Surroundings
Surroundings

Author: Etienne S. Benson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 022670629X

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Given the ubiquity of environmental rhetoric in the modern world, it’s easy to think that the meaning of the terms environment and environmentalism are and always have been self-evident. But in Surroundings, we learn that the environmental past is much more complex than it seems at first glance. In this wide-ranging history of the concept, Etienne S. Benson uncovers the diversity of forms that environmentalism has taken over the last two centuries and opens our eyes to the promising new varieties of environmentalism that are emerging today. Through a series of richly contextualized case studies, Benson shows us how and why particular groups of people—from naturalists in Napoleonic France in the 1790s to global climate change activists today—adopted the concept of environment and adapted it to their specific needs and challenges. Bold and deeply researched, Surroundings challenges much of what we think we know about what an environment is, why we should care about it, and how we can protect it.

Society and Environment: A Historical Review
Society and Environment: A Historical Review

Author: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-01

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1317434668

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Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905-1983) was a British town planner, editor, and educator. This book includes four of Tyrwhitt’s key texts to illustrate how she forged and promoted a synthesis of Patrick Geddes’ bioregionalism and the utopian ideals of European Modernist urbanism, which influenced post-war academic discourse and professional practice in urban planning and design internationally. The key texts reprinted in this book are contributions from the Town and Country Planning Textbook (1950) which was published as an outcome for the Correspondence Course in Town Planning for members of the Allied Forces, which Tyrwhitt ran. It was designed to meet the requirements created by passage of the 1947 Town and Country Act and helped to shape a generation of planning practitioners in the UK and commonwealth countries.

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Author: Bathsheba Demuth

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2019-08-20

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0393635171

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Winner of the 2021 AHA John H. Dunning Prize Longlisted for the 2020 Cundill History Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by Nature, NPR, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews "A monument to a people and their land… an allegory of the world we have created." —Sven Beckert, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of Cotton: A Global History Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before American and European colonization. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.

Evolutionary History
Evolutionary History

Author: Edmund Russell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-04-11

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1139496476

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We tend to see history and evolution springing from separate roots, one grounded in the human world and the other in the natural world. Human beings have, however, become probably the most powerful species shaping evolution today, and human-caused evolution in other species has probably been the most important force shaping human history. This book introduces readers to evolutionary history, a new field that unites history and biology to create a fuller understanding of the past than either can produce on its own. Evolutionary history can stimulate surprising new hypotheses for any field of history and evolutionary biology. How many art historians would have guessed that sculpture encouraged the evolution of tuskless elephants? How many biologists would have predicted that human poverty would accelerate animal evolution? How many military historians would have suspected that plant evolution would convert a counter-insurgency strategy into a rebel subsidy? With examples from around the globe, this book will help readers see the broadest patterns of history and the details of their own life in a new light.

A Living Past
A Living Past

Author: John Soluri

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2018-02-19

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1785333917

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Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region.

Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia
Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-03-20

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9004288058

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In Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia: A Longue Durée Perspective, eleven historians bring their knowledge and insights to bear on the long Braudelian sweep of Southeast Asian history. In doing so they seek both to debunk simplistic assumptions about fragile traditions and transformational modernities, and to identify real repeating patterns in Southeast Asia's past: clientelistic political structures, periodic tectonic and climatic disasters, ethnic occupational specializations, long cycles of economic globalization and deglobalization. Their contributions range across many centuries: from the Austronesian expansion to the Aceh tsunami, and from the Sanskrit cosmopolis to the Asian financial crisis. The book is inspired by, and dedicated to, Peter Boomgaard, a scholar whose work has embodied the Braudelian spirit in Southeast Asian historiography. This title is available online in its entirety in Open Access.

Civilizing Nature
Civilizing Nature

Author: Bernhard Gissibl

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0857455273

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National parks are one of the most important and successful institutions in global environmentalism. Since their first designation in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s they have become a global phenomenon. The development of these ecological and political systems cannot be understood as a simple reaction to mounting environmental problems, nor can it be explained by the spread of environmental sensibilities. Shifting the focus from the usual emphasis on national parks in the United States, this volume adopts an historical and transnational perspective on the global geography of protected areas and its changes over time. It focuses especially on the actors, networks, mechanisms, arenas, and institutions responsible for the global spread of the national park and the associated utilization and mobilization of asymmetrical relationships of power and knowledge, contributing to scholarly discussions of globalization and the emergence of global environmental institutions and governance.

China
China

Author: Robert B. Marks

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 1442212764

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This deeply informed and beautifully written book provides a comprehensive and comprehensible history of China from prehistory to the present. Focusing on the interaction of humans and their environment, Robert B. Marks traces changes in the physical and cultural world that is home to a quarter of humankind. Through both word and image, this work illuminates the chaos and paradox inherent in China's environmental narrative, demonstrating how historically sustainable practices can, in fact, be profoundly ecologically unsound. The author also reevaluates China's traditional "he.

Human/nature
Human/nature

Author: John P. Herron

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780826319166

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Provocative essays explore how ideas about human nature inform or shape human understanding of nature and the environment.

An Environmental History of Latin America
An Environmental History of Latin America

Author: Shawn William Miller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-08-27

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1316224325

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A narration of the mutually mortal historical contest between humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a period that begins with Amerindian civilizations and concludes in the region's present urban agglomerations, the work offers an original synthesis of the current scholarship on Latin America's environmental history and argues that tropical nature played a central role in shaping the region's historical development. Human attitudes, populations, and appetites, from Aztec cannibalism to more contemporary forms of conspicuous consumption, figure prominently in the story. However, characters such as hookworms, whales, hurricanes, bananas, dirt, butterflies, guano, and fungi make more than cameo appearances. Recent scholarship has overturned many of our egocentric assumptions about humanity's role in history. Seeing Latin America's environmental past from the perspective of many centuries illustrates that human civilizations, ancient and modern, have been simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable than previously thought.