Perspectives

As a space where terrestrial jurisdiction did not apply, the ocean has often served as a repository for unwanted things, whether people or objects. This article traces the journeys of several ships and their cargos of toxic waste in the 1970s and 1980s.

This reflection on unruliness refers to all papers in the volume, demonstrating how the concept of unruly environments provides a perspective of human-nature relationships from the vantage point of humans.

Looking at coasts, this paper reveals the extent to which unruliness occurs when the human need for stability negotiates with nature’s dynamism, highlighting how we will be forced to renegotiate our relationship with the sea.

This paper uses the settlement histories of the early Deccan Plateau to highlight how heterogeneity, and a process of continual adjustment, shape historical settlements and lead to unruliness.

Looking at nature and culture in Malibu, California, this paper looks at how natural processes occurring in rapid succession—over months and years—have been subject to efforts to turn the area into a tame and orderly garden as part of a linear understanding of progress, closely linked to civility and the cultivation of nature.

Looking at the pastoral Toda people of the Wenlock Downs, this paper considers grassland transformations in the Nilgiris, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Using accounts of man-eating leopards and changing, ungovernable landscape in India’s Central Himalayas, this paper makes sense of the complex and multiple dimensions of the interspecies companionship at the heart of human-wildlife conflict.

This paper considers Cherrapunji, a sleep hilltop village in the remote northeastern frontier of India discovered through the colonial search for a cool place for European sensibilities.

This paper considers the construction of the Panama Canal in order to analyze the confluence of imperialism, modernity, and environmental control.