The Environment and World History

The Environment and World History PDF Author: Edmund Burke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520256873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
In 11 essays, the contributors examine the connections between environmental change and other major topics of early modern world history: population growth, commercialization, imperialism, industrialization, the fossil fuel revolution, and more.

The Environment and World History

The Environment and World History PDF Author: Edmund Burke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520256873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
In 11 essays, the contributors examine the connections between environmental change and other major topics of early modern world history: population growth, commercialization, imperialism, industrialization, the fossil fuel revolution, and more.

Humans Versus Nature

Humans Versus Nature PDF Author: Daniel R. Headrick
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190864710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
Since the appearance of Homo sapiens on the planet hundreds of thousands of years ago, human beings have sought to exploit their environments, extracting as many resources as their technological ingenuity has allowed. As technologies have advanced in recent centuries, that impulse has remained largely unchecked, exponentially accelerating the human impact on the environment. Humans versus Nature tells a history of the global environment from the Stone Age to the present, emphasizing the adversarial relationship between the human and natural worlds. Nature is cast as an active protagonist, rather than a mere backdrop or victim of human malfeasance. Daniel R. Headrick shows how environmental changes--epidemics, climate shocks, and volcanic eruptions--have molded human societies and cultures, sometimes overwhelming them. At the same time, he traces the history of anthropogenic changes in the environment--species extinctions, global warming, deforestation, and resource depletion--back to the age of hunters and gatherers and the first farmers and herders. He shows how human interventions such as irrigation systems, over-fishing, and the Industrial Revolution have in turn harmed the very societies that initiated them. Throughout, Headrick examines how human-driven environmental changes are interwoven with larger global systems, dramatically reshaping the complex relationship between people and the natural world. In doing so, he roots the current environmental crisis in the deep past.

A Companion to Global Environmental History

A Companion to Global Environmental History PDF Author: J. R. McNeill
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111897753X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
The Companion to Global Environmental History offers multiple points of entry into the history and historiography of this dynamic and fast-growing field, to provide an essential road map to past developments, current controversies, and future developments for specialists and newcomers alike. Combines temporal, geographic, thematic and contextual approaches from prehistory to the present day Explores environmental thought and action around the world, to give readers a cultural, intellectual and political context for engagement with the environment in modern times Brings together environmental historians from around the world, including scholars from South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and China

Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (The Global Century Series)

Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (The Global Century Series) PDF Author: J. R. McNeill
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393075893
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
"One of those rare books that’s both sweeping and specific, scholarly and readable…What makes the book stand out is its wealth of historical detail." —Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker The history of the twentieth century is most often told through its world wars, the rise and fall of communism, or its economic upheavals. In his startling book, J. R. McNeill gives us our first general account of what may prove to be the most significant dimension of the twentieth century: its environmental history. To a degree unprecedented in human history, we have refashioned the earth's air, water, and soil, and the biosphere of which we are a part. Based on exhaustive research, McNeill's story—a compelling blend of anecdotes, data, and shrewd analysis—never preaches: it is our definitive account. This is a volume in The Global Century Series (general editor, Paul Kennedy).

Global Environmental History

Global Environmental History PDF Author: John Robert McNeill
Publisher: Rewriting Histories
ISBN: 9780415520539
Category : Environmental policy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Global Environmental History introduces this rapidly developing field through a broad and thought-provoking range of expert contributions, it will be an essential resource for students of Environmental History and Global History.

Climate Change and the Course of Global History

Climate Change and the Course of Global History PDF Author: John L. Brooke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521871646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 655

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Book Description
The first global study by a historian to fully integrate the earth-system approach of the new climate science with the material history of humanity.

Surroundings

Surroundings PDF Author: Etienne S. Benson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670629X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
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.

A Global History of Literature and the Environment

A Global History of Literature and the Environment PDF Author: John Parham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108107680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 736

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Book Description
In A Global History of Literature and the Environment, an international group of scholars illustrate the immense riches of environmental writing from the earliest literary periods down to the present. It addresses ancient writings about human/animal/plant relations from India, classical Greece, Chinese and Japanese literature, the Maya Popol Vuh, Islamic texts, medieval European works, eighteenth-century and Romantic ecologies, colonial/postcolonial environmental interrelations, responses to industrialization, and the emerging literatures of the world in the present Anthropocene moment. Essays range from Trinidad to New Zealand, Estonia to Brazil. Discussion of these texts indicates a variety of ways environmental criticism can fruitfully engage literary works and cultures from every continent and every historical period. This is a uniquely varied and rich international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present. It provides a compelling account of a topic that is crucial to twenty-first-century global literary studies.

The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment

The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment PDF Author: Perrin Selcer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548230
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. In The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth”—the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system—exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions. Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the “global”—as in global population, global climate, and global economy—an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO’s Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.

What is Environmental History?

What is Environmental History? PDF Author: J. Donald Hughes
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745688462
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
What is environmental history? It is a kind of history that seeks understanding of human beings as they have lived, worked, and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the changes brought by time. In this new edition of his seminal student textbook, J. Donald Hughes provides a masterful overview of the thinkers, topics, and perspectives that have come to constitute the exciting discipline that is environmental history. He does so on a global scale, drawing together disparate trends from a rich variety of countries into a unified whole, illuminating trends and key themes in the process. Those already familiar with the discipline will find themselves invited to think about the subject in a new way. This new edition has been updated to reflect recent developments, trends, and new work in environmental history, as well as a brand new note on its possible future. Students and scholars new to environmental history will find the book both an indispensable guide and a rich source of inspiration for future work.