TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 399 of New England. It explains how the ecological order changed and posits a theory for why it changed in the way it did. Indeed, the book’s theorizing about ecological and social change—especially its integra tion of gender into the analysis—is a signal contribution. But Mer chant’s quest for theoretical rigor may have come at the expense of a more nuanced, richly textured narrative. There are painfully few people making history in this book. One reads about systems—social, ecological, and cosmological—but little sense is conveyed of how these ecological revolutions changed the structure and substance of peo ple’s everyday lives. Still, Merchant has written a stimulating book that raises new and interesting questions for historians of technology. What was the ecological impact of technological change? How, if at all, did change or crisis in the ecological order fuel the search for new technologies? By introducing the concepts of ecology and gender into her analysis, Merchant has enriched our understanding of the relationship be tween technology and culture. Theodore Steinberg Dr. Steinberg is assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan and postdoctoral scholar, Michigan Society of Fellows. He is the author of Nature Incorpo rated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Cambridge University Press, in press). Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography. By Michael Williams. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xxii + 599; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $44.50. Michael Williams’s Americans and Their Forests is weighty, both physically and intellectually. The book surely makes any new synthesis in the forest history of the United States unnecessary for many years to come. Readers of thisjournal may, however, be less than satisfied by Williams’s discussion of the relations between technology and culture. Williams deals ingeniously with the topical, chronological, and geographical unevenness of research on America’s forest history by alternating among three organizing principles. The first fifty pages (pt. 1) and the last 100 (pt. 4) deal primarily with the politics and ideology of forest perception, use, and preservation: part 1 for the period before 1600 and part 4 for the 1870s through the mid-20th century. Part 2 (approximately pp. 50—200) deals with the retreat of forests in the colonies and states east of the Mississippi between 1600 and 1860. Chapters in this section cover both the overlap and the contrasts between farmers and loggers, between the subsistence and the market economies. Part 3 (approximately pp. 200—400) deals mostly with forest-based industries. Thanks to the moving “lumber man’s frontier,” this section’s fundamentally geographical organiza 400 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tion is also roughly chronological: from the Great Lakes (1860—90) to the South (1880—1920) to the Pacific Northwest (1880—1940). Present-day forest planners for developing countries might have an uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu when reading about how the rising price of fuelwood converted America’s domestic and industrial fur naces to coal and thus eventually to other fossil fuels (pp. 332—33). If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then it is appropriate to praise Williams’s rigorously quantitative history of American forest use by citing statistics about the book: over 100 figures—mostly statistical data presented in the form of maps that forest historians and policymakers will ask permission to photocopy frequently, nearly fifty tables, almost as many illustrations, about fifty pages of notes, and an additional forty pages of bibliography. Perhaps inevitably, a few sentences requiring second readings were carried along in this landslide of information—both author and copy editor must have felt overwhelmed at times. Yet Americans and Their Forests lays remarkably few traps for the many people who will read it as an encyclopedia of forest-related facts. Examples of such facts include the transforma tions worked by forest succession and by Native Americans in forests seen by later generations of romantics as unchanging and “virgin” before European settlement (pp. 30, 35—42, 49) and the quantitative importance of forest products in the growth of the American econ omy (p. 5, table 1.1, and p. 331). As a treatise on technology and culture...