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.
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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.
The Sardar Sarovar Dam is constructed in India to aid in the country’s industrialization, providing irrigation, electricity, and economic stimulus. After heavy controversy and international pressures to examine the costs of the project, the World Bank cuts financial assistance, exposing the social costs surrounding modernization and wide scale infrastructure projects.
The Sundarbans, one of the largest remaining areas of mangroves in the world with an exceptional level of biodiversity, is inscripted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World examines the policy changes needed to combat climate change and explores the economic benefits that could flow from the transition.
State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future examines changes in the ways cities are managed, built, and lived in that could tip the balance towards a healthier and more peaceful urban future.
State of the World 2006 provides a special focus on China and India and their impact on the world as major consumers of resources and polluters of local and global ecosystems.
The Population Bomb criticizes overpopulation and advocates instant action to limit population growth. The author justifies his arguments with huge starvation threats and other trouble spots.
A reflection on the challenges of doing environmental history research in the diverse region of the Himalayas.
This issue of RCC Perspectives uses mountains as a common denominator around which to discuss overarching challenges of environmental history: challenges relating not only to mountain landscapes, but also to broader questions of sources, methods, cross-cultural research, project scale, and audience. Each author discusses some of their most intriguing discoveries, resulting in a brief and diverse collection of environmental history snapshots.
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