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Veronica Strang. Gardening the World: Agency, Identity and the Ownership of Water. New
York: Berghahn Books, 2009. Illustrations. 317 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84545-606-1.
Reviewed by David D. Vail (Kansas State University)
Published on H-Water (October, 2010)
Commissioned by Justin M. Scott-Coe
Of Conquerors, Gardeners, and Activists: Fluid Conflicts on the World’s Driest Continent
fails to adequately combine the material values of water
with its symbolic values on a global scale. Indeed, how
societies value, claim, and use this resource also carries
an international context.
Water is perhaps the most significant natural resource on the planet, and conflicts from antiquity to the
contemporary over ownership, technology, use, and exploitation help explain its ubiquitous role in human civilization. This quest for hydrological control also reinforced sociocultural expressions and concepts of identity around the conquest of the nonhuman world, adverse impacts on ecosystems, and contentious political
exchanges. Many academic disciplines have addressed
water’s place in the development of societies, policies,
economic systems, and societies. Historians, such as
Donald Worster (Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the
Growth of the American West [1986]), Mark Fiege (Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in
the American West [1999]), Donald Pisani (Water and the
American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National
Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935 [2002]), and Karl
Brooks (Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon
High Dam Controversy [2006]), have provided significant
insights into water resource development in North America, the role of hydrology in American agricultural development, and the contentious exchanges between public
development and private ownership.
Veronica Strang in Gardening the World explores how
water has influenced the policies, perceptions, and natural resource practices of other societies by focusing on
the driest continent on earth, Australia. Strang, professor of anthropology at the University of Aukland, argues
that conflicts over water in Australia and other global regions require a look into a common human theory about
the nonhuman world: nature as garden. In the mind’s
eye, according to Strang, a vision of a perfect world exists; “a productive, well-fed, well-watered world in which
societies coexist amicably; in which ecosystems are allowed to maintain themselves and all of their extraordinary intricacies; in which resources are only used at a
rate that can replenished; and in which the words starvation, conflict, and extinction do not exist” (p. 2). This
image is better understood as a mirage that hovers “on
the edge of the human imagination, sometimes inspiring
hope that with enough striving it can be reached; more
often engendering concern that humankind is on a road
These works, however, remain focused on North that doesn’t go there” (p. 2). And it is this interpretation
America and only address the hydrological consequences that Strang insists leads paradoxically to ecological crisis.
in the American West. Topics on water law, Native Australians’ view of their continent as a garden encourAmerican water rights, irrigation societies, and munici- aged a “relentless desire for growth and expansion” that,
palities continue to inform historians’ perspectives about in turn, drained rivers and dried aquifers (p. 2).
the American past–California water history is its own
Strang begins by addressing the centricity of water
academic endeavor. Yet the breadth of this scholarship
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in understanding the larger aspects of the human-nature
dialectic. As water “lies at the heart of all development
… it is integral to people’s abilities to have agency, to
generate wealth and to direct social, economic and political events … in other words it is essential to every
diverse cultural effort to ‘garden,’ in an equally varied
range of ecological contexts” (p. 2). The ability of farmers to produce healthy crop yields, industrial groups to
appropriate water for urban development, the expansion
of Australian tourism and the response by environmental activists, and the maintenance of indigenous fluidscapes all demonstrate “how natural resources are ‘acculturated’ through people’s efforts to engage with and
act upon their material environments with varying degrees of directive force … [and how] water is integrated
into created efforts to construct and express social identity and agency through the ownership and control of
resources, and how this involves self-generative activities aimed at ‘gardening the world’ ” (p. 6). In subsequent chapters, Strang examines the social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental contours of this garden vision by researching two river catchment systems:
the Brisbane River in South Queensland and the Mitchell
River in Far North Queensland.
came the guiding principles of resource management,
placing Australia on an unsustainable resource path.
Gardening the World provides fascinating insight to
a growing contemporary fear of global water shortages.
Strang develops a workable framework for a new international worldview toward water–a worldview that moves
beyond the idea that “humankind and its economic activities are separate from ‘nature’ ” (p. 77). The book,
however, has weaknesses that could hinder its acceptance among scholars. First, it is jargon filled, sacrificing
clarity for theory. Throughout the book, Strang relies on
the porous notions of agency, identity, discourse, subalternism, and encoding without much clarification. These
theories are crucial to her argument about the paradoxical visions of the garden and Australia, but readers will
struggle to understand their value without clear definitions. Historians will also find fault with this book because Strang neglects the abundant American scholarship on water use. She does address Worster’s Rivers of
Empire but fails to include more recent books, such as the
works cited earlier in this review.
Perhaps the most obvious interplay is between rural
and urban water interests. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, for example, Strang explores how ideological debates and institutional changes over water resource management illustrate a larger modification of the garden vision. Water
governance, in its various national, regional, and local
forms, organized water use around the common good.
This principle, however, remained tied to scales of action, need, and cultural identity. Farmers used water to
support their agricultural interests and saw the resource
as a way to “express social agency and identity as primary producers” (p. 7). This would allow landowners to
“retain the social, economic, and political leadership that
they enjoyed for much of the colonial era” (p. 7). Urban and industrial users presented a competing garden
vision–one that emphasized population and urban development over agriculture and rural life.
Second, the book is a valuable case study of Australia but it often neglects larger, global implications of
gardening the world. Certainly, historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and other scholars will find various chapters significant in scope and content as a comparative work, but the book, as a whole, remains intimately focused on Australia, rarely moving to an international context. For example, water use and development in the American West sparked many of the same
debates, contentious exchanges, and ecological hazards
that Australians have struggled to overcome. Thus, the
value of Gardening the World is that it illuminates the
human-environmental relationships, conflicts, and policymaking that shaped Australia’s water resource management (and mismanagement), which can be used by
other scholars/policymakers to address other water resource problems or resolve human-environmental conflicts, but its insinuation that the Australian experience
is the same as that of other nations is tenuous at best.
Additional chapters address how these tensions
shaped the interactions of cultural and subcultural
groups. From landowners and policymakers to tourists,
environmentalists, and Aborigines, water remained a
central force in the ways various water-using groups understood their familial, gender, and environmental relationships. And as privatization of an ecological commons
increased from the colonial period to the contemporary,
doctrines of development and growth over wise use be-
Ultimately, Gardening the World makes important advances in understanding how peoples around the world
address the tensions between infinite desires and finite
resources. Water helps create cultural identities, encourages technological possibilities, and motivates humans to
view nature as unequal and separate. It also illustrates
the fragility of ecosystems and the consequences of resource exploitation. Strang’s work connects human behaviors and actions at the local level with policymaking
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at the regional, national, and international levels, and articulates a way for people to “reconstitute communities,
to act collectively, and to connect with the places that
they inhabit” (p. 292).
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Citation: David D. Vail. Review of Strang, Veronica, Gardening the World: Agency, Identity and the Ownership of
Water. H-Water, H-Net Reviews. October, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25893
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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