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CHOICE Review

Bramwell's book is about the political and intellectual history of the modern ecological movement from its roots--the holistic ideas of the German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel, who coined the name ecology--to the later wedding of these concepts to resource and energy economics, forming what the author calls ecologism. The holistic, vitalistic, naturist ideas spread from Germany during the early 1900s to Great Britain and North America, then faded, and resurged with the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Bramwell explores the development of ecologism, the Green movement, in Europe where it contained all the elements found in environmental activism today--a back-to-land movement, organic farming, forest and soil conservation--and she speculates on its future and meaning. She deliberately omits most of the history of ecologism in North America, covered in part by D. Worster in Nature's Economy (CH, May '78) and by B. Devall and G. Sessions in Deep Ecology (CH, Mar '86). An important and challenging book on the environmental movement, that is well researched with numerous footnotes and good bibliography. For upper-division undergraduate and graduate students. R. L. Smith West Virginia University