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Against all odds. Rural community in the information age
322
Book Reviews
human impacts on nature. In the final chapter, Murphy discusses how to go about 'reorienting the relationship between social action and the processes of nature' (p. 288), i.e. meeting the challenge to move from an exploitative towards a symbiotic relationship with nature. He discusses and dismisses the neo-Malthusian notions of force and coercion. Habermas' 'practical reason', ecological ethics and ecological consciousness. He argues instead that it is ecological experience and/or ecological knowledge that has the potential to suggest routes towards a symbiotic relationship with nature. Science and rationalisation involve decisions, and it is the results of those decisions that cause the impacts that threaten the rationalist project. Those decisions can change. Murphy suggests that 'a new recognition is beginning to emerge of nature as an active, imperfectly understood, process rather than as a plastic thing to shape and master' (p. 254). Symbiosis is not predestined, but the struggle to attain it may be joined: The issue at the end of this century is no longer the same as that at the beginning. Then it was mastery of nature. Now it is the mastery of social constructions that will become compatible with nature, in other words, human self-mastery (p. 227). In this book, Raymond Murphy provides a sustained critique of contemporary environmentalism, from deep ecology through social ecology to sustainability, extensive insights into ways to think about relationships between social action and the environment. The book is not a light read, although it is well-written. It offers rich pickings in a succession of sharply-crafted phrases, set in a matrix of tight argument. Its reference list is vast (29 pages), and up to date. The book's concluding position may be too neat for some, but there are important and refreshing ideas here. The argument demands a close reading, but this is worth the effort involved, for it is a strong book. W.M. A D A M S
Department of Geography University of Cambridge Reference Perrow, C. (1984) Normal Accidents: Living with HighRisk Technologies. Basic Books, New York.
Against All Odds. Rural Community in the Information Age, J.C. Allen and D . A . Dillman. 238 pp., 1994, Rural Studies Series, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, $19.95 pbk, $55.00 hbk Community is a much used (and abused) word in both popular and academic discourse. There are many conflicting views over what is actually meant by the term. In this book, Allen and Dillman set out to explore how a small town and its surrounding area have managed to maintain a sense of community in the modern world, employing a primarily ethnographic approach. Their theoretical framework is based on the idea of three eras of social and economic organisation in the United States; the era of community control, the mass society era and the information age. The first o f these, it is argued, was dominant until the 1950s and was characterised by strong locality ties. These ties were weakened as the era of mass society and subsequently the information age arrived.
The locality under study is accorded the fictional name of Bremer. It lies in eastern Washington state towards the border with Idaho in an area highly dependent on wheat farming. Allen and Dillman's argument is that Bremer has managed to retain many vestiges of the community control era while adapting to some of the changes brought about through external links. They contend that 'daily decisions in most peoples' lives reflected a juxtapositioning of s o c i e t a l and locality influences' (p. 27). The areal extent of the community was derived through a self-defining mechanism. The authors travelled along roads leading from the town of Bremer and asked each resident if the person living in the next house was part of the Bremer community. In this way the community is seen to consist of approximately 1000 people living within a 12-15 mile radius of the town. Throughout the book there is a general acceptance of this territorial definition but issues clearly arise concerning who, within this radius, is 'in' the community and who is 'outside'. The book's early chapters introduce readers to Bremer and provide the contextual framework. Subsequent chapters deal with various aspects of life in Bremer - - economic and political activity, gender roles, medical care, education, religion, social life and outward community expression. The impact of the information age on the locality is exemplified by the image of Bremer farmers using the internet and mobile phones in order to make decisions on selling in future markets. This juxtaposition can also create certain tensions. For example, although many people prefer to shop locally, they are dissatisfied by opening hours which appear limited compared to those in large urban areas. Elsewhere the authors demonstrate residents' selective engagement with wider regulations; highlighting the interaction between the local and the global. The central thesis is that locality ties remain dominant and, as a consequence, community values are maintained. The transmission of values and traditions occurs through a number of mechanisms. One of these is the 'community club'. This is an informal body (exclusively male) which is responsible for a number of local initiatives and, in the view of the authors, 'provides a glue that is critical to building the fabric of community' (p. 106). It demonstrates the highly socialised nature of the local power system. While the authors refer to this body as acting in the best interests of the community, it is clearly operating in a somewhat conservative manner through the maintaining of stability. Education is another method of value transmission. Here again tensions arise. Parents are in favour of their children being socialised into local norms but they also wish them to be educated for an outside world into which they will have to enter in order to obtain employment. A number of examples suggest there is a strong degree of insularity amongst residents of Bremer. The non-appointment of a female doctor of Asian origin on the grounds that she would not understand the area and its people demonstrates one of the problems associated with the preservation of what are seen as traditional community values; distrust of outsiders, rising in instances to overt antipathy. In their conclusion the authors eschew passing judgement on the phenomena they have described. Nevertheless they assert that they were impressed by a number of features including 'the taking into account of others' (19. 205) by local residents. They fail to point out that this attitude seems only to apply to those 'in' the community.
f
Book Reviews Allen and Dillman suggest, and this reviewer would agree, that an erosion of local distinctiveness would be regressive. However, it should be remembered that some local traditions and norms, in Bremer and elsewhere, are quite exclusionary. Otherwise, there is a danger of presenting an overly harmonious picture, a trap into which Allen and Dillman may have fallen. The challenge for advocates of 'community' is to preserve local distinctiveness while promoting a more inclusive idea of who can be a member of the community. This is an eminently readable and informative book. However, some chapters are weaker than others. The treatment of gender roles is somewhat superficial while the chapter dealing with outward community expression, as evidenced through the local Fair and Stock Show, tends towards the simplistic. Despite the reservations expressed above, the authors succeed in creating a picture of the locality and in illuminating a little corner of rural America. More importantly the book poses many questions for those concerned with social, economic and cultural change in rural areas. DAVID STOREY
Geography Department Worcester College of Higher Education
Dealing in Diversity: America's Market for Nature Conservation, Victoria M. Edwards, 182 pp., 1995, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £30.00 hbk This book asks, 'how can we make nature conservation pay?' (p. xiii). It is a question that is being asked more and more in the U.S. While the property rights and so-called wise-use movements are challenging the legitimacy of government restrictions on the use of private property, the chief vehicle for environmental protection in the U.S., self-confident free marketeers propound the doxa of neoclassical economics. Environmental goods, they insist, must pay their way like any other. Although the measure was defeated by the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives recently passed a bill requiring the federal government to conduct exhaustive cost-benefit analyses before enacting any new environmental regulations. Environmental groups are also casting their appeals for conservation in the rhetoric of economic efficiency. The scholarly literature, however, has yet to catch up with the changing mood. It has tended to focus on public lands and government regulation as the only means of securing environmental conservation. By exploring the operation of a profit maximizing market for nature conservation, Victoria Edwards fulfills an important need, and her book will be read with interest by planners and policy makers. An introductory chapter outlines a neo-classical economic theory of the market for nature conservation. A variety of case studies, based on fieldwork in Montana, Wisconsin, Virginia and the Southwest, put flesh and blood on the abstractions of neoclassical theory. They illustrate the practical challenges of instituting market mechanisms to make it profitable, and thus economically rational, for private landowners, who hold more than half of the land area of the U.S., to provide these 'goods'. Edwards identifies five developments that have made the
323
market for conservation more efficient. First, non-government organizations like the Nature Conservancy lower the transaction costs for those trading in environmental protection by providing a central clearing house for information that brings buyers and sellers together. Second, the development of an increasingly elaborate system of alienable property rights such as easements and leases reduces the opportunity costs of environmental protection by allowing purchasers to achieve their goals without having to purchase the full fee. Third, the commodification of conservation products like excludable access to wildlife for hunting or observation provides landowners with an incentive to manage their lands to protect natural habitat. Fourth, careful marketing and development can capitalize the benefits of conservation into the freehold value of land so that land owners will be encouraged to conserve the environment so as to protect the value of their holdings. Finally, landowners may act collectively through covenants to coordinate their management so as to realize use and non-use benefits of ownership. '[B]y rewarding the wise use of natural resources', Edwards contends, an efficient market for conservation 'will play a vital role in the protection of biodiversity' (p. 167). Many of the chapters begin with epigraphs from Aldo Leopold, but I'm not sure that he would recognize the spirit of his celebrated land ethic in the market for conservation. The only thing that counts in the market is what someone is willing to pay for. The market treats the environment atomistically, as if it were a shopping basket of discrete and fungible environmental goods and services to be bought and sold in a system of human exchange. Such narrow economism, Leopold (1949, p. 214) argued, leads us 'to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning.' Leopold's experience with predator control in the Southwest suggests that the rise of a market for hunting licenses on private land will not necessarily lead to sound wildlife management, as Edwards suggests. Predators compete with fee-paying hunters for deer, and so in many parts of the Southwest, individual ranchers with the cooperation and support of government fish and game officials exterminate them. Though profitable and economically rational, this system is ecologically unsound and led, in 1925, to the infamous crash of the Kaibab deer herd (Dunlap, 1988) and a degraded range habitat for deer, hunters, and predators alike. Against this kind of market calculus, Leopold (1949, p. 204) hoped that by 'thinking like a mountain' it would be possible to take into account 'what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient'. The case for market-based conservation would have been much stronger if Edwards had addressed these concerns head-on. Instead, she presumes that self-interested and economically rational 'private landowners have a greater incentive than any public body to take into account the needs and desires of future generations' (p. 166). This is.an astounding assertion. It runs against the grain of received wisdom in the American conservation movement, which, since the Progressive-era, has argued that it is precisely 'the long time element' and the pressures of immediate profit-taking that make 'private ownership and c a p i t a l . . . ill-adapted to give a more conservative and rational treatment' to the forest (Society for the Preservation of New Hampshire Forests, 1904-1905, p. 11). Perhaps this faith was misplaced. Certainly, the Republican Congress
Book Reviews
human impacts on nature. In the final chapter, Murphy discusses how to go about 'reorienting the relationship between social action and the processes of nature' (p. 288), i.e. meeting the challenge to move from an exploitative towards a symbiotic relationship with nature. He discusses and dismisses the neo-Malthusian notions of force and coercion. Habermas' 'practical reason', ecological ethics and ecological consciousness. He argues instead that it is ecological experience and/or ecological knowledge that has the potential to suggest routes towards a symbiotic relationship with nature. Science and rationalisation involve decisions, and it is the results of those decisions that cause the impacts that threaten the rationalist project. Those decisions can change. Murphy suggests that 'a new recognition is beginning to emerge of nature as an active, imperfectly understood, process rather than as a plastic thing to shape and master' (p. 254). Symbiosis is not predestined, but the struggle to attain it may be joined: The issue at the end of this century is no longer the same as that at the beginning. Then it was mastery of nature. Now it is the mastery of social constructions that will become compatible with nature, in other words, human self-mastery (p. 227). In this book, Raymond Murphy provides a sustained critique of contemporary environmentalism, from deep ecology through social ecology to sustainability, extensive insights into ways to think about relationships between social action and the environment. The book is not a light read, although it is well-written. It offers rich pickings in a succession of sharply-crafted phrases, set in a matrix of tight argument. Its reference list is vast (29 pages), and up to date. The book's concluding position may be too neat for some, but there are important and refreshing ideas here. The argument demands a close reading, but this is worth the effort involved, for it is a strong book. W.M. A D A M S
Department of Geography University of Cambridge Reference Perrow, C. (1984) Normal Accidents: Living with HighRisk Technologies. Basic Books, New York.
Against All Odds. Rural Community in the Information Age, J.C. Allen and D . A . Dillman. 238 pp., 1994, Rural Studies Series, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, $19.95 pbk, $55.00 hbk Community is a much used (and abused) word in both popular and academic discourse. There are many conflicting views over what is actually meant by the term. In this book, Allen and Dillman set out to explore how a small town and its surrounding area have managed to maintain a sense of community in the modern world, employing a primarily ethnographic approach. Their theoretical framework is based on the idea of three eras of social and economic organisation in the United States; the era of community control, the mass society era and the information age. The first o f these, it is argued, was dominant until the 1950s and was characterised by strong locality ties. These ties were weakened as the era of mass society and subsequently the information age arrived.
The locality under study is accorded the fictional name of Bremer. It lies in eastern Washington state towards the border with Idaho in an area highly dependent on wheat farming. Allen and Dillman's argument is that Bremer has managed to retain many vestiges of the community control era while adapting to some of the changes brought about through external links. They contend that 'daily decisions in most peoples' lives reflected a juxtapositioning of s o c i e t a l and locality influences' (p. 27). The areal extent of the community was derived through a self-defining mechanism. The authors travelled along roads leading from the town of Bremer and asked each resident if the person living in the next house was part of the Bremer community. In this way the community is seen to consist of approximately 1000 people living within a 12-15 mile radius of the town. Throughout the book there is a general acceptance of this territorial definition but issues clearly arise concerning who, within this radius, is 'in' the community and who is 'outside'. The book's early chapters introduce readers to Bremer and provide the contextual framework. Subsequent chapters deal with various aspects of life in Bremer - - economic and political activity, gender roles, medical care, education, religion, social life and outward community expression. The impact of the information age on the locality is exemplified by the image of Bremer farmers using the internet and mobile phones in order to make decisions on selling in future markets. This juxtaposition can also create certain tensions. For example, although many people prefer to shop locally, they are dissatisfied by opening hours which appear limited compared to those in large urban areas. Elsewhere the authors demonstrate residents' selective engagement with wider regulations; highlighting the interaction between the local and the global. The central thesis is that locality ties remain dominant and, as a consequence, community values are maintained. The transmission of values and traditions occurs through a number of mechanisms. One of these is the 'community club'. This is an informal body (exclusively male) which is responsible for a number of local initiatives and, in the view of the authors, 'provides a glue that is critical to building the fabric of community' (p. 106). It demonstrates the highly socialised nature of the local power system. While the authors refer to this body as acting in the best interests of the community, it is clearly operating in a somewhat conservative manner through the maintaining of stability. Education is another method of value transmission. Here again tensions arise. Parents are in favour of their children being socialised into local norms but they also wish them to be educated for an outside world into which they will have to enter in order to obtain employment. A number of examples suggest there is a strong degree of insularity amongst residents of Bremer. The non-appointment of a female doctor of Asian origin on the grounds that she would not understand the area and its people demonstrates one of the problems associated with the preservation of what are seen as traditional community values; distrust of outsiders, rising in instances to overt antipathy. In their conclusion the authors eschew passing judgement on the phenomena they have described. Nevertheless they assert that they were impressed by a number of features including 'the taking into account of others' (19. 205) by local residents. They fail to point out that this attitude seems only to apply to those 'in' the community.
f
Book Reviews Allen and Dillman suggest, and this reviewer would agree, that an erosion of local distinctiveness would be regressive. However, it should be remembered that some local traditions and norms, in Bremer and elsewhere, are quite exclusionary. Otherwise, there is a danger of presenting an overly harmonious picture, a trap into which Allen and Dillman may have fallen. The challenge for advocates of 'community' is to preserve local distinctiveness while promoting a more inclusive idea of who can be a member of the community. This is an eminently readable and informative book. However, some chapters are weaker than others. The treatment of gender roles is somewhat superficial while the chapter dealing with outward community expression, as evidenced through the local Fair and Stock Show, tends towards the simplistic. Despite the reservations expressed above, the authors succeed in creating a picture of the locality and in illuminating a little corner of rural America. More importantly the book poses many questions for those concerned with social, economic and cultural change in rural areas. DAVID STOREY
Geography Department Worcester College of Higher Education
Dealing in Diversity: America's Market for Nature Conservation, Victoria M. Edwards, 182 pp., 1995, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £30.00 hbk This book asks, 'how can we make nature conservation pay?' (p. xiii). It is a question that is being asked more and more in the U.S. While the property rights and so-called wise-use movements are challenging the legitimacy of government restrictions on the use of private property, the chief vehicle for environmental protection in the U.S., self-confident free marketeers propound the doxa of neoclassical economics. Environmental goods, they insist, must pay their way like any other. Although the measure was defeated by the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives recently passed a bill requiring the federal government to conduct exhaustive cost-benefit analyses before enacting any new environmental regulations. Environmental groups are also casting their appeals for conservation in the rhetoric of economic efficiency. The scholarly literature, however, has yet to catch up with the changing mood. It has tended to focus on public lands and government regulation as the only means of securing environmental conservation. By exploring the operation of a profit maximizing market for nature conservation, Victoria Edwards fulfills an important need, and her book will be read with interest by planners and policy makers. An introductory chapter outlines a neo-classical economic theory of the market for nature conservation. A variety of case studies, based on fieldwork in Montana, Wisconsin, Virginia and the Southwest, put flesh and blood on the abstractions of neoclassical theory. They illustrate the practical challenges of instituting market mechanisms to make it profitable, and thus economically rational, for private landowners, who hold more than half of the land area of the U.S., to provide these 'goods'. Edwards identifies five developments that have made the
323
market for conservation more efficient. First, non-government organizations like the Nature Conservancy lower the transaction costs for those trading in environmental protection by providing a central clearing house for information that brings buyers and sellers together. Second, the development of an increasingly elaborate system of alienable property rights such as easements and leases reduces the opportunity costs of environmental protection by allowing purchasers to achieve their goals without having to purchase the full fee. Third, the commodification of conservation products like excludable access to wildlife for hunting or observation provides landowners with an incentive to manage their lands to protect natural habitat. Fourth, careful marketing and development can capitalize the benefits of conservation into the freehold value of land so that land owners will be encouraged to conserve the environment so as to protect the value of their holdings. Finally, landowners may act collectively through covenants to coordinate their management so as to realize use and non-use benefits of ownership. '[B]y rewarding the wise use of natural resources', Edwards contends, an efficient market for conservation 'will play a vital role in the protection of biodiversity' (p. 167). Many of the chapters begin with epigraphs from Aldo Leopold, but I'm not sure that he would recognize the spirit of his celebrated land ethic in the market for conservation. The only thing that counts in the market is what someone is willing to pay for. The market treats the environment atomistically, as if it were a shopping basket of discrete and fungible environmental goods and services to be bought and sold in a system of human exchange. Such narrow economism, Leopold (1949, p. 214) argued, leads us 'to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning.' Leopold's experience with predator control in the Southwest suggests that the rise of a market for hunting licenses on private land will not necessarily lead to sound wildlife management, as Edwards suggests. Predators compete with fee-paying hunters for deer, and so in many parts of the Southwest, individual ranchers with the cooperation and support of government fish and game officials exterminate them. Though profitable and economically rational, this system is ecologically unsound and led, in 1925, to the infamous crash of the Kaibab deer herd (Dunlap, 1988) and a degraded range habitat for deer, hunters, and predators alike. Against this kind of market calculus, Leopold (1949, p. 204) hoped that by 'thinking like a mountain' it would be possible to take into account 'what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient'. The case for market-based conservation would have been much stronger if Edwards had addressed these concerns head-on. Instead, she presumes that self-interested and economically rational 'private landowners have a greater incentive than any public body to take into account the needs and desires of future generations' (p. 166). This is.an astounding assertion. It runs against the grain of received wisdom in the American conservation movement, which, since the Progressive-era, has argued that it is precisely 'the long time element' and the pressures of immediate profit-taking that make 'private ownership and c a p i t a l . . . ill-adapted to give a more conservative and rational treatment' to the forest (Society for the Preservation of New Hampshire Forests, 1904-1905, p. 11). Perhaps this faith was misplaced. Certainly, the Republican Congress