American Forests: Nature, Culture, and Politics
An edited collection investigating the history of forestry in the United States from the nineteenth century onward.
An edited collection investigating the history of forestry in the United States from the nineteenth century onward.
Experts in history, history of science, archaeology, geography, and environmental studies examine the history of the region.
The modernization, the declinist, and the inclinist paradigms of the late twentieth century, despite their differences, all tended to frame environmental change in a unilinear Nature-to-Culture fashion, which in turn entailed homogenizing the agency, process, and outcome of environmental change. This article examines the characteristics of each paradigm, as well as some of the paradoxes that have arisen in their wake. Finally, it looks to alternative approaches.
For one month, we are able to follow an assistant forester on his daily rounds about the province of Capiz on Panay Island, as the forest was transformed from a resource and a refuge into an arena where state management practices and indigenous customary rights competed alongside those who saw trees as nothing more than a commercial enterprise.
Investigates the significance of the Sundarbans as a natural reserve or buffer area (a resource of yet unknown magnitude) in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial South Asia.
Tom Lee on the dynamism and complexity of the relationship that exists between differing kinds of knowledge.
Steven Luper discusses natural resources, gadgets, and artificial life.
When Jacques Piccard started his first deep-sea expedition in 1960, the world’s oceans still seemed healthy and clean.
Powerless Science? looks at complex historical, social, and political dynamics, made up of public controversies, environmental and health crises, economic interests, and political responses, and demonstrates how and to what extent scientific knowledge about toxicants has been caught between scientific, economic, and political imperatives.
Managing the Unknown offers essays that show that deficient knowledge is a far more pervasive challenge in resource history than conventional readings suggest. Furthermore, environmental ignorance does not inevitably shrink with the march of scientific progress. This volume combines insights from different continents as well as the seas in between and thus sketches outlines of an emerging global resource history.