This is a collection of essays showing that concerns about climate change are far from being a uniquely modern phenomenon. It traces the origins of environmental debates about soil erosion, deforestation, and climate change in the writings of early colonial administrators, doctors and missionaries. The author traces what is known and what can be inferred about El Nino events centuries before the devastating 1997/1998 effects. In a concluding essay he analyzes the general significance of marginal land and its ecology in the history of popular resistance movements.
From constructing new buildings to describing rival-controlled areas as morally and physically dangerous, leaders in late antiquity fundamentally shaped their physical environment and thus the events that unfolded within it. Controlling Contested Places maps the city of Antioch (Antakya, Turkey) through the topographically sensitive vocabulary of cultural geography, demonstrating the critical role played by physical and rhetorical spatial contests during the tumultuous fourth century. Paying close attention to the manipulation of physical places, Christine Shepardson exposes some of the powerful forces that structured the development of religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the late Roman Empire. Theological claims and political support were not the only significant factors in determining which Christian communities gained authority around the Empire. Rather, AntiochÕs urban and rural places, far from being an inert backdrop against which events transpired, were ever-shifting sites of, and tools for, the negotiation of power, authority, and religious identity. This book traces the ways in which leaders like John Chrysostom, Theodoret, and Libanius encouraged their audiences to modify their daily behaviors and transform their interpretation of the world (and landscape) around them. Shepardson argues that examples from Antioch were echoed around the Mediterranean world, and similar types of physical and rhetorical manipulations continue to shape the politics of identity and perceptions of religious orthodoxy to this day.
One woman’s enlightening trek through the natural histories, cultural stories, and present perils of thirteen national monuments, from Maine to Hawaii This land is your land. When it comes to national monuments, the sentiment could hardly be more fraught. Gold Butte in Nevada, Organ Mountains–Desert Peaks in New Mexico, Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine, Cascade–Siskiyou in Oregon and California: these are among the thirteen natural sites McKenzie Long visits in This Contested Land, an eye-opening exploration of the stories these national monuments tell, the passions they stir, and the controversies surrounding them today. Starting amid the fragrant sagebrush and red dirt of Bears Ears National Monument on the eve of the Trump Administration’s decision to reduce the site by 85 percent, Long climbs sandstone cliffs, is awed by Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings and is intrigued by 4,000-year-old petroglyphs. She hikes through remote pink canyons recently removed from the boundary of Grand Staircase–Escalante, skis to a backcountry hut in Maine to view a truly dark night sky, snorkels in warm Hawaiian waters to plumb the meaning of marine preserves, volunteers near the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States, and witnesses firsthand the diverse forms of devotion evoked by the Rio Grande. In essays both contemplative and resonant, This Contested Land confronts an unjust past and imagines a collaborative future that bears witness to these regions’ enduring Indigenous connections. From hazardous climate change realities to volatile tensions between economic development and environmental conservation, practical and philosophical issues arise as Long seeks the complicated and often overlooked—or suppressed—stories of these incomparable places. Her journey, mindfully undertaken and movingly described, emphasizes in clear and urgent terms the unique significance of, and grave threats to, these contested lands.
"In this volume, nine eminent scholars apply the theory and practice of a cultural politics of natural resources to spatial and temporal sites that range from petroleum fields in Nigeria to palm-oil plantations in Indonesia; from irrigation engineering in British India to contemporary environmental decision making in the United Kingdom; from global climate change to water scarcity in Gujarat." "The essays in this volume stimulate and inform environmental debates in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, history, and geography - as well as in the world at large."--BOOK JACKET.
The definitive account of one of the most important battles of the twentieth century, and the Black River borderlands’ transformation into Northwest Vietnam This new work of historical and political geography ventures beyond the conventional framing of the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, the 1954 conflict that toppled the French empire in Indochina. Tracking a longer period of anticolonial revolution and nation-state formation from 1945 to 1960, Christian Lentz argues that a Vietnamese elite constructed territory as a strategic form of rule. Engaging newly available archival sources, Lentz offers a novel conception of territory as a contingent outcome of spatial contests.
This publication contains the proceedings of an international conference, held in Pitlochry, Scotland in November 2002, to mark the UN International Year of Mountains 2002. The conference participants discussed the state of current knowledge about the mountains of Northern Europe and considered issues arising from the interactions between people and nature, and the conservation and sustainable development activities needed to benefit the natural heritage of mountain regions in the UK, Norway and Sweden, Finland and Iceland.
Mountain regions are subject to a unique set of economic pressures: they act as collective enterprises which have to valorize rare resources, such as spectacular landscapes. While primarily rural in nature, they often border large cities, and the development of industries such as hydroelectric power and the rapid development of tourism can bring about sweeping socio-economic change and vast demographic alterations. The Spatial and Economic Transformation of Mountain Regions describes the socio-economic changes and spatial impacts of the last four decades, with the transformation of mountain areas held up as an example. Much of the real-world context draws on the Alps, spanning as they do the significant economies of France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Chapters address academic discourse on regional development in these mountain areas and suggest alternative approaches to the liberal-productivist societal model. This book will be essential reading for professionals, institutions, and NGOs searching for counter-models to the existing marketing approaches for peripheral areas. It will also be of interest to students of regional development, economic geography, environmental studies, and industrial economics.
From her world-famous dude ranch in Washington state's Yakima County, Kay Kershaw exerted tremendous influence on conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest and, tangentially, on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. After gaining local renown in sports and aviation, she established the ranch at Goose Prairie with her first partner, Pat Kane--a fraught undertaking in a region closely associated with the John Birch Society. Operating under the guise of two "spinsters," Kershaw and her later life-partner Isabelle Lynn guarded their privacy closely, but local encroachment by the U.S. Forest Service and the timber industry forced them into the public arena as environmentalists. In partnership with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Kershaw and Lynn spearheaded a decades-long campaign to save the ancient forests and ecosystem of Washington's Cascade Range. In the process, Kay and Isabelle's devoted relationship proved a marked contrast to Justice Douglas' own turbulent love life, perhaps affecting his perception of the law and his precedent-setting judicial opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which provided the basis for major LGBTQ+ Supreme Court decisions in the twenty-first century as well as Roe v. Wade in 1973.
Mountains have captured the interests and passions of people for thousands of years. Today, millions of people live within mountain regions, and mountain regions are often areas of accelerated environmental change. This edited volume highlights new understanding of mountain environments and mountain peoples around the world. The understanding of mountain environments and peoples has been a focus of individual researchers for centuries; more recently the interest in mountain regions among researchers has been growing rapidly. The articles contained within are from a wide spectrum of researchers from different parts of the world who address physical, political, theoretical, social, empirical, environmental, methodological, and economic issues focused on the geography of mountains and their inhabitants. The articles in this special issue are organized into three themed sections with very loose boundaries between themes: (1) physical dynamics of mountain environments, (2) coupled human–physical dynamics, and (3) sociocultural dynamics in mountain regions. This book was first published as a special issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
