AFRICAN ENVIRONMENTS: IMAGINED AND REAL William G. Moseley and B. Ikubolajeh Logan, eds. African Environment and Development: Rhetoric, Programs and Realities. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. xii + 240 pp. Map. Illustration. Tables. Bibliographies. Index. $89.95. Cloth. William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor, eds. Social History and African Environments. Athens: Ohio University Press/Oxford: James Currey, 2003. x + 266 pp. Illustrations. Bibliographies. Index. $44.95. Cloth. $22.95. Paper. The characterization of African environments-and of Africans' interactions with them-has come under scrutiny from a number of academic disciplines, and especially from multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary analysis. Stereotypes and generalizations largely unfounded on fact (and usually pejorative) were codified during the colonial era. Although colonial officers did put forward alternative perspectives, systematic challenge came in the late twentieth century from studies of specific places at particular points in time that contradicted established beliefs. Initially considered to be radical, this kind of critical analysis has become such an accepted area of study that it has generated its own debates. However, deliberation is less about whether colonial perspectives were accurate than about how to construct better explanations. The initial gross oppositions are in the process of being refined or replaced by more nuanced understandings that accept the possibilities of variability in nature and human response. This recent literature of criticism, rich in terms like narrative, is supported by new theoretical formulations in both the physical and sciences. As orthodoxies are being challenged, the best research uses these new perspectives to enhance understandings of a place; the least useful use a particular location to demonstrate the validity of a theoretical construction. One way to ensure that a dynamic environment, rather than a theoretical construction, prevails as subject is to include a historical perspective. Landscapes and human reactions to them differ in time, whether measured within a year or over several years, decades, or centuries. Accounting for variation, or even complete change, is often a challenge for theoretical models. Two quite different volumes of multidisciplinary conference papers contribute to this redefining of the African environment and human relations to it. William G. Moseley and B. Ikubolajeh Logan set out to present a critical analysis of environmental narratives as they relate to environment and development policy, particularly in West Africa. William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor, on the other hand, consciously avoid discussion of environmental policy and responsibilities for environmental change in East, central, and southern Africa, preferring, as the back cover blurb proclaims, to challenge some of the interpretive conventions of Africanist scholarship with a collection of essays concerning and cultural perspectives on environmental change. Moseley and Logan's introduction includes instructive overviews of the ideology of sustainable development, the meaning and application of political ecology, and a discussion of environmental narratives, political economy, and global environmental politics as they relate to specific African realities. Beinart and McGregor are less clear in identifying which narratives-or aspects of them-their collection challenges. The word Africanist is used frequently in their introduction to identify categories of scholarship, but its meaning is not always clear: is it meant, in instances, to evoke the complex South African concerns about types of economic analysis or the privileging of certain groups of people? Despite the social history of the book's tide, the introduction briefly reviews African environmental history, with an emphasis on those areas of study that do not involve detailed analysis of the environment itself. …