My second book was The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (U. of Chicago Press, 2003), which won the George Perkins Marsh prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2004) and an Honorable Mention from the Pinkney Prize committee of the Society for French Historical Studies (2004).  For an excerpt from the book click here.

     This book assesses the growing impact of ecological ideas on the totality of French society and culture: the economy, the state, the habits and expectations of consumers, the changing perceptions of humanity’s place within nature.  The story of French environmentalism, I argue, can be plausibly read in two sharply divergent ways — as a narrative of success, in which green ideas gradually came to permeate the mainstream culture and economy of this nation; and as a narrative of defeat, in which virtually all the more radical aspects of the original green vision were trimmed down or jettisoned by a tenaciously consumerist population whose attachment to technological modernity ran deep.  Hence the term “light-green,” designed to connote the profound ambivalence that has characterized this new type of social order.

Although in some respects the case of France is unique, I argue that the emergence of the light-green society in this nation also followed a more general pattern, readily discernible in most industrialized democracies throughout the world.  The central feature of this new social order consisted in a blurring of the age-old boundary between the “social” and the “natural.”  On one side, a preoccupation with natural qualities and natural equilibrium increasingly infused the nation’s economic and cultural life: from eco-friendly appliances to organic vegetables, from green tourism to anti-pollution laws.  On the other side, human activities laid an ever more potent and pervasive touch on the land — whether through the heavy-handed intrusions of agriculture, industry, and urban growth, or through the much subtler and more well-intentioned efforts of “ecological management,” an increasingly widespread mode of intervention in the territory as the decades went by.  Nature blurring into society, society blurring into nature: this accelerating interpenetration became the hallmark of the light-green social order.  A paradox, indeed: the rise of environmentalism in the 1960s stemmed from a fervent desire to “save” wild nature — nature conceived as a qualitatively distinct domain, wholly separate from human designs and endeavors.  And yet, 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.

Read The Light-Green Society, Chapter Six

BOOK REVIEWS OF The Light-Green Society

• By Caroline Ford, in Journal of Modern History 79 (March 2007): 112-133 [book discussed on pp. 130-132].
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• By Pierre-Claude Reynard, in Journal of Social History 39:2 (Winter 2005), 545-47.  For excerpt click here 

• By W. Brian Newsome, in Canadian Journal of HIstory 40: 2 (Aug. 2005), 357.
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• By Sara Pritchard, in French Politics, Culture, and Society 23:1 (Spring 2005), 148.  For excerpt click here.
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• By Richard Kuisel, in American Historical Review 110:1 (Feb 2005), 237.  For excerpt click here.
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• By Kerry Whiteside, in Environmental Values 14:1 (Feb 2005), 138-39.

• By Edward Ousselin, in The French Review 78.3 (Feb. 2005): 601-2.

• By Rosemary Wakeman, in Technology and Culture 46:1 (Jan 2005), 217-18.  For excerpt click here.

• By David Gueranger, in H-Net (2004).  For full text of review click here.

• By Peder Anker, in Isis 95:4 (2004), 743.

• By Florian Charvolin, in Développement Durable & Territoires (Oct. 20, 2004).  For full text click here.

• By G.W. McDonogh, in Choice 41:11/12 (Jul/Aug 2004), 2113.

• By Angela G. Mertig, in Environmental History 9:3 (July 2004), 545-46.  For full text click here.
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• By Christine Taft, in E-Streams 7:5 (May 2004), 3245.