Archaeological data now show that relatively intense human adaptations to coastal environments developed much earlier than once believed—more than 125,000 years ago. With our oceans and marine ...fisheries currently in a state of crisis, coastal archaeological sites contain a wealth of data that can shed light on the history of human exploitation of marine ecosystems. In eleven case studies from the Americas, Pacific Islands, North Sea, Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, leading researchers working in coastal areas around the world cover diverse marine ecosystems, reaching into deep history to discover how humans interacted with and impacted these aquatic environments and shedding new light on our understanding of contemporary environmental problems.
Covering the last five hundred years of global history, The Environment in World History examines the processes that have transformed the Earth and put growing pressure on natural resources.
Chapters ...and case studies explore a wide range of issues, including:
the hunting of wildlife and the loss of biodiversity in nearly every part of the globe
the clearing of the world's forests and the development of strategies to halt their decline
the degradation of soils, one of the most profound and unnoticed ways that humans have altered the planet
the impact of urban-industrial growth and the deepening 'ecological footprints' of the world's cities
the pollution of air, land and water as the 'inevitable' trade-off for continued economic growth worldwide.
The Environment in World History offers a fresh environmental perspective on familiar world history narratives of imperialism and colonialism, trade and commerce, and technological progress and the advance of civilisation, and will be invaluable reading for all students of world history and environmental studies.
This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth ...through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the vector mosquitoes of yellow fever and malaria, and these diseases wrought systematic havoc among armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions to succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to prevent them.
International politics has become increasingly legalized over the past fifty years, restructuring the way states interact with each other, international institutions, and their own constituents. The ...international legalization of human rights now makes it possible for individuals to take human rights claims against their governments at international courts such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. This book brings together theories from international law, human rights and international relations to explain the increasingly important phenomenon of states' compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings. It argues that this is an inherently domestic affair. It posits three overarching questions: why do states comply with human rights tribunals' rulings? How does the compliance process unfold and what are the domestic political considerations around compliance? What effect does compliance have on the protection of human rights? The book answers these through a combination of quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom.
There are three major myths of human nature: humans are divided into biological races; humans are naturally aggressive; men and women are truly different in behavior, desires, and wiring. In an ...engaging and wide-ranging narrative Agustín Fuentes counters these pervasive and pernicious myths about human behavior. Tackling misconceptions about what race, aggression, and sex really mean for humans, Fuentes incorporates an accessible understanding of culture, genetics, and evolution requiring us to dispose of notions of "nature or nurture." Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields, including anthropology, biology, and psychology, Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy and differences between the sexes. A final chapter plus an appendix provide a set of take-home points on how readers can myth-bust on their own. Accessible, compelling, and original, this book is a rich and nuanced account of how nature, culture, experience, and choice interact to influence human behavior.
When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become ...the enslaved property of the mother's master. InLaboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe,Laboring Womentraverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners' expectations for reproductive labor, and women's lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery. Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women's gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women's actual lives-from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations-she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women's reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life. Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery,Laboring Womenis a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women.
The Asia-Pacific is known for having the least developed regional mechanisms for protecting human rights. This edited collection makes a timely and distinctive contribution to contemporary debates ...about building institutions for human rights protection in the Asia-Pacific region, in the wake of ASEAN's establishment in 2009 of a sub-regional human rights commission.
Drawing together leading scholarly voices, the book focuses on the systemic issue of institutionalising human rights protection in the Asia-Pacific. It critically examines the prospects for deepening and widening human rights institutions in the region, challenging the orthodox scepticism about whether the Asia-Pacific is "ready" for stronger human rights institutions and exploring the variety of possible forms that regional and sub-regional institutions might take. The volume also analyses the impediments to new institutions, whilst questioning the justifications for them. The collection provides a range of perspectives on the issues and many of the chapters bring interdisciplinary insights to bear. As such, the collection will be of interest to scholarly, practitioner, and student audiences in law, as well as to readers in international relations, political science, Asian studies, and human rights.
Elephants rarely breed in captivity and are not considered domesticated, yet they interact with people regularly and adapt to various environments. Too social and sagacious to be objects, too strange ...to be human, too captive to truly be wild, but too wild to be domesticated-where do elephants fall in our understanding of nature?
InWildlife in the Anthropocene,Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has come to an end. But life goes on. Wildlife inhabits everywhere and is on the move; Lorimer proposes the concept of wildlife as a replacement for nature. Offering a thorough appraisal of the Anthropocene-an era in which human actions affect and influence all life and all systems on our planet- Lorimer unpacks its implications for changing definitions of nature and the politics of wildlife conservation.Wildlife in the Anthropoceneexamines rewilding, the impacts of wildlife films, human relationships with charismatic species, and urban wildlife. Analyzing scientific papers, policy documents, and popular media, as well as a decade of fieldwork, Lorimer explores the new interconnections between science, politics, and neoliberal capitalism that the Anthropocene demands of wildlife conservation.
Imagining conservation in a world where humans are geological actors entangled within and responsible for powerful, unstable, and unpredictable planetary forces, this work nurtures a future environmentalism that is more hopeful and democratic.
In recent years, influential studies have shown that the activities of human rights organizations are central in convincing violating governments to improve their practices. Yet some governments ...continue to get away with human rights violations despite mobilizations against them. InHuman Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines, Anja Jetschke considers the impact of transnational human rights advocacy on the process of human rights reform and democratization in two countries that have been successful in resisting international human rights pressure. Jetschke details the effects of campaigns waged by international and domestic NGOs, foreign governments, local opposition leaders, and international organizations. She argues that the literature on transnational advocacy overlooks the ability of governments to justify and excuse human rights violations in their public dialogue with human rights organizations. Describing efforts of international and domestic human rights advocates to protect the rights of various groups, the case studies in this book suggest that governments successfully block or evade pressures if they invoke threats to state security. Jetschke finds that state security puts into play a set of powerful international norms related to sovereignty-a state's right to territorial integrity, the secular organization of the state, or a government's lack of control over the means of organized violence. If governments frame persuasive arguments around these norms, they can effectively mobilize competing domestic and international groups and trump human rights advocacy.Human Rights and State Securityshows that the content and arguments on behalf of human rights matter and provide opportunities for both governments and civil society organizations to advance their agendas.
PDF
