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Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution (review)

human awareness about the environment. Thinking in terms of the global longue durée, Bess poses four philosophical questions. The first two have to do with the meaning and scope of the “artificial” or “tame” versus the “wild” or “wilderness” and whether the concept of pristine nature has become an anachronism. A third question considers the role of human agency in shaping the relationship between nature and artifice. After forty years of environmentalist agitation, much of it remarkably successful in achieving its aims, the old conception of nature as a “separate sphere” has become largely untenable. In the light-green society, where ecology and technological modernity continually flow together, a new hybrid vision of intermingled nature-culture has increasingly taken its place. Lastly, Bess asks whether we will eventually encounter another “natural environment” in the cosmos that will function as an extension of the terrestrial wilderness. Bess’s style is engaging and conversational. This is a tour de force of environmental history. It carries us forward, especially in our thinking about European attitudes toward both ecology and technological modernity. Europe, after all, has also been at the forefront of the movement for sustainability—that is, an integrated approach to ecology, economy, and community. As Bess describes it, this is a humanized paysage that is “closer to the shape of things to come” (p. 294). For these reasons, this study of French environmentalism is an outstanding scholarly contribution to the relationship between technology, culture, and the green movement.