Through a short account of French reclamation in Algeria, this paper shows that it is between two divergent notions of environmental agency—environments acted upon and environments acting—that unruliness emerges as a provocative and potentially useful theme for environmental historians.
Bringing together scholarship from across the globe, this volume of RCC Perspectives aims to shed light and stimulate discussion on the past, present, and future of the “unruly” environments that frustrate efforts at social and environmental control.
Content
This essay looks at science fiction works by Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin from the 1970s in which visions of scarcity are both critiques of abundance and utopian gestures. Today, Ramírez argues, scarcity has lost its critical power.
The consideration of scarcity as it is represented in literary texts can show us that the distinction of world and language is less stable than it might appear at first sight.
In literature and the arts, scarcity has often been given a positive interpretation as something to be cherished not shunned, actively endorsed and idealized rather than dismissed as an obstacle to artistic success.
Since fossil fuel consumption has been integral to the project of modernity, energy history offers one way of trying to understand the Anthropocene and link the histories of capital and climate.
Although video games seem to be a product of a culture of abundance, they create challenges for their players by requiring them to negotiate conditions of lack, as can be seen in the recent rise in games that portray post-apocalyptic worlds in which scattered survivors have to scavenge for basic resources in barren environments and destroyed ecosystems.
Although medieval Scandinavian literary texts are heavily symbolic and thus cannot be used as reliable sources of information about environmental conditions of the past, they can shed valuable light on the ways premodern societies perceived and dealt with problems of scarcity and environmental change.
In European imagination the North Atlantic has been seen as a region on the far borders of civilization and marked by the contrasts of scarcity and plenty.
British perceptions of the 1874 famines in India and the Ottoman Empire were shaped by discourses that defined these regions as spaces of absence, scarcity, wilderness, or empty land in desperate need of colonial investment and opportunity.
