Bess, Michael

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Bess, Michael

PERSONAL:

Education: Reed College, B.A., 1979; University of California at Berkeley, M.A., 1983, Ph.D., 1989.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Nashville, TN. Office—Vanderbilt University, VU Station B, #351802, Nashville, TN 37235. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, assistant professor, 1989-96; associate professor, 1996-2004; professor of history, 2004-06, Chancellor's Professor of History, 2006—. Daily American, Rome, Italy, assistant editor, 1979-80; Oregonian, reporter, 1980.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, American Society for Environmental History, American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Society for French Historical Studies, Society for the History of Technology, Neuroethics Society, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History, 2004, for The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000; fellowships from the National Institutes of Health, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation.

WRITINGS:

Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945-1989: Louise Weiss (France), Leo Sz-ilard (USA), E.P. Thompson (England), Danilo Dolci (Italy), University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1993.

The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2003.

Choices under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II, Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.

Author of articles for scholarly journals, including the Yale Review, Environmental History, American Historical Review, and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; member of editorial board for Environmental History.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian Michael Bess, a professor at Vanderbilt University, has written several books on topics as wide-ranging as environmentalism in France and the morality of World War II. Specializing in environmental history, a multidisciplinary field that combines history, geography, anthropology, and the natural sciences, Bess has also contributed much scholarly research to the nascent field through his articles on nuclear war, ecology, and environmental activism, particularly in the post-World War II era.

Bess provides a history of the environmental movement in postwar France in The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000. "Light green" is the term he coins to describe how France adopted environmentally friendly practices out of a combination of convenience, technology, tradition, and modernity. The result is a society in which nuclear power, high-speed mass transit, fuel-efficient cars, and pervasive recycling are an integral part of a culture that continues to be consumerist and partial to technical innovation (such as the failed Concorde) even as it embraces its rural peasant life. He further theorizes that France's take on sustainability reflects its unique blurred division of nature and culture, one that may have ramifications—though not all the answers—for sustainability worldwide. Sara B. Pritchard, reviewing the book for French Politics, Culture and Society, praised the book for showing how "when pulled between the poles of technology, progress, and abundance on the one hand, and constraint, sustainability, and tradition on the other, the French opted to do both…. Bess therefore characterizes France's commitment to environmentalism as wide and shallow." W. Brian Newsome, writing in the Canadian Journal of History, praised Bess for providing "a novel paradigm through which historians can consider the evolution of environmental policies in France and other industrial countries."

In Choices under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II, Bess challenges the notion that the war was a "good war" in which the United States was on the right side of freedom and democracy. He examines issues such as allying with Josef Stalin in order to defeat Adolf Hitler, the role of racism, and whether or not the massive casualties Allied Forces inflicted on civilian populations in order to save their own military personnel—particularly in Dresden and Tokyo—were justified. Jay Freeman, writing in Booklist called Choices under Fire a "fascinating but discomfiting work." Other critics considered the book "difficult" as well, including Antoine Capet in a review for the online History News Network, who called it "ambitious" and concluded that its difficulty resides in the fact that "it certainly does not offer ready-made answers to the reader—if anything, it shakes many of the certainties which he or she may have entertained before opening it."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2006, Jay Freeman, review of Choices under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II, p. 23.

Canadian Journal of History, August, 2005, W. Brian Newsome, review of The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000, p. 357.

French Politics, Culture and Society, spring, 2005, Sara B. Pritchard, review of The Light-Green Society, p. 148.

Isis, December, 2004, Peder Anker, review of The Light-Green Society, p. 743.

Journal of Social History, winter, 2005, Pierre Claude Reynard, review of The Light-Green Society, p. 545.