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Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in the Third World . By W. M. Adams. New York: Routledge, 1990.

That the environment will remain a dominant issue on the global political agenda of the 1990s is already an item of conventional wisdom. The dizzying speed with which the environmental cause has been embraced by the public has caught politicians, technocrats, governments, and multinational corporations unprepared, sending them scrambling to develop a new "green" image. Unfortunately, in all the commotion it often seems unclear exactly what it is we are trying to "do" about the environment: there has been no shortage of moral exhortations and numbing technical discussion, but coherence and an overall sense of direction are lacking. Some of the blame for this confused state of affairs must be laid on an academic community that seems to be in a similar state of disarray, even though it is in just such a time of intellectual flux that rigorous and critical analysis is particularly needed. W. M. Adams's Green Development seeks to fill this void, providing a framework for the discussion of environmental issues as they relate to the question of development in the Third World. Adams does not attempt to provide the elusive recipe for combining development and environmental management; his goal is the more preparatory one of "bridging the gulf between environmentalism and development theory, and illustrating the effects of these theories in practice in the developing nations. In the process, he performs the essential function of dissecting the key concepts of the debate, and indicates what avenues of inquiry might be most productive to produce such a unified theory. The first half of the book, devoted to theoretical questions, is the most illuminating and provocative. Adams gives an outline of the genesis of environmentalist thinking, highlighting some of its inherited internal inconsistencies, notably a tension between technocratic and romantic views and utilitarian and categorical motives which create "schizophrenic confusion within the conservation movement." This is manifested, for example, in confusion over whether species extinction should be prevented because it may be economically counterproductive in the long run, or because it is somehow wrong. Environmentalism, in Adams's view, tends toward determinism, is ahistorical, and downplays the role of social organization in environmental crises. The popularization of the concept "sustainable development" in the 1987 Report of the United Nations Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future, represented a breakthrough in its attempt to transcend the inherited divisions between environmental and developmental thought, recognizing that the environmental ills of the Third World could only be intelligibly analyzed with reference to socioeconomic conditions. Rather than starting from the need to protect the environment and then explaining why this makes economic sense, sustainable development starts from the social and economic goals and asks what environmental policies are needed to achieve them.