Book Reviews

Kathryn M. de Luna. 2016. Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in
Central Africa. 新天堂: 耶鲁大学出版社.

Reviewed by Amy Freitag
NOAA National Centers for Coastal and Ocean Science and JHT, Inc.

Cultivating Food, Cultivating People challenges many of the historical narratives
researchers often hold up in explaining the development of food systems. 第一的,
the region of focus, the Botatwe-speaking part of central Africa, has largely been
left out of these narratives because of its unusual dispersed political structure.
第二, the book pushes readers to ask why a culture may choose a certain type
of food system. This decision may not involve not just efﬁciency, but also resil-
ience in a variable ecosystem, and involve interplay with social power dynamics.
The book moves through time, using largely a linguistic approach to de-
scribe the evolution and dispersal of pre-Botatwe foods and cultures from
大约 1000 BCE to 1700 广告. Over that long span of time, one of the biggest
messages is that the trajectory of food system growth is not monolithic nor does
it follow a single, straight path. The shifting climate in central Africa from wet to
dry and back again left its residents with a desire to mitigate risk through mul-
tiple streams of food production. 在任何给定年份, one form would be “best,”
and there was great value in maintaining open options.

Tied to the milieu of food production systems is the unique social struc-
ture of the region. The common understanding of the evolution of food systems
is the story of a march of progress from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture
and animal husbandry. This account also rests on a social structure evolving
towards central power, and a patriarchal nuclear family structure. 反而, 的
Luna argues that the hunter-gatherer community in the Botatwe-speaking region
was more decentralized, with many distributed nodes of power, and with a
form of matriarchal family structure that awarded status by multiple kinds of
contributions to society. This society changed in tandem with the local envi-
罗门特, shifting from grain-based agriculture to pastoralism depending on
which product best ﬁt the climate regime of the time. This non-traditional and
dynamic view of social design can have lessons for how we categorize current
societies as well.

The linguistic approach used to describe the changes in Botatwe food and
culture through time allows a methodological lens well tailored to a society that
did not leave much behind for traditional archeological and historical tech-
好的. While the analysis through time does include conclusions from exam-
ining pottery, jewelry, and gravesites, the nature of the diversity and adaptability

Global Environmental Politics 18:1, 二月 2018
© 2018 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

146

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Amy Freitag

(西德:129) 147

of Botatwe-speaking people is perhaps best captured in creating a linguistic di-
aspora. Words borrowed from neighboring languages can tell much about trad-
ing patterns, social learning, and intermarriage in a region that has left little in
the way of archeological footprints.

This linguistic approach is also one of the book’s weaknesses, as the audi-
ences that stand to gain the most from many of the discussions are also likely to
be unfamiliar with the primary methodologies and disciplinary linguistic con-
ventions used throughout the book. 例如, some discussion of how one
pins down a particular time frame to a word shift would have been enlighten-
英. The depicted family tree of languages and accompanying maps appear to
have much in common with molecular clock methods in evolutionary biology,
so clarifying the linkages might help potential interdisciplinary applications of
the book.

One other weakness is that the narrative waits until the last chapter and
epilogue to add in greater details about the culture that come from other sources
of evidence like copper jewelry, pottery, glass beads, and ivory. These sources
enrich the history with insight into trade patterns and interactions with distant
empires, and further demonstrate the complexity of the social networks in the
地区. This information would have been nice to read alongside the linguistic
证据. The author also admits that, even with linguistic evidence, the cultural
stories of people and towns absorbed by the expansion of the Botatwe (通过
marriage or violence) are perhaps forever lost.

The strengths of this book lie in its broad conclusions that serve as both an
interesting case study that deﬁes so many stereotypes of the region and the time
period of study, as well as a lesson for thinking about how modern cultures are
forming in response to their food environment. The biggest strength of this
book lies in its contribution to an underrepresented history of Africa, both in
the region and time period of study. The Botatwe speakers serve as a good ex-
ample of the diversity of social structures both in Africa and around the world,
and in the types of factors researchers need to look at when describing a culture.
The value of linguistics alongside the more traditional disciplines to ap-
proach the questions discussed in this book speaks to the need for interdis-
ciplinarity for understanding aspects of society that are not preserved well in
the sands of time. This approach allows the book to cover time periods and
geographies that have not received much research attention, and to document
different kinds of social structures than were considered common for the con-
tinent. More surprises likely are around the corner in applying these methods.
最后, this book is a welcome case in thinking about modern societies
that mix hunting, 搜集, 农业, animal husbandry, and other kinds
of food production. Botatwe-speaking historical Africa reminds us through
the pages of this book that there are advantages in hunter-gatherer lifestyles
for increasing community resilience. These structures offer forms of prestige
and power outside of government. These lessons will be a welcome example
for many ﬁshing communities mixing wild-caught ﬁshing with different forms

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148 (西德:129) Book Reviews

of aquaculture and other subsistence activities. The lessons of central Africa
carry through time.

Dinar, Ariel, and and Yacov Tsur, 编辑. 2017. Management of Transboundary Water Resources
under Scarcity. New Jersey: World Scientiﬁc Publishing.

Reviewed by Theresa Jedd
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

This volume provides a critical focus on the need to plan for a range of climate
conditions for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations, with special
attention to arid and semi-arid regions, and a political science approach to
understanding water governance. Geographic coverage includes the Jordan River
Basin, Amu Darya, Nile, Mekong, the Colorado, Tagus, and Fergana Valley.

Drought is a naturally occurring phenomenon in each. 相似地, 水
scarcity—whether caused by decreasing rain, increasing temperatures, or con-
scious management decisions—is also a historically recurrent feature. Its effects
are far-reaching, from decreased ecological function to humanitarian crises.
Societies have devised structures and political arrangements to deliver water,
and the ultimate test of these structures is how well they hold up during a short-
年龄. The volume’s editors assert in the introduction and conclusion that climate
改变, combined with population growth, will continue to strain water re-
sources in transboundary basins. Appropriately addressing these phenomena
requires going beyond legal approaches to include economic, 技术性的,
政治的, and incentive-based mechanisms. The contributors discuss how to
implement these practices and how to draw stakeholder countries into the
decision-making process.

The volume is organized in three parts. Part I builds an overall under-
standing of the economic, institutional, and technological aspects of transbound-
ary basins. The authors introduce the concept of a baseline requirement of a per
capita minimum volume and its relevance for planning. How we think about this
baseline requirement has changed over time. In the ﬁrst chapter, Yacov Tsur argues
that because there are more people on the planet, the water requirement thresh-
olds have dropped from a 1989 “water stress” deﬁnition of 1700 cubic meters per
person/year to a 1996 deﬁnition of “subsistence scarcity” of 100 cubic meters per
person/year. Tsur presents forecasts of sustainable supply (the amount that can
be used without depleting freshwater reserves) based on UN estimates of popula-
tion growth, suggesting that by 2030 the natural water supply is likely to fall below
100 cubic meters per person/year. Environmental ﬂows have been caught in the
middle of increasing water prices and decreasing crop values, setting up the urgent
need to restore natural ﬂows both for human and ecosystem well-being.

The two chapters in Part II cover legal agreements between states, focusing on
the borders between United States and Mexico and between Israel and Palestine.

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Theresa Jedd

(西德:129) 149

The authors suggest that water banking and transfers may be an alternative in
places where treaties are not possible, and they argue that establishing general
peace agreements regarding borders may be a prerequisite to water negotiations.
Border delineation can have a chain of governance effects, establishing a
basis of diversiﬁcation for single-source households and irrigators, offering
them basic access to drinking water and small farm irrigation when wells and
springs are dry. The cases offer a strikingly candid assessment of the difﬁculties
of achieving a treaty between countries in over-allocated basins. Political scien-
tists will be familiar with the difﬁculties caused by common pool resources,
hegemony, and conﬂict. The basic laws of geography are ever-present, 尤其
when it comes to hydroshed location and positioning along a river and eleva-
tion gradient.

Part III covers management arrangements, valuation approaches, and efforts
to estimate the economic beneﬁts of alternatives for restoration. The chapters
blend considerations of efﬁciency in water storage and social trade-offs of the
delivery infrastructure. One lesson is that, as dams become larger, 这很重要
to consider whether the net gains are worth the costs. The ability to calculate the
value of these gains and losses is invaluable for the social planner. When appro-
priately paired with natural basin features, dams can efﬁciently deliver water where
it is needed. When allocations are balanced according to the weights associated
with their intended outcomes (namely large-scale agricultural irrigation and
hydropower), the end result can be multilateral cooperation around more than
水. At this point, the reader will likely be prompted to return to the thorough
econometric case study of the eastern Nile River Basin in Part I to see how this
optimization could occur in practice.

Getachew Nigatu and Ariel Dinar see trading water as akin to trading prod-
ucts and services. They use multiple alternative water rights arrangements (WRA)
and joint pairing of basin pricing and trades to model net gains for countries in
the Nile River Basin through the principle of comparative advantage. 考试用-
普莱, if Ethiopia were to focus on hydropower generation and sell excess energy
to the other countries, then Egypt would focus on irrigated agriculture, a sector
that is relatively efﬁcient. 同时, they consider how their economic
and environmental optimization model (with agriculture and hydropower as
the focal demands) ﬁts with the ongoing efforts of the Nile Basin Initiative to
build cooperation around preventing resource degradation, addressing water
scarcity, and achieving food security.

Water banking allows for nonmarket valuation of environmental ﬂows
and ecological restoration if institutions are set up to address basin-wide prior-
ities and design strategic plans to achieve multiple-use objectives. WRA models
are designed to accommodate a range of preferences, 互动, and objec-
tives across multiple uses: agricultural, municipal/industrial, and hydropower
一代. Recognizing that tradeoffs must be made, different allocation
methods can be used. These include “priority” (在哪里, for each step, the net-
work ﬂow solver attempts to satisfy the water users with the highest priority

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150 (西德:129) Book Reviews

首先), and “objective function” (where each component, beneﬁt, or user is
given equal weight). In Chapter 10, Nir Becker and David Katz discuss restor-
ative ﬂows and recreational uses of the Jordan River, including original survey-
based research on tourists’ willingness to pay for increased ﬂows and enhanced
water quality. They ﬁnd that all three populations—Jordanians, Israelis, 和
Palestinians—would beneﬁt from restoration in multiple scenarios.

总共, this volume provides a variety of solutions and range of regional
coverage that stakeholders are likely to ﬁnd practical. While integrated water
resources management may be the gold standard in basin planning, 作者
offer a realistic assessment of the tools that can be leveraged in cases where
comprehensive planning is unraveled by political pressures. 例如, 向下-
stream states with weaker negotiating positions can improve their leverage by
linking issues like regional trade with upstream countries. The key takeaway
for the international relations theorist is that as water becomes scarce, 冲突
may ensue. With this concern in mind, the contributors present concepts,
techniques and models that can facilitate cooperation between countries and
部门.

Dauvergne, 彼得. 2016. Environmentalism of the Rich. 剑桥, 嘛: 与新闻界.

Reviewed by Robin Broad
美国大学

With Environmentalism of the Rich, Peter Dauvergne has given us another book
that will be widely read and cited, and that will become a classic. There are parts
of this book that will haunt the reader far into the future. Among them (with no
spoilers): Pablo, to whom this book is dedicated, and Dauvergne’s ﬂying dump
卡车. So too with his main analytical point: more economic growth, 更多的
consumerism, and more corporations selling more so-called environmentally
friendly goods, will not save our planet. 而且, the book is an ideal length
and structure, with each chapter readable and focused on a speciﬁc topic. 这是
the model for a book that crosses the academic and trade divide.

In this book, Dauvergne examines the successes and failures of environ-
mentalism driven by the middle classes, the wealthy, and corporations of the
richer nations. He highlights a number of victories of this “environmentalism
of the rich,” but points out how their wins are far outweighed by the damages
of overconsumption and runaway growth.

In the second part of the book, Dauvergne focuses on so-called eco-heroes
of Northern environmentalism, including Jane Goodall, Bruno Manser, 和
Paul Watson. He also examines key Northern-headquartered environmental
groups including The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, 和
the World Wildlife Fund: big environmental groups that raise much of their
funds from the wealthy and from global corporations. This is a crucial and

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Robin Broad

(西德:129) 151

unseemly underside to environmentalism of the rich. But we should not be
surprised that groups that take money from big corporations and governments
do not speak truth to power. The best companion reading to Dauvergne on this
is the classic (and still timely) article written by Max Chapin (2004) on Conserva-
tion International, the World Wildlife Fund, and The Nature Conservancy.

Dauvergne’s title is important, and readers need to keep it in mind as they
read his book. Even though Dauvergne himself is clear on his focus and his
话题, some readers may leave his book thinking that the book is about global
environmentalism (especially because of the unfortunate choice to title the
second part of the book “Global Environmentalism”). 它不是. It is explicitly
about environmentalism of the rich. Dauvergne focuses on what is wrong with
efforts to save the environment that concentrate on growth and consumption,
and does not put center-stage environmental movements where poorer people
act to protect the natural resource base on which their lives depend—what might
be termed “environmentalism of the poor.” Case in point: ﬁshers who protect
their ﬁshing grounds against big trawlers, or farmers in northern El Salvador,
self-identiﬁed “water protectors,” whose multi-year struggle to safeguard their
watershed led the government of El Salvador to pass the world’s ﬁrst law banning
all metals mining (Broad and Cavanagh, 2017).

The distinction between environmentalism of the rich and environmental-
ism of the poor is not geographic. Environmentalism of the rich can be found
among elites in Southern countries as well as among elites in Northern (开发-
专栏) countries—what might be termed environmentalism of the global 1
百分. And environmentalism of the poor can be found in Northern countries
(such as the Standing Rock Sioux, who also term themselves water protectors) 作为
well as in Southern countries—an environmentalism of the global 99 百分.
换句话说, as Dauvergne’s book suggests between the lines, 有
not one environmental movement or paradigm. The full picture requires his
gloomier prognosis on environmentalism of the rich. But it also needs the hope
that many ﬁnd on the ground with ordinary poorer people doing extraordinary
things to protect the environment, often at great risk. Dauvergne frames envi-
ronmentalism of the rich as increasing in power and dominance, arguing that
“environmentalism has increasingly come to reﬂect the interests and comforts of
those with the most money and the most power” (p. 141). What at least some
current Southern-based research suggests is that environmentalism of the 99 每-
cent is also on the rise in many parts of the world. Could we possibly be at an
unusual moment in history when both are on the rise?

The bottom line of Dauvergne’s research on the big US environmental
groups is essential to digest: Those with power and wealth who consume far
more of the earth’s resources will never be central to effective solutions. Nor will
the world be saved by an “our common future” paradigm of environmentalism
that pretends that we live in a world of equity rather than a world where the
majority are dispossessed and marginalized in terms of economic, 政治的,
and environmental power and resources.

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152 (西德:129) Book Reviews

This book should be read and used in classrooms. Dauvergne has given us
another beautifully written and essential book—starting with its disturbing
sweep of history. His portrayal of the environmental havoc wreaked by economic
growth is devastating. This book will help shatter the “environmental Kuznets
curve” myth that growth can solve the environmental problem. This book will
make some readers uncomfortable in their assumptions about how consump-
tion habits and the so-called corporate responsibility movement will help save
the environment and our future. Probing such faulty assumptions and facile
solutions is essential, and Dauvergne is to be applauded for this book.

参考

Broad, 罗宾, and John Cavanagh. 2017. Historic Wins for Democracy and Rights in
El Salvador. 伦理 & International Affairs, Carnegie Council, Online Exclusive, 六月
2017. https://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2017/historic-wins-democracy-
rights-el-salvador/, last accessed December 10, 2017.

Chapin, Max. 2004. A Challenge to Conservationists. World Watch Magazine 17 (6): 17–31.

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