About this issue
“Unruly environments”—as unwanted, unproductive, and difficult to control spaces—both attract and repel human efforts to transform them. Far from dwindling away in the modern era, these unmastered places are proliferating, in scholarship as in the world at large. As unruly geographies and ecologies—oceans, marshes, grasslands, mountains, and deserts—they frustrate efforts at social and environmental control. As territorial borderlands, they facilitate unexpected cultural exchange, migration, and material flows. As transformed and built landscapes, they generate new forms of risk and regulation. 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 these unruly environments.
How to cite: Krishnan, Siddhartha, Christopher L. Pastore, and Samuel Temple (eds.), “Unruly Environments,” RCC Perspectives 2015, no. 3. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7220.
Content
Introduction
- Unruly Matters by Siddhartha Krishnan, Christopher L. Pastore, and Samuel Temple
Ruling Nature
- Unruly Marshes: Obstacles or Agents of Empire in French North Africa? by Samuel Temple
- Triumphalism and Unruliness during the Construction of the Panama Canal by Paul Sutter
- Rain, Rain, Come Again: Cherrapunji, the Rainiest Spot on Earth by Sajal Nag
Nature Strikes Back
- The Man-Eater Sent by God: Unruly Interspecies Intimacies in India’s Central Himalayas by Radhika Govindrajan
- Woody, Thorny, and Predatory Forests: Grassland Transformations in the Nilgiris, South India by Siddhartha Krishnan
- Unruly Paradise—Nature and Culture in Malibu, California by Christof Mauch
Living with Nature
- Unruly Hinterlands and Settlement Histories of the Deccan Plateau by Aloka Parasher-Sen
- Line in the Sand: The Promises and Perils of Ordering the Ocean’s Edge by Christopher L. Pastore
Unruly Environments: An Overview
- Reflecting on Unruliness by William Beinart
