Mediterranean landscape ecology, island cultures and long-term human history have all emerged as major research agendas over the past half-century, engaging large swathes of the social and natural ...sciences. This book brings these traditions together in considering Antikythera, a tiny island perched on the edge of the Aegean and Ionian seas, over the full course of its human history. Small islands are particularly interesting because their human, plant and animal populations often experience abrupt demographic changes, including periods of near-complete abandonment and recolonization, and Antikythera proves to be one of the best-documented examples of these shifts over time. Small islands also play eccentric but revealing roles in wider social, economic and political networks, serving as places for refugees, hunters, modern eco-tourists, political exiles, hermits and pirates. Antikythera is a rare case of an island that has been investigated in its entirety from several systematic fieldwork and disciplinary perspectives, not least of which is an intensive archaeological survey. The authors use the resulting evidence to offer a unique vantage on settlement and land use histories.
Minnesota's Twin Cities have long been powerful engines of change. From their origins in the early nineteenth century, the Twin Cities helped drive the dispossession of the region's Native American ...peoples, turned their riverfronts into bustling industrial and commercial centers, spread streets and homes outward to the horizon, and reached well beyond their urban confines, setting in motion the environmental transformation of distant hinterlands. As these processes unfolded, residents inscribed their culture into the landscape, complete with all its tensions, disagreements, contradictions, prejudices, and social inequalities. These stories lie at the heart of Nature's Crossroads. The book features an interdisciplinary team of distinguished scholars who aim to open new conversations about the environmental history of the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.
The opening of the Amazon to colonization in the 1970s brought cattle, land conflict, and widespread deforestation. In the remote state of Acre, Brazil, rubber tappers fought against migrant ranchers ...to preserve the forest they relied on, and in the process, these "forest guardians" showed the world that it was possible to unite forest livelihoods and environmental preservation. Nowadays, many rubber tappers and their children are turning away from the forest-based lifestyle they once sought to protect and are becoming cattle-raisers or even caubois (cowboys). Rainforest Cowboys is the first book to examine the social and cultural forces driving the expansion of Amazonian cattle raising in all of their complexity. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork, Jeffrey Hoelle shows how cattle raising is about much more than beef production or deforestation in Acre, even among "carnivorous" environmentalists, vilified ranchers, and urbanites with no land or cattle. He contextualizes the rise of ranching in relation to political economic structures and broader meanings to understand the spread of "cattle culture." This cattle-centered vision of rural life builds on local experiences and influences from across the Americas and even resembles East African cultural practices. Written in a broadly accessible and interdisciplinary style, Rainforest Cowboys is essential reading for a global audience interested in understanding the economic and cultural features of cattle raising, deforestation, and the continuing tensions between conservation and development in the Amazon.
This is the first environmental history of China during the three thousand years for which there are written records. It is also a treasure trove of literary, political, aesthetic, scientific, and ...religious sources, which allow the reader direct access to the views and feelings of the Chinese people toward their environment and their landscape.Elvin chronicles the spread of the Chinese style of farming that eliminated the habitat of the elephants that populated the country alongside much of its original wildlife; the destruction of most of the forests; the impact of war on the environmental transformation of the landscape; and the re-engineering of the countryside through water-control systems, some of gigantic size. He documents the histories of three contrasting localities within China to show how ecological dynamics defined the lives of the inhabitants. And he shows that China in the eighteenth century, on the eve of the modern era, was probably more environmentally degraded than northwestern Europe around this time.Indispensable for its new perspective on long-term Chinese history and its explanation of the roots of China's present-day environmental crisis, this book opens a door into the Chinese past.
Coasts under stress Ommer, Rosemary E
Coasts under stress,
c2007, 2007, 20070808, 2007-08-08, 20070101
eBook, Book
Rosemary Ommer and her project team combine formal scientific (natural and social) and humanist analysis with an examination of the lived experience of coastal people. They analyze community erosion ...created by economic decline and the ecosystem damage caused by unrelenting industrial pressure on natural resources and look at the history of coastal communities, their resource bases, their economies, and the way the lives of people are embedded in their environments.
This book is a holistic environmental history of the Middle East and North Africa over the last half millennium. It shows how the intimate connections between peoples and environments shaped ...political, economic, and social history in startling and often unforeseen ways. Nearly all political powers in the region based their rule on the management and control of natural resources, and nearly all individuals were in constant communion with the natural world. To grasp how these multiple histories were central to the pasts of the Middle East and North Africa, the chapters in this book demonstrate the power of environmental history to open up new avenues of historical research and understanding. The book furthermore traces how the Middle East and North Africa deeply affected the global histories of climate, disease, trade, energy, environmental politics, ecological manipulation, and much more. At the intersection of three continents and as many seas, the Middle East and North Africa have been central to world history for millennia. Studying the ecological implications of these global connections, both for the region itself and for the rest of the world, helps bring the Middle East and North Africa into global history and shows how the region must be an essential part of any understanding of the environments of Eurasia over the last five hundred years.
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.
The former Soviet empire spanned eleven time zones and contained half the world's forests; vast deposits of oil, gas and coal; various ores; major rivers such as the Volga, Don and Angara; and ...extensive biodiversity. These resources and animals, as well as the people who lived in the former Soviet Union - Slavs, Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Kazakhs and Tajiks, indigenous Nenets and Chukchi - were threatened by environmental degradation and extensive pollution. This environmental history of the former Soviet Union explores the impact that state economic development programs had on the environment. The authors consider the impact of Bolshevik ideology on the establishment of an extensive system of nature preserves, the effect of Stalinist practices of industrialization and collectivization on nature, and the rise of public involvement under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and changes to policies and practices with the rise of Gorbachev and the break-up of the USSR.
In Strange Natures , Nicole Seymour investigates the ways in which contemporary queer fictions offer insight on environmental issues through their performance of a specifically queer understanding of ...nature, the nonhuman, and environmental degradation. By drawing upon queer theory and ecocriticism, Seymour examines how contemporary queer fictions extend their critique of natural categories of gender and sexuality to the nonhuman natural world, thus constructing a queer environmentalism. Seymour's thoughtful analyses of works such as Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues , Todd Haynes's Safe , and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain illustrate how homophobia, classism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia inform dominant views of the environment and help to justify its exploitation. Calling for a queer environmental ethics, she delineates the discourses that have worked to prevent such an ethics and argues for a concept of queerness that is attuned to environmentalism's urgent futurity, and an environmentalism that is attuned to queer sensibilities.
