Etienne S. Benson, Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalism (Chicago and London: University of Chica
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Etienne S. Benson, Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 278 pp., 16 b&w illus., $27.50 Paper, ISBN: 9780226706290 Sharon E. Kingsland1 Accepted: 30 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Surroundings is a history of changing concepts of the environment from the lateeighteenth century to the present, explored through different scientific communities and practices. One goal is to illustrate how scientific ways of engaging with the material world bring about changes in our conception of what surrounds us, or what we call the environment. Because the book covers so much ground, the approach is episodic, providing a broad overview of various ways of conceiving the environment, rather than a deep or sustained analysis of what these conceptions entailed. The first chapter focuses on scientific activity in Paris at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, established in 1793. As expeditions brought exotic plants and animals to Paris, natural history blossomed into a dynamic enterprise, resulting in new fields such as comparative anatomy, new systems of classification, and experimental programs that explored the relationship between external conditions and an organism’s form and function. Benson reviews the work of leading naturalists in Paris, starting with Buffon and including Georges and Frédéric Cuvier, André Thouin (professor of horticulture and head gardener of the Muséum), Etienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, among others. These naturalists did not use the term “environment,” but Benson argues that their activities led to a new way of thinking that distinguished between living beings (“organisms”) and the conditions that surrounded and supported them (“environments”). Benson sees these new ideas as infiltrating other areas of thought, ultimately influencing the social theories of August Comte and later Herbert Spencer, who in the mid-1850s began using the word “environment” to describe the conditions to which individuals were adapted. Through Spencer the term came into common use. The second chapter shifts to a medical context and British colonial encounters with diseases, especially yellow fever in tropical locations such as the Caribbean. * Sharon E. Kingsland [email protected] 1
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
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S. E. Kingsland
High mortality rates from disease among soldiers and sailors prompted medical research that grew more quantitative over time, incorporating the new science of statistics. These studies led to new ideas about the relationship between health, the personal characteristics of individuals, and the locations where they served, although medical officers were not using the term “environment” at this time. Benson argues that neo-Hippocratic concepts of disease as tied to “airs, waters, and places” and the miasma theory of disease were not the direct antecedents of later environmental views of disease. New observations, in fact, cast dou
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