148 Book Review Essay Book Review Essay Book Review Essay Global Voices from the South • Adil Najam Agarwal, Anil, Sunita Narain and Anju Sharma, eds. 1999. Green Politics: Global Environmental Negotiations 1. New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment. Guha, Ramachandra. 2000. Environmentalism: A Global History. New York: Longman Publishers. At ªrst perusal there seems to be little in common between these two books. There is, of course, the obvious fact that both relate to global environmental is- sues and both are written by Indian authors, but it is the differences—in size, in tone and style, in treatment of detail—that immediately stand out. However, al- though obvious (and not unimportant), the differences are ultimately less signiªcant than the more subtle commonalities that make these two books stand out as major contributions to our understanding of global environmental politics. Whether read individually, and even more so when read together, these two books deserve special attention not because they are written by Southern (developing country) authors, but because by adding a Southern sensibility to the discourse on “global” environmental issues they make the discourse that much more “global” than it generally tends to be. What is remarkable in each of the two books is not just the “Southern- ness” that they bring to the discourse, but the “global-ness” that they embrace. The fundamental premise of both is an indictment of the existing literature on “global” environmental policy and history as being North-centric and, therefore by deªnition, not “global” enough. Instead of simply presenting a Southern “re- sponse,” each book attempts to present what it considers to be more “global” accounts of environmental negotiations (in the case of Green Politics) and envi- ronmental history (in the case of Environmentalism: A Global History). At the heart of each book is the explicit claim and implicit challenge that the main- Global Environmental Politics 1:1, February 2001 © 2001 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/152638001570679 by guest on 16 March 2021