Soviet environmental policies and practices; the most critical investment

Book Reviews childcare are shaped by attitudes about the roles of women in society. The latter point seems to me to be foundational to any discussion of childcare provision. RACHEL SDUC,

WOODWARD Lampeter, U.K.

Dictionary of Environment and Development: People, Places, Ideas and Organizations, Andy Crump, 280 pp., 1991. Earthscan Publications, London, f15.00 pb

As its subtitle suggests, this book attempts to be a compendium of biographical and geographical information, along with definitions of concepts and information about key organisations related to environment and/or development. It fails in the attempt. It is difficult to judge a book when the author does not seek to set out his purpose or, in this case, the criteria used for selecting the items to be listed. However, it appears from the Foreword (by one Lloyd Timberlake; the author does not provide any prefatory material) that the perspective taken for this book is a global one, which immediately limits any potential utility of the book for professionals who ileal with environment and development at regional, local’or site scales. It is clear also, from the items listed, that the view of environment is essentially biophysical and that of development is essentially economic: holistic views of both are not reflected in this book. Even discounting these limitations the book is a strange collection of items. Mother Teresa and Ferdinand Marcos are listed but Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner are not; Latin America and Chernobyl are listed but the Sahel and Bangladesh are not; food irradiation and disarmament are listed but climatic change and demographic transition are not; and Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation and Division for &onomic and Social Information are listed but the International Council on Monuments and Sites and Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change are not. Some of the amissions are quite fundamental weaknesses: there are no definitions of terms such as environment, development and resources, and this reviewer was confused to find that the definition of absorbtive capacity referred to an ability of developing countries to absorb aid and investment rather than the capacity of soils to absorb moisture. And, insofar as many of the organisations listed are at least as well known by their acronyms as by their full titles, their acronyms might have appeared in the alphabetical listings. In short, the book will be of little use to professionals working with environment and development at global scales, and of no use to those working at regional, local or site scales for whom a book like Environmental Planning: a Condensed Encyclopaedia (Alan Gilpin, 1986, Noyes Publishers, Park Ridge) would be more useful. It is difficult to see a market for the book unless it is the unsuspecting public. IAN BOWIE Mitchell College of Advanced Education Bathurst, NSW, Australia

471

Soviet Environmental Policies and Practices; the Most Critical Investment, M. Turnbull, xiv + 215 pp., 1991, Dartmouth, Aldershot, 235 hb

Glasnost and Perestroika have fuelled a growing interest in aspects of Soviet life and livelihood which have hitherto been largely inaccessible to western academics. The country’s great reliance on traditional (and heavily polluting) industries and heavy use of natural resources, coupled with its centrally planned economy and socialist commitments have placed a great burden on the Soviet environment. Yet this vast superpower has only recently woken up to the need to protect its environment, its resources and its people. This clearly written book, by Mildred Turnbull of Glasgow University’s Institute of Soviet and East European Studies, seeks to describe and evaluate the sweeping changes in Soviet political interest in the environment, especially during the 1980s and particularly under the leadership of Gorbachev. It is a true labour of love, based heavily on Russian language materials, which required the services of seven translators and took five years to write. Inevitably the writing was constrained by the availability of relevant material. But it was also constrained by the Soviet environmental bureaucracy, which until the formation of the U.S.S.R. State Committee for Nature Protection in 1988 was fragmented, competitive and uncoordinated. Much as the author might have preferred to integrate subjects within the text. she had little option but to base chapters on major themes (and these were clearly defined mainly in terms of economic sectors rather than environmental issues). The end product is a rather staccato and uninviting book, which lacks in vitality, insight and challenge but is solidly factual and a valuable reservoir of detail and statistics. A brief opening chapter introduces the theme of environmental investment in the Soviet Union, emphasising (along with the book’s sub-title) that environmental protection is now being seen as a key ingredient of sustainable development as well as a healthy population. Successive chapters deal with particular industries, covering municipal waste water treatment, agriculture, the pulp and paper industry, fossil fuel electricity generation, the metallurgical industry, and the chemical and petrochemical industries. Surprisingly little appears about major Soviet environmental problems such as nuclear energy (especially in the post-Chernobyl era), open-cast mining, desertification, resource depletion or industrial air pollution. Also, the text adopts an exclusively domestic definition of ‘Soviet’, with no mention of wider problems such as trans-frontier industrial air pollution, Soviet claims over territorial rights in Antarctica, Soviet exploration of ocean resources, and so on. Notwithstanding these limitations, this is a useful collection of up-to-date and otherwise inaccessible material. It reveals a great deal about Soviet environmental policies and practices, but also highlights how enormous are the technical, economic, political and bureaucratic obstacles which remain. A second edition in 10 years’ time, which

Book Reviews

472

reviewed how far the promises of the 1980s had turned into reality in the 1990s would make a fascinating read! CHRIS PARK Lancaster University, U.K.

The Idea of Wilderness, M. Oelschlaeger. University Press, New Haven

1991, Yale

The Idea of Wilderness is an attempt to discuss the evolution of the idea of wilderness. The subtitle is From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. It begins with the Paleolithic, moves through the Ancient World, spends a great deal of time with what the author describes as Modernisation, looks at the contribution of Thoreau, Muir, Aldo Leopold, the poetry of Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers and ends with a discussion of contemporary wilderness philosophy. This, in barest outline, is the structure of the book. The references are wide in their coverage and the notes are voluminous. This is a big book: 477 pages in total. With 353 pages of text, over lo0 pages of notes and an index which includes such names as Richard Rorty, Albert Einstein and Friedrich Nietzsche, you would expect a work of scholarship. You would be disappointed. I started the book feeling the weight, attracted to the and eager to be informed. My distaste began with preface which is smug, pompous and fawning all at same time. My opinion did not improve by reading the of the text. Let me articulate my annoyance.

title the the rest

First, Oelschlaeger fawns over big names like a star-struck groupie hanging outside the stage door. The references to the big names are, on closer inspection, merely a glitzy display revealing a wafer-thin understanding. Page 319, chosen at random, mentions Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur and Richard Rorty in a breathless run through their ideas. Page 345 has Frederick Ferre, Descartes, Bacon, Einstein, Schrodinger, and C.P. Snow. These citations add little to our understanding; they are mentioned in a kind of crude name-dropping. Second, the book is flawed in its basic approach. The author wants to consider wilderness as a general idea to be considered as part of the response and criticism of Modernism. These are big themes which range across space and time. And yet the figures that are considered Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Snyder and Jeffers - are all responding to the particular experience of the U.S.A. The parochial choice of subjects fatally undermines the claim to generality. The inflation of the U.S. experience to global significance, without even realizing it, is a shoddy piece of thinking. Moreover, this whole section looks second-rate in comparison with Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and rhe American Mind. To be fair, most work compares unfavorably with Nash, yet Oelschlaeger simply begs the comparison by considering the same people that Nash examines. Third, the basic approach of the author is to take big themes (Modernism, Postmodernism) and consider the role of the idea of wilderness therein. It is the view of ideas from outer space. Miles of nothingness separate this Olympian view with the contexts in which ideas wcrc developed. contested, transformed. This top-down view sees ideas simply replacing other ideas without any

articulated connection omics and societies.

with the material

world

of econ-

I left off the book very disappointed. It is obvious that the author has some style and no little verve. With less arrogance and more genuinely creative scholarship his next book may be less of a disappointment. JOHN RENNIE SHORT Department of Geography, Syracuse University, U.S. A.

Public Policy under Thatcher, Stephen Savage and Lynton Robins (eds), 275 pp., 1990, Macmillan, f9.99 Much of the discussion of Thatcherism has been conducted within the framework of either high theory or broad journalist brushstrokes. The end of the Thatcher era provides a useful point to discuss not whether Thatcherism succeeded in its hegemonic project or ‘ended the socialist era’ but the degree to which there were substantive changes in public policy. When it comes to actual policies and outcomes did the 11 years of Thatcher government make a difference or was it constrained by past policies, political institutions and international factors? At last with Public Policy Under Thatcher, we apparently have a book that deals with these issues. According to the Introduction, the decade of continuous government provided a recipe for ‘rapid political change’ and whether this happened is central to the book. The book then provides a comprehensive range of chapters covering a wide number of policy areas from economic policy, industrial policy, trade unions to social policy areas such as health, housing, education and on to Northern Ireland and foreign policy. The chapters are divided either temporally or according to key policy changes. Inevitably with such a large number of chapters the quality is uneven. Some of the chapters appear to be written by people without expertise in their particular areas and so provide little information that will be new to the well-informed reader. Chapter 1 for instance contains two basic errors with Britain joining the EEC in June 1973 and Minnis rather than Minis as the acronym for the government’s management information system. The chapter on economic policy provides a fairly useful introduction to economic policy and a valuable table on privatisation since 1979. Again the chapters on industrial policy and trade unions provide an introductory narrative that is basically accurate but they offer nothing original and little in the way of explanation. Of more interest to the readers of this journal might be John Bradbeer’s chapter on environmental policy. This chapter begins by briefly outlining the Downsian and ‘New Times’ explanations of policy change. It continues with discussions of agricultural policy, the planning system and pollution. It looks at why Mrs Thatcher changed position on the environment and how free market ideology conflicts with environmental ends. Yet the chapter does little to explain Mrs Thatcher’s unexpected change of heart, at least in rhetoric, on the environment, nor does it make an assessment of how government policy has affected the environment. The reader is not informed of what was distinctive about a Thatcherite environmental or agricultural policy. The book then moves to a number

of chapters

on social