Torsten Hägerstrand (Lund) emphasizes the transnational character of environmental changes, showing how multi-national companies have developed expertise in avoiding nation-specific environmental restrictions. At the same time, trans-national lobbies have organised themselves to protest and seek to hinder the work of the multi-nationals. After establishing the variable national patterns of food and energy flows in the four countries studied, the central part of the volume concentrates on recent environmental changes and ecological policies in the Amsterdam metropolitan region and the waterlands around the polders; on large landed estates in Scania, southern Sweden; in the coal mining region of the Saarland; and in rural Ireland where profound changes in agricultural land use and the organisation of dairy farming have occurred since 1950. Final chapters analyse the change from area-based lifeways (genres de vie) to sector-based resource exploitation in Ireland – and elsewhere.

Matters of ecology and spatial organisation have acquired great importance to ordinary citizens, policy makers and politicians, but the notion of ‘sustainable development’ is a fuzzy one and is interpreted in differing ways in the four study areas. Nonetheless, action needs to be taken to conserve wisely for the decades and centuries ahead. As everyone knows, such fine sentiments often fall on deaf economic and political ears. Anne Buttimer and her partners point toward future threats. Their collective insights offer hope for people working at the grass-roots level to introduce ‘bottom-up’ initiatives for more sustainable ways of life. May the politicians, policy makers and directors of multi-national organisations take note.— Hugh Clout , University College London.