New Zealand Geographer

(2007)

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, 73–78 10.1111/j.1745-7939.2007.00092.x

© 2007 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2007 The New Zealand Geographical Society Inc. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Blackwell Publishing Asia

Book ReviewBook Review

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The Geopolitics Reader, 2nd edition

Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby and PaulRoutledge (eds). Routledge, London and NewYork, 2006. 302 pp. ISBN 0-415-34148-5.

This book is an extensively revised update ofthe editors’ successful 1998

Geopolitics Reader

.Whilst the new edition is organized around thesame themes as the earlier edition – imperialistgeopolitics, cold war geopolitics, 21st centurygeopolitics, the geopolitics of global dangerand anti-geopolitics – the readings have beensignificantly refreshed. The dedication of thebook to Rachel Corrie, Margaret Hassan, DanielPearl and Edward Said reflects a shift in focusaway from the nuclear inspired logic of theCold War and the post-Cold War realignmentof geopolitical thinking towards the geopoliticalimaginations framed by 9/11, the subsequentUS-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, andincreasingly the geopolitics of resource conflictand environmental change.

The editors have assembled a body of read-ings that range from such classics of geopoliticalthinking as Mackinder’s ‘The GeographicalPivot of History’ through to often cited, butless often sighted, works such as the Projectfor a New American Century’s ‘Statement ofPrinciples’ or Osama Bin Laden’s ‘Letter toAmerica’. In introducing these readings theeditors seek to disabuse readers of any notionthat geopolitical reasoning provides a simple,detached or predictive body of knowledge.Rather in their commentary on each block ofreadings, the editors constantly ask the readerto confront the intellectual context of eachreading. Consequently the strongly articulatedtheme that emerges from the collection is theneed to reject geopolitical thinking based onManichaean logics (encapsulated in PresidentGeorge W Bush’s phrase ‘if you are not withus, you are against us’) and instead acknow-ledge and accept the complexity of the rela-

tionships between states, peoples and non-stateactors and equally entangled intellectual gene-alogies of geopolitical thought.

Whilst the readings are interesting andwide-ranging they coalesce around a relativelylimited number of geopolitical situations. Inparticular these are the Cold War relationshipbetween the United States and the then Unionof Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), andmore recently the putative ‘clash of civilizations’between ‘the West’ and the ‘Islamic East’ framedby 9/11 and the subsequent US-led invasion ofIraq. Given the graphically displayed trajectoriesof threat and destruction which haunt the MiddleEast’s involvement in ‘Western’ politics, this latterfocus is not surprising. But perhaps in choosingpapers which cluster around these points ofconflict an opportunity has been missed to providea wider window into the geopolitical imageriesand implications of other situations. Here, toname two, we might think about the link betweenimagination and threat which exists in thecomplex relationships between India and Paki-stan, or regarding the flows of refugees andmigrants between North Africa and Europe.

Given these comments it is unsurprising thatfor a New Zealand reader there is little or noreference to Australasia or the wider SouthPacific. At the risk of appearing chauvinisticI think that the recently printed transcriptof David Lange’s 1985 Oxford Union speech‘Nuclear weapons are morally indefensible’would provide a worthy counterpoint to thereadings in Part Two of the collection. Moreseriously, as I write, Fiji has just experiencedits fourth coup since 1987, Tonga is recoveringfrom riots, whilst in recent years Australia’sHoward government has proclaimed itself tobe the United States’ sheriff in the Asianregion, and both New Zealand and Australiahave been involved in peacemaking/keepingroles in Bougainville, East Timor and theSolomon Islands. Each of these conflicts hasgenerated and sustained its own popular and

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Book Reviews

© 2007 The AuthorsJournal compilation

© The New Zealand Geographical Society 2007.

practical geopolitical knowledges, some ofwhich intersect with the issues explored in ÓTuathail

et al.

’s collection, but which are notreducible to them. Thus, whilst the collectionprovides us with the analytical tools toapproach conflicts in the Pacific, we need toavoid the temptation to reduce the complexityof these specific conflicts to the residue expres-sion of an all-encompassing, all-explaininggeopolitical focus such as the ‘war on terror’.

Notwithstanding the caveat which surroundsthe collection’s scope, one of the book’s greatassets is the method articulated by the editorsto understanding geopolitical reasoning. Theeditors clearly state their belief that the failureof geopolitical reasoning has been its desireto simplify and to understand the world inbinaries. Rather, what the editors suggest isthat the relationships between states and peoples

and

how we conceptualize those relationshipsneeds to be constantly remembered and writtenas entangled and complex. To this end thebook provides a timely and very useful reminderof the historical genealogies of geopolitics andthe need to critically interrogate the geopoliticalvisions of our collective world.

Matthew Henry

Geography ProgrammeMassey University

February 2007631

Book Review

Book ReviewsBook Reviews

Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to

Global Crisis: An Abridgment

Michael Williams. University of Chicago Press,Chicago and London, 2006. 543 pp. ISBN 0-226-89947-0.

This book is a

tour de force

in historical geo-graphy. The original volume, published in 2003,was much larger, but even the new sum-marized version is a comprehensive account ofthe destruction of natural forests by peopleover thousands of years. The approach is overtlyhistorical, so that the emphasis is strongly onwritten sources, or sometimes on archaeology.Not surprisingly, the Library of Congress classi-fication does not classify it under geography,although there are numerous maps, mostlyshowing the distribution of forests in various

parts of the world at different times. The resultof this concentration on written evidence is astrong bias of the book towards Europe andAmerica. The Far East, particularly in relationto early times, is covered scantily. Pollen evidencegets little mention, and sedimentological evidenceof erosion is not widely drawn on, though itsrelationship to deforestation is briefly discussed.

These limitations must not be taken too seri-ously, since they are more than compensatedfor, not only by the breadth of the historicalsources used, but also by the analysis of the dis-courses revealed, in terms of human philosophyas well as of the historical reconstruction. To me,this study of the oscillating attitudes towardsforests through time is the most interestingaspect of the work. The author provides evidencethat the concept of humans having a role indominating nature was in fact widespread inthe classical world of Greece and Rome. To blameit simply on the Christian interpretation ofGenesis, as Lynn White did, is a gross error. Infact most early (and some later) cultures seemto have had an ambivalent attitude to forests.As Jay Appleton has suggested, forest couldbe a refuge, where one could hide, as well asfinding food and fuelwood. It could also bea hazard, where one could get lost and one’senemies might approach undetected. Even thetrees themselves seemed worthy of worship(or fear) and might be regarded as sacred.

In the Western world, since the IndustrialRevolution, forest has increasingly been regardedas a commodity, or rather two commodities,timber and land. As Adam Smith said, in

TheWealth of Nations

, ‘Consumption is the sole endand purpose of all production.’ Such concepts,as well as technological advances, led to defor-estation in Europe and North America on anunprecedented scale. Yet even in the 19th cen-tury, there were voices of discontent with thisidea: Wordsworth and the other ‘nature poets’,John Ruskin and the ‘romanticism’ movement.

A final triumph of the book is the way Wil-liams deals with the 20th century (especiallysince World War II) up to 1995, when thereview concludes. He copes impressively withworld population growth, economic develop-ment, the chain saw, ecology, the conservationmovement, miracle rice, sustainability, bio-diversity and finally global warming. His positionis about as objective as it is possible to be, and