New Books In Environmental Studies

In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. Through the Second World War, France’s agriculture was comparatively backward next to those of its neighbors and geopolitical rivals. The French government undertook a major program of “modernization” to encourage the consolidation of landholdings, increases in the productivity of agricultural labor, and the application of capital-intensive technologies. In this it was successful—at least to the extent that France became one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural goods. However, as Bivar documents, this transformation was not without considerable resistance: plenty of farmers were unable or unwilling to change, and the transformation of the French countryside generated intense debates about the nature of quality in food and agriculture, and its relationship to the people and land of France. Venus Bivar is A