A Living Past

A Living Past PDF Author: John Soluri
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785333917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
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.

A Living Past

A Living Past PDF Author: John Soluri
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785333917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
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.

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait PDF Author: Bathsheba Demuth
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393635171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
A groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between capitalism, communism, and Arctic ecology since the dawn of the industrial age. Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great 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, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history. Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that immense human needs and ambitions have brought, and will continue to bring, to a finite planet.

The Environment in World History

The Environment in World History PDF Author: Stephen Mosley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100099144X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Now in its second edition and refreshed by a decade of new research, The Environment in World History uncovers the deep-rooted causes of interconnected climate, biodiversity, and ecological crises that have brought the environment to the top of the global political agenda in the twenty-first century. Its expanded chapters and case studies explore a wide range of issues including the following: the hunting of wildlife and the loss of biodiversity across the globe; deforestation and the development of strategies to protect the world’s forests; soil degradation caused by worldwide agricultural expansion, one of the most profound ways that humans have altered the planet; the widening impact of urban-industrial growth and the deepening ecological footprints of the world’s cities; and the rising levels of air, land and water pollution as the trade-off for continued economic growth worldwide. Covering the last five hundred years, it offers an essential environmental perspective on well-known world history narratives of imperialism and colonialism, trade and commerce, technological progress and the advance of civilisation. Clearly written and fully up-to-date, it is an invaluable resource for all students of world history and environmental studies.

American Environmental History

American Environmental History PDF Author: Dan Allosso
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781981731732
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
An expanded, new and improved American Environmental History textbook for everyone! After years of teaching Environmental History at a major East Coast University without a textbook, Dr. Dan Allosso decided to take matters into his own hands. The result, American Environmental History, is a concise, comprehensive survey covering the material from Dan's undergraduate course. What do people say about the class and the text? "This was my first semester and this course has created an incredible first impression. If all of the courses are this good, I am going to really enjoy my time here. The course has completely changed the way I look at the world." (Student in 2014 class) "One of the few classes I'm really sad is ending, the subject matter is fascinating and Dan is a great guide to it. His approach should be required of all students as it teaches an appreciation for a newer and better way of living." (Student in 2014 class) "Allosso's lectures are fantastic. The best I have ever had. So impressed. The material is always extremely interesting and well-presented." (Student in 2015 class) "It is just a perfect course that I think should be mandatory if we want to save our planet and live responsibly." (Student in 2015 class) "A rare gem for an IB ESS teacher or any social studies teacher looking for an 11th or 12th grade supplementary text that aims to provide an historical context for the environmental reality in America today. Highly recommended." (District Curriculum Coordinator, 2016) "I was so impressed with this material that I am using it as a supplement for a course I teach at my college." (History and Environmental Studies Professor, 2017) Beginning in prehistory and concluding in the present, American Environmental History explores the ways the environment has affected the choices that became our history, and how our choices have affected the environment. The dynamic relationship between people and the world around them is missing from mainstream history. Putting the environment back into history helps us make sense of the past and the present, which will help guide us toward a better future. More information and Dan's blog are available at environmentalhistory.us

From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba

From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba PDF Author: Reinaldo Funes Monzote
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807888869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
In this award-winning environmental history of Cuba since the age of Columbus, Reinaldo Funes Monzote emphasizes the two processes that have had the most dramatic impact on the island's landscape: deforestation and sugar cultivation. During the first 300 years of Spanish settlement, sugar plantations arose primarily in areas where forests had been cleared by the royal navy, which maintained an interest in management and conservation for the shipbuilding industry. The sugar planters won a decisive victory in 1815, however, when they were allowed to clear extensive forests, without restriction, for cane fields and sugar production. This book is the first to consider Cuba's vital sugar industry through the lens of environmental history. Funes Monzote demonstrates how the industry that came to define Cuba--and upon which Cuba urgently depended--also devastated the ecology of the island. The original Spanish-language edition of the book, published in Mexico in 2004, was awarded the UNESCO Book Prize for Caribbean Thought, Environmental Category. For this first English edition, the author has revised the text throughout and provided new material, including a glossary and a conclusion that summarizes important developments up to the present.

Paper Landscapes

Paper Landscapes PDF Author: P. Boomgaard
Publisher: Brill
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Too much of what has so far passed for the 'historical background' to Indonesia's environmental problems has consisted of little more than thinly disguised backward projections of modern trends. The writers in this volume report on their own pioneer journeys into the paper landscapes of the colonial literature and archives in search of the real environmental history of Indonesia.

Ice Blink

Ice Blink PDF Author: Stephen Bocking
Publisher: Canadian History and Environment
ISBN: 9781552388549
Category : Arctic regions
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cover -- Series Page -- Full Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- 1: Navigating Northern Environmental History -- Part 1: Forming Northern Colonial Environments -- 2: Moving through the Margins:The "All-Canadian" Route tothe Klondike and the StrangeExperience of the Teslin Trail -- 3: The Experimental State of Nature: Science and the Canadian Reindeer Project in the Interwar North -- 4: Shaped by the Land: An Envirotechnical History of a Canadian Bush Plane -- 5: Many Tiny Traces: Antimodernism and Northern Exploration Between the Wars -- Part 2: Transformations and the Modern North -- 6: From Subsistence to Nutrition: The Canadian State's Involvement in Food and Diet in the North,1900-1970 -- 7: Hope in the Barrenlands: Northern Development and Sustainability's Canadian History -- 8: Western Electric Turns North: Technicians and the Transformation of the Cold War Arctic -- Part 3: Environmental History and the Contemporary North -- 9: "That's the Place Where I Was Born": History, Narrative Ecology, and Politics in Canada's North -- 10: Imposing Territoriality: First Nation Land Claims and the Transformation of Human-Environment Relations in the Yukon -- 11: Ghost Towns and Zombie Mines: The Historical Dimensions of Mine Abandonment, Reclamation, and Redevelopment in the Canadian North -- 12: Toxic Surprises: Contaminants and Knowledgein the Northern Environment -- 13: Climate Anti-Politics: Scale, Locality, and Arctic Climate Change -- Conclusion -- 14: Encounters in Northern Environmental History -- Contributors -- Index

Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future

Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future PDF Author: Bartow J. Elmore
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324002050
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
An authoritative and eye-opening history that examines how Monsanto came to have outsized influence over our food system. Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018—but its Roundup Ready® seeds, introduced twenty-five years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us. When researchers found trace amounts of the firm’s blockbuster herbicide in breakfast cereal bowls, Monsanto faced public outcry. Award-winning historian Bartow J. Elmore shows how the Roundup story is just one of the troubling threads of Monsanto’s past, many told here and woven together for the first time. A company employee sitting on potentially explosive information who weighs risking everything to tell his story. A town whose residents are urged to avoid their basements because Monsanto’s radioactive waste laces their homes’ foundations. Factory workers who peel off layers of their skin before accepting cash bonuses to continue dirty jobs. An executive wrestling with the ethics of selling a profitable product he knew was toxic. Incorporating global fieldwork, interviews with company employees, and untapped corporate and government records, Elmore traces Monsanto’s astounding evolution from a scrappy chemical startup to a global agribusiness powerhouse. Monsanto used seed money derived from toxic products—including PCBs and Agent Orange—to build an agricultural empire, promising endless bounty through its genetically engineered technology. Skyrocketing sales of Monsanto’s new Roundup Ready system stunned even those in the seed trade, who marveled at the influx of cash and lavish incentives into their sleepy sector. But as new data emerges about the Roundup system, and as Bayer faces a tide of lawsuits over Monsanto products past and present, Elmore’s urgent history shows how our food future is still very much tethered to the company’s chemical past.

Toxic Bodies

Toxic Bodies PDF Author: Nancy Langston
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300162995
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
In 1941 the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of diethylstilbestrol (DES), the first synthetic chemical to be marketed as an estrogen and one of the first to be identified as a hormone disruptor—a chemical that mimics hormones. Although researchers knew that DES caused cancer and disrupted sexual development, doctors prescribed it for millions of women, initially for menopause and then for miscarriage, while farmers gave cattle the hormone to promote rapid weight gain. Its residues, and those of other chemicals, in the American food supply are changing the internal ecosystems of human, livestock, and wildlife bodies in increasingly troubling ways. In this gripping exploration, Nancy Langston shows how these chemicals have penetrated into every aspect of our bodies and ecosystems, yet the U.S. government has largely failed to regulate them and has skillfully manipulated scientific uncertainty to delay regulation. Personally affected by endocrine disruptors, Langston argues that the FDA needs to institute proper regulation of these commonly produced synthetic chemicals.

Making Salmon

Making Salmon PDF Author: Joseph E. Taylor III
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295989912
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Award, American Society for Environmental History