Agricultural History Review, Volume 63 Part 2 (2015), p. 327

The idea underlying this volume is a sound one – to provide a history of biodiversity in the modern world that does not succumb to a simplistic narrative of decline. Jones counterpoints this to a narrative of ecological decline driven by the politics of ‘environmental lobbies’, which, he avers, are driven more by ‘faith’ than science. He attacks the use of historical ecological baselines as a starting point for claims of decline, pointing out that before the late twentieth century they are often weakly rooted in empirical data. Moreover, any linear account of decline is, Jones argues, inherently flawed. Nature is constantly in flux. Even where extinctions take place, there can be no guarantee of which prevailing ecological system is subjectively better or worse. Any project that stands in the way of the great rule of change is flawed.

Yet for all the protestations of objectivity, this book really fails to deliver on its promise. Firstly, as the introduction makes clear, this volume is a political intervention, written to defend free market capitalism as ecologically sound. The author’s own condemnation of those who attack ‘a capitalist market system of which the critics are themselves beneficiaries’ clearly demarcates his purpose. The volume is punctuated by mistimed swipes at opponents, including unsupported claims such as the view that ‘historical fluctuations hold little interest for environmentalists’, which appear to be derived from the author’s conviction that environmentalists form an implacable band of ideological enemies who fail to recognize change as natural law. Perhaps the nadir of this form of argumentation is reached at the end of chapter three, when a single letter by one individual is cited as evidence for the implication that we should really stop worrying about climate change because of all the ‘wonderful new flora and fauna that surely must emerge’, as well as the ‘economic benefits’.

Jones offers a geographically rather narrow analysis, given the global nature of many claims for biodiversity loss. The majority of this book deals with British and Dutch historical examples from the seventeenth century onwards. Much of this discussion is based on reference to a secondary literature that is sometimes surprisingly narrow. The claim that the relationship between hunting and the environment has been only poorly studied, for example, does not really stand up. There are more (and more recent) studies on the theme than are cited here, not to mention a growing number of relevant studies on animal history. The rest of the world is addressed by Jones in several quite short chapters on ‘European expansion’, which really don’t add much to the existing state of knowledge except for the claim that ‘The transformations of global ecosystems are not being fairly assessed when they are presented as necessarily European, Western, capitalist or Christian’, which is of a piece with Jones’s tendency to return to apologetics at points throughout the text. Jones does not fairly represent the diversity of opinion among environmental historians on these or other factors in explaining ecological change.

Moreover, the author’s suggestion that environmental history has discounted the agency of non-Western peoples in ecological transformations is simply wrong. Jones’s attack on the noble savage myth both wildly exaggerates the purchase of this mythology among contemporary environmentalists and fails to recognize the significant role of historical work in undermining this discourse. Instead, Jones proceeds, bizarrely, to reproduce one of the core components of this very mythology by arguing that ‘The virtue of European and American technology was that it was not static but went on improving’, a claim that suggests a lack of familiarity with those historians who have demonstrated that Western technological dominance has often precisely been used to construct an idea of non-Western peoples as existing outside of progressive historical time.

‘Among environmental history’s problems’, Jones suggests, ‘is a tendency to hark back to a Golden Age when nature was supposedly unsullied’. If this view ever had any validity, it is increasingly hard to argue for it in the present, when it seriously fails to reflect the breadth of research and intellectual diversity within the field. Jones’s insistence on rooting his arguments in stereotyped notions of both environmentalism and environmental history is a great pity because his book raises questions worthy of serious treatment by environmental historians. The author is perfectly right to point to the difficulty of making historical judgments about biodiversity in the past; it is clear that there is a question to be raised over the relationship of environmental history and ecological science. However, and somewhat ironically, it is Jones’s very single-mindedness in putting environmentalists in their place for their supposed historical errors that means he slips too often from the position of critical historian to ahistorical apologist.