conservationist, the other of a progressive farmer, and the book ends with a chapter on twentieth-century conservation debates among African farmers and a postscript on the persistence of declensionist arguments.

Despite all these topics and approaches, this is not a survey but a carefully organized set of studies on a single issue, conservation in the South Africa, all of it informed by extensive research and animated by Beinart’s deep interest in the land and the people. It should be of interest far beyond South Africa and find a place on the shelves of historians of agriculture and agricultural science, the environment, European settler colonies, and European overseas empires, for it places the white South African experience in these contexts, aiding comparative studies and giving perspective to work on other areas. South African farmers faced no new problems, worked in the same world commodity market as stockmen from New South Wales to Mani-toba, found their government helping and hindering in ordinary ways, and appealed to the same applied sciences, but they did so under the unique conditions of the South African land, already shaped by earlier inhabitants and being changed by their own actions. Focusing on the graziers’ problems and the applied sciences that addressed them allows Beinart to show the interplay of local and metropolitan knowledge, the ways that scientific understanding clashed or meshed with the stockowners’ views, and what science actually did for people on the land. The chapters on the ‘progressive’ farmer who applied the gospel of conservation on his land and the government agricultural bureaucrat charged with bringing in new knowledge add other perspectives. This last, a study of the Afrikaner drought expert H.S.du Toit, shows unfamiliar aspects of the story of American agricultural expertise abroad, and interested students should read it with J.M.Powell andIan Tyrrell’s accounts of American-Australia connections in mind.

The entire book deals with environmental issues but speaks directly to the field of environmental history in two ways. It offers a narrative that shows nature as an active force in history and includes a meditation on the popularity of declensionist narratives, those tales of ruined lands and failing societies so popular in so many societies over the centuries but with added relevance now that humans shape every ecosystem in the world. Beinart places these arguments in the context of recent South African history, where a minority applied ‘progressive’ agriculture on individual holdings before coming under siege from a majority with communal traditions and no love of the modern world market. His conclusions are largely cautions: that people must ‘disturb’ nature to live, that nature is not static, that we cannot go back to some imagined pristine land, and that we have only begun to understand the long-term impact of our life on the land. They are, though, useful warnings and this detailed history an important argument for them. All in all, this is an impressive work that should stimulate and inform scholarship in several fields.