American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species

American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species PDF Author: Peter Coates
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520933257
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose, humans have transported plants and animals to new habitats around the world. Arriving in ever-increasing numbers to American soil, recent invaders have competed with, preyed on, hybridized with, and carried diseases to native species, transforming our ecosystems and creating anxiety among environmentalists and the general public. But is American anxiety over this crisis of ecological identity a recent phenomenon? Charting shifting attitudes to alien species since the 1850s, Peter Coates brings to light the rich cultural and historical aspects of this story by situating the history of immigrant flora and fauna within the wider context of human immigration. Through an illuminating series of particular invasions, including the English sparrow and the eucalyptus tree, what he finds is that we have always perceived plants and animals in relation to ourselves and the polities to which we belong. Setting the saga of human relations with the environment in the broad context of scientific, social, and cultural history, this thought-provoking book demonstrates how profoundly notions of nationality and debates over race and immigration have shaped American understandings of the natural world.

American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species

American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species PDF Author: Peter Coates
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520933257
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose, humans have transported plants and animals to new habitats around the world. Arriving in ever-increasing numbers to American soil, recent invaders have competed with, preyed on, hybridized with, and carried diseases to native species, transforming our ecosystems and creating anxiety among environmentalists and the general public. But is American anxiety over this crisis of ecological identity a recent phenomenon? Charting shifting attitudes to alien species since the 1850s, Peter Coates brings to light the rich cultural and historical aspects of this story by situating the history of immigrant flora and fauna within the wider context of human immigration. Through an illuminating series of particular invasions, including the English sparrow and the eucalyptus tree, what he finds is that we have always perceived plants and animals in relation to ourselves and the polities to which we belong. Setting the saga of human relations with the environment in the broad context of scientific, social, and cultural history, this thought-provoking book demonstrates how profoundly notions of nationality and debates over race and immigration have shaped American understandings of the natural world.

Invasive Species in Forests and Rangelands of the United States

Invasive Species in Forests and Rangelands of the United States PDF Author: Therese M. Poland
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030453677
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
This open access book describes the serious threat of invasive species to native ecosystems. Invasive species have caused and will continue to cause enormous ecological and economic damage with ever increasing world trade. This multi-disciplinary book, written by over 100 national experts, presents the latest research on a wide range of natural science and social science fields that explore the ecology, impacts, and practical tools for management of invasive species. It covers species of all taxonomic groups from insects and pathogens, to plants, vertebrates, and aquatic organisms that impact a diversity of habitats in forests, rangelands and grasslands of the United States. It is well-illustrated, provides summaries of the most important invasive species and issues impacting all regions of the country, and includes a comprehensive primary reference list for each topic. This scientific synthesis provides the cultural, economic, scientific and social context for addressing environmental challenges posed by invasive species and will be a valuable resource for scholars, policy makers, natural resource managers and practitioners.

A Handbook of Global Freshwater Invasive Species

A Handbook of Global Freshwater Invasive Species PDF Author: Robert A. Francis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136461248
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 918

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Book Description
Invasive non-native species are a major threat to global biodiversity. Often introduced accidentally through international travel or trade, they invade and colonize new habitats, often with devastating consequences for the local flora and fauna. Their environmental impacts can range from damage to resource production (e.g. agriculture and forestry) and infrastructure (e.g. buildings, road and water supply), to human health. They consequently can have major economic impacts. It is a priority to prevent their introduction and spread, as well as to control them. Freshwater ecosystems are particularly at risk from invasions and are landscape corridors that facilitate the spread of invasives. This book reviews the current state of knowledge of the most notable global invasive freshwater species or groups, based on their severity of economic impact, geographic distribution outside of their native range, extent of research, and recognition of the ecological severity of the impact of the species by the IUCN. As well as some of the very well-known species, the book also covers some invasives that are emerging as serious threats. Examples covered include a range of aquatic and riparian plants, insects, molluscs, crustacea, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals, as well as some major pathogens of aquatic organisms. The book also includes overview chapters synthesizing the ecological impact of invasive species in fresh water and summarizing practical implications for the management of rivers and other freshwater habitats.

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

The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History

The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History PDF Author: Andrew C. Isenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190673486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 801

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History draws on a wealth of new scholarship to offer diverse perspectives on the state of the field.

Trout Culture

Trout Culture PDF Author: Jen Corrinne Brown
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805811
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West, the popular conception of Rocky Mountain trout fishing as a quintessential experience of communion with nature belies the sport’s long history of environmental manipulation, engineering, and, ultimately, transformation. A fly-fishing enthusiast herself, Brown places the rise of recreational trout fishing in a local and global context. Globally, she shows how the European sport of fly-fishing came to be a defining, tourist-attracting feature of the expanding 19th-century American West. Locally, she traces the way that the burgeoning fly-fishing tourist industry shaped the environmental, economic, and social development of the Western United States: introducing and stocking favored fish species, eradicating the less favored native “trash fish,” changing the courses of waterways, and leading to conflicts with Native Americans’ fishing and territorial rights. Through this analysis, Brown demonstrates that the majestic trout streams often considered a timeless feature of the American West are in fact the product of countless human interventions adding up to a profound manipulation of the Rocky Mountain environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKMwEkKj9jg

Frontier Cities

Frontier Cities PDF Author: Jay Gitlin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Macau, New Orleans, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. All of these metropolitan centers were once frontier cities, urban areas irrevocably shaped by cross-cultural borderland beginnings. Spanning a wide range of periods and locations, and including stories of eighteenth-century Detroit, nineteenth-century Seattle, and twentieth-century Los Angeles, Frontier Cities recovers the history of these urban places and shows how, from the start, natives and newcomers alike shared streets, buildings, and interwoven lives. Not only do frontier cities embody the earliest matrix of the American urban experience; they also testify to the intersections of colonial, urban, western, and global history. The twelve essays in this collection paint compelling portraits of frontier cities and their inhabitants: the French traders who bypassed imperial regulations by throwing casks of brandy over the wall to Indian customers in eighteenth-century Montreal; Isaac Friedlander, San Francisco's "Grain King"; and Adrien de Pauger, who designed the Vieux Carré in New Orleans. Exploring the economic and political networks, imperial ambitions, and personal intimacies of frontier city development, this collection demonstrates that these cities followed no mythic line of settlement, nor did they move lockstep through a certain pace or pattern of evolution. An introduction puts the collection in historical context, and the epilogue ponders the future of frontier cities in the midst of contemporary globalization. With innovative concepts and a rich selection of maps and images, Frontier Cities imparts a crucial untold chapter in the construction of urban history and place.

Smell Detectives

Smell Detectives PDF Author: Melanie A. Kiechle
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295741945
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
What did nineteenth-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the nineteenth-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary challenges caused by rapid urban and industrial growth. Melanie Kiechle examines nuisance complaints, medical writings, domestic advice, and myriad discussions of what constituted fresh air, and argues that nineteenth-century city dwellers, anxious about the air they breathed, attempted to create healthier cities by detecting and then mitigating the most menacing odors. Medical theories in the nineteenth century assumed that foul odors caused disease and that overcrowded cities—filled with new and stronger stinks—were synonymous with disease and danger. But the sources of offending odors proved difficult to pinpoint. The creation of city health boards introduced new conflicts between complaining citizens and the officials in charge of the air. Smell Detectives looks at the relationship between the construction of scientific expertise, on the one hand, and “common sense”—the olfactory experiences of common people—on the other. Although the rise of germ theory revolutionized medical knowledge and ultimately undid this form of sensory knowing, Smell Detectives recovers how city residents used their sense of smell and their health concerns about foul odors to understand, adjust to, and fight against urban environmental changes.

Biotic Borders

Biotic Borders PDF Author: Jeannie N. Shinozuka
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022681730X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A rich and eye-opening history of the mutual constitution of race and species in modern America. In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nursery stock and other agricultural products shipped from Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. In Biotic Borders, Jeannie N. Shinozuka uncovers the emergence of biological nativism that fueled American imperialism and spurred anti-Asian racism that remains with us today. Shinozuka provides an eye-opening look at biotic exchanges that not only altered the lives of Japanese in America but transformed American society more broadly. She shows how the modern fixation on panic about foreign species created a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that flourished in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia inspired concerns about biodiversity, prompting new categories of “native” and “invasive” species that defined groups as bio-invasions to be regulated—or annihilated. By highlighting these connections, Shinozuka shows us that this story cannot be told about humans alone—the plants and animals that crossed with them were central to Japanese American and Asian American history. The rise of economic entomology and plant pathology in concert with public health and anti-immigration movements demonstrate these entangled histories of xenophobia, racism, and species invasions.

The Journeys of Trees: A Story about Forests, People, and the Future

The Journeys of Trees: A Story about Forests, People, and the Future PDF Author: Zach St. George
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324001615
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
An urgent and illuminating portrait of forest migration, and of the people studying the forests of the past, protecting the forests of the present, and planting the forests of the future. Forests are restless. Any time a tree dies or a new one sprouts, the forest that includes it has shifted. When new trees sprout in the same direction, the whole forest begins to migrate, sometimes at astonishing rates. Today, however, an array of obstacles—humans felling trees by the billions, invasive pests transported through global trade—threaten to overwhelm these vital movements. Worst of all, the climate is changing faster than ever before, and forests are struggling to keep up. A deft blend of science reporting and travel writing, The Journeys of Trees explores the evolving movements of forests by focusing on five trees: giant sequoia, ash, black spruce, Florida torreya, and Monterey pine. Journalist Zach St. George visits these trees in forests across continents, finding sequoias losing their needles in California, fossil records showing the paths of ancient forests in Alaska, domesticated pines in New Zealand, and tender new sprouts of blight-resistant American chestnuts in New Hampshire. Everywhere he goes, St. George meets lively people on conservation’s front lines, from an ecologist studying droughts to an evolutionary evangelist with plans to save a dying species. He treks through the woods with activists, biologists, and foresters, each with their own role to play in the fight for the uncertain future of our environment. An eye-opening investigation into forest migration past and present, The Journeys of Trees examines how we can all help our trees, and our planet, survive and thrive.