Reviewed by: William E Doolittle, University of ...

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such nonsense. It was a world gone mad, I tell you, enough to drive my old dean crazy. Through it all there were precious few constant voices of sanity, one.
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Blaikie P and Brookfield H (1987) Land Degradation and Society. London: Methuen. Chamberlin TC (1890) The method of multiple working hypotheses. Science (old series) 15(366): 92–96. Reprinted in: Vayda AP and Walters BB (eds) (2011) Causal Explanation for Social Scientists: A Reader. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 168–178. Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine 2(8): e124. Available at: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10. 1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124. McCay BJ (2008) An intellectual history of ecological anthropology. In: Walters BB, McCay BJ, West P, and Lees S (eds) Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 11–26. Nickerson RS (1998) Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology 2(2): 175–220. Reprinted in: Vayda AP and

Walters BB (eds) (2011) Causal Explanation for Social Scientists. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Vayda AP and Sahur A (1996) Bugis settlers in East Kalimantan’s Kutai National Park: Their past and present and some possibilities for their future. A CIFOR Special Publication, Center for International Forestry Research, Jakarta. Vayda AP and Walters BB (eds) (2011) Causal Explanation for Social Scientists: A Reader. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Walters BB (2008) Events, politics and environmental change. In: Walters BB, McCay BJ, West P, and Lees S (eds) Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 67–79. Walters BB and Vayda AP (2009) Event ecology, causal historical analysis and human-environment research. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99(3): 534–553.

Reviewed by: William E Doolittle, University of Texas, USA

there were precious few constant voices of sanity, one of which was Pete Vayda (others in my opinion include Bob Netting and Karl Butzer). And, just how many pages does it take to tell the truth in these matters? Precisely 237! (not counting the bibliography and index). Pete must have played baseball in his youth, and learned well from his coaches who, as all former ball players know, harp constantly about keeping your eye on the ball. Later, as a student, he must have taken a course on the philosophy of science, something most subscribers to _____ism didn’t do but should have done. But, alas, they are not scientists. They pretend to be intellectuals, but most are not even good scholars. This book is all about the truth, and not being distracted. It is an intellectual treatise built on solid scholarship, hence the first word in the title – explaining – is most appropriate. The ten chapters of this tome are slightly rewritten versions of papers published between 1989 and 2008, eight in journals, and two in edited volumes (four are book reviews). They progress, in large part, from newest to oldest and from most general

A former associate dean of arts and sciences I knew back in my early days at Mississippi State University kept coming to mind as I read this book. Oh, how he would have appreciated it. A biologist who rarely published anything longer than five pages, he was always perplexed by the lengthy writings of historians. More than once I heard him ask: ‘How many pages does it take these people to tell the truth?’ During the past five decades there have doubtless been hundreds of thousands (perhaps more than a million!) pages published on human impacts on the environment. Most of these have been polemics, sometimes pondering, typically pontificating political, economic, and social agendas. If it wasn’t Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, or Foucault (who never existed1), it was _____ ecology or some such nonsense. It was a world gone mad, I tell you, enough to drive my old dean crazy. Through it all

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to most specific. All include to one degree or another conceptual issues and empirical evidence. Although the title puts the focus first on human activities and second on the world’s biophysical environments – doubtless a function of Vayda being an anthropologist – my interest is principally with the environment – an inherently geographical perspective – and secondarily with how people act. But, as two other words in the title – action and change – suggest, dynamism is paramount. And herein lays another philosophical dilemma. A departure into the world of art and the philosophy of humanities is offered here in hopes of shedding insight. Time, change, and landscape are major themes in the work of South African artist William Kentridge, to whom the world exists as process, not fact. Two of his animated films stand out as particularly good examples, Landscape in a State of Siege (1988) and Felix in Exile: Geography of Memory (1994). Kentridge conveys the concepts through his erasure technique in which images are hand-drawn, filmed for a few seconds, erased in places with new items added in the redrawing, then filmed again for a few seconds. The process is repeated multiple times, each with traces of what has been erased remaining slightly visible, thereby creating a sense of fading memory or the passing of time. The technique grapples with what is not said, what remains suppressed or forgotten but is easily felt. Borrowing Gilles Deleuze’s (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 167) idea of faciality, a text in which human faces are analyzed as systems consisting of ‘white wall/black hole’, Elisabeth Van Caelenberge (2008) concluded that Kentridge’s work possesses landscapity, a notion that is politically explicit and renounces the picturesque and the sublime. Face and landscape thus have much in common, even intertwined. This is most evident in Felix in Exile, which alternates between close-up views of Felix’s face in a mirror and long views of the bare Johannesburg landscape. Going from humanistic to scientific realms, landscapity renders moot such notions as environmental change, vegetation change, climate change, indeed, any kind of change. Climate, for example, is defined in every introductory textbook as something like ‘the normal state of the atmosphere’. The idea of normal is based on averaging temperature and

humidity conditions over some period of time. Because of the recentness of detailed data gathering, this is usually the past century or so. But, as the notion of average itself implies, data are variable. Deviations from one observation to the next reflect change, however large or small. Averages, therefore, conflate accuracy and precision. Rolling averages, it can be argued, ameliorate some of the issues with short-term averages, but they too are flawed. Indeed, the premise for ‘rolling’ is the implicit recognition that change exists. Topics such as climate change are, therefore, redundant at best and tautological at worst. Climate does not exist as a concrete phenomenon. It is an abstraction, an intellectual construct. Treating it as though it is real violates what Alfred North Whitehead (1925) long ago labeled the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The same holds true for environment. When scholars talk of environmental change, they typically do so over some arbitrary period of time. The earliest or oldest date is the benchmark from which deviations are measured (e.g. Shantz and Turner, 1958). The causes of change are usually seen as human, and the changes themselves are seen as negative, rightly or wrongly. There are, more importantly, two problems with this type of study. First, environmental conditions at the benchmark date are seen to be normal, even natural, both of which are probably incorrect. Second, human actions are simplified to a fault, nuances and subtleties go unrecognized and unappreciated. It is in this latter regard that Vayda’s book is critically important. As different as humans may be from other animals, we are still animals. As such we are motivated by the same things as other animals. We have to eat, drink, survive the elements, and reproduce. We are not, therefore, distinct from nature as some might want us to believe. We are in every way part of nature. In the course of satisfying our needs we impact the environment around us – other parts of nature. Vayda’s book is magnificent in its arguing the complexity of human actions, questioning the self-perceived uniqueness disciplinary perspectives, arguing against focusing on certain factors assumed in advance to be important, pointing out failures in various explanations, untying the Gordian knot of processes typically treated superficially, demonstrating how different

Dialogues in Human Geography 1(3)

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conclusions can be reached when asking different questions, and illustrating confusion stemming from polemics. Some readers will doubtless see it as dogmatic. To me it is just plain simple, an invocation of Ockham’s razor. For three decades I have required my doctoral students to read John Bennett’s under-appreciated book The Ecological Transition (1976). Joining that book now is Vayda’s Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Change. I think it will have merit in 2040. Note 1. On p. 76 of Power/Knowledge, Michel Foucault (1980) said: ‘As far as I’m concerned, Marx doesn’t exist. I mean the sort of entity constructed around a proper name, signifying at once a certain individual, the totality of his writings, and an immense historical process deriving from him’. If Marx didn’t exist, then, on the basis of the perspective he proffered, Foucault would have to conclude that he himself never existed. If Foucault thought he didn’t exist, no one else should either.

Reviewed by: Dan Klooster, University of Redlands, USA

When writing reviews of polemic books, reviewers should be cognizant of their allegiances. I am generally for political ecology; the term even appears in the titles of some of my publications. Vayda, however, is largely opposed to political ecology; one of the chapters in the book reviewed here is titled ‘Against Political Ecology’. Logically, therefore, I must be against Vayda. However, I wish to take a different approach, one which affirms the value of Vayda’s guide to the conduct of environmental research but without jettisoning the goals or observations about positionality, social nature, and politics associated with political ecology. My comments here are guided by this question: are the arguments in this book useful to political ecologists and others engaged in the practice of environmental change research? My answer is yes.

References Bennett JW (1976) The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthropology and Human Adaptation. New York: Pergamon Press. Deleuze G and Guattari F (1988) Year Zero: Faciality, In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone. Foucault M (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Shantz HL and Turner BL (1958) Photographic documentation of vegetational changes in Africa over a third of a century. University of Arizona College of Agriculture Report 169, Tucson. Van Caelenberge E (2008) Visual storytelling: A progressive strategy? The animated drawings of William Kentridge. Image [&] Narrative 23. Available at: www. imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/ Timeandphotography/vancaelenberghe.html. Whitehead AN (1925) An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This book (Vayda, 2009) collects essays written over the course of more than 20 years, all of which address explanation in environmental change research, mostly by elucidating the errors in others’ human-environment research. The key chapter is the first, in which Vayda presents the dos and don’ts of a pragmatic approach to the causal explanation of environmental change. As I distill it, he recommends three essential steps in explaining environmental change. First, formulate clear research questions in which the object of explanation – environmental change – is clearly identified. These should be ‘why?’ questions about events, ideally evoking very specific causal claims which are amenable to evidence-based refutation. Second, conduct research to obtain evidence for and against various causal possibilities, without bias towards a particular preconceived explanation. In this approach, Vayda invokes the concept of abduction, following Charles Peirce. Abduction involves identifying possible causes which might explain the environmental change being studied. For

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