For nearly a century, we have relied increasingly on science and technology to harness natural forces, but at what environmental and social cost?
Through a series of ethnographic studies that range from Papua New Guinea to Siberia, Brazil to Namibia, Ethnographies of Conservation argues that the problem is not the disappearance of “pristine nature” or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, critical attention would be better turned on discourses of “primitiveness” and “pristine nature,” so prevalent within conservation ideology.
Vaclav Smil shows why energy transitions are inherently complex and prolonged affairs, and how ignoring this raises unrealistic expectations that the United States and other global economies can be weaned quickly from a primary dependency on fossil fuels.
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation” had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume, In the Name of the Great Work follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.
