Bibliographical Retrospective
This retrospective highlights and celebrates the writings on development, conservancy and
planning which underscore my experience.
North American writing is everywhere present. The socio-environmental luminaries
include, in birth order: John James Audubon (1785–1851), George Perkins Marsh (1801–82),
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), John Muir (1838–1914),
Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946), Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Ansel
Adams (1902–84), Rachel Carson (1907–64), and Ian McHarg (1921–2001). And another col-
lation, this time of, as far as I know, living American authorities on ‘sustainability’ ‘urban-
ism’ and ‘planning’, includes: Andres Duany, Barbara Ehrenreich, Paul Ehrlich, Francis
Fukuyama, Joel Garreau, Garrett Hardin, Paul Hawken, Robert Heilbroner, Jane Jacobs,
Robert Kaplan, David Korten, Amory Lovins, Kirkpatrick Sale, John Ralston Saul, Joni
Seager, London-based Richard Sennett and Lawrence Susskind. In practical effect recogni-
tion of American sources goes wider, to the film directors, producers of sitcoms, and the
newscasters and journalists whom, with varying degrees of humour, horror, sick humour
and insight, depict and pillory the suburban scene.
Although far from literary masterpieces, the fresh and significant boundary markers
from which this offering takes its contemporary cue are the Rio Declaration(usually
depicted as Agenda 21, United Nations Conference on Environment and Development,
1992), which in turn took succour from the Bruntland Report, Our Common Future(World
Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). Lesser known, but of structural
importance to the post-modernist drift is Andrea Huysson’s After the Great Divide:
Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), and David Harvey’s Condition of
Postmodernity(1989). These works possibly had part of their genesis in the likes of Fritjof
Capra’s ‘The Turning Point’ (1975) which was a stimulus for a host of writings on en-
vironment and development.
Overarching all on my account is Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilisation(1934) first
read during the 1950s in the Nelson College Scriptorium as a sixth former. My larger per-
spective also derives from Albert Waterston’s Development Planning(1968), Clarence
Glacken’sTraces on the Rhodian Shore(1977), Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Capital (1975),
Bernard Porter’s The Lion’s Share(1975). More specific and recent writings include Gertrude
Himmelfarb’s revelations of Victorian values, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral
Imagination of the Late Victorians (1991), William Cronon’s depiction of Chicago’s expansion
inNature’s Metropolis(1991) and David Harvey’s paper ‘The Environment of Justice’ (1995).
Books on the process of land enclosure in the New World include Howard’s Colonisation
and Underdevelopment(1978), William Lines’s Taming the Great South Land(1991); and
a useful trio of feminist perspectives and analyses, working back in time from Giselle
Byrnes’s ‘No Holidays are Kept in the Bush’ (1993, New Zealand), Kay Schaeffer’s Women