The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism by Harriet Ritvo (review)

• Autores: Christopher Hamlin
• Localización: Technology and Culture, ISSN-e 1097-3729, Vol. 54, Nº. 4, 2013, págs. 980-981
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The Dawn of Green narrates Manchester�s acquisition of Thirlmere, in the English Lake District, as its primary reservoir at the end of the nineteenth century. Harriet Ritvo begins with the romantics� celebration of the lake as a place of natural beauty and power. She goes on to review Manchester�s growth and water needs, then examines the debates and processes of policymaking that led Parliament to allow Manchester to acquire Thirlmere in 1879. The fourth chapter concerns the building of the waterworks and Manchester�s subsequent administration of what Ritvo rightly recognizes as a distant colony. In the last chapter, she traces the town�s later water conquests of other pristine lakes, and the ultimate regionalization and then privatization of British water resources. Ritvo treats the Thirlmere affair as exemplary of environmental controversy: it is the model for the great American controversy over the Hetch Hetchy reservoir for San Francisco a generation later; equally, she argues, for the Aswan Dam and the Three Gorges project in China. In a brief epilogue, she notes that many of the anxieties that animated partisans on both sides had a basis in fact and points, tantalizingly, toward finding ways to mediate controversies that avoid the hardening of positions. But generally, the book is lean on scholarly context�Ritvo presents; she does not argue.