Perspectives Article
Mountains beyond Mountains: Cross-Cultural Reflections on China
A cross-cultural dialogue on the cultural and environmental history of mountains in China.
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Perspectives Article
Pursuing Environmental History on India’s Himalayas: Challenges and Rewards
A reflection on the challenges of doing environmental history research in the diverse region of the Himalayas.
Perspectives Article
Conspicuous Elevations and the High Art of Posing the Right Question
Reflects on how one best selects a research question in environmental history. Three Ps are offered as guidance: personal interests, practical matters, procedural concerns, professional considerations, and public issues.
Perspectives
Crossing Mountains: The Challenges of Doing Environmental History
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.
Perspectives Article
Africa’s Mountains: Collecting and Interpreting the Past
This essay addresses the challenges of collecting and interpreting data for environmental history in East Africa’s highlands.
Perspectives Article
The British Shaping of America’s First Fossil Fuel Transition
American knowledge of British coal practices had at least two crucial implications for the timing and shape of the nation’s first fossil fuel energy transition. This story suggests that attention to transnational contexts can help us better understand how, when, and why energy transitions occur.
Perspectives Article
Scarcity in the Arctic: A Colonial Construct?
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.
Perspectives Article
Anthropocene Blues: Abundance, Energy, Limits
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.
Perspectives
Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses”
In “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Dipesh Chakrabarty examined the idea of the Anthropocene—the dawn of a new geological period dominated by human activities—in the context of history and philosophy, raising fundamental questions about how we think historically in an era when human and geological timescales are colliding.This volume of RCC Perspectives offers critiques of these “Four Theses” by scholars of environmental history, political philosophy, religious studies, literary criticism, environmental planning, geography, law, biology, and geology.
Perspectives Article
Heralding a New Humanism: The Radical Implications of Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses”
LeCain provides a detailed analysis of Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses” and its implications for humanism. This thinking diverges from that of Western Enlightenment by challenging the humanistic belief that we are separate from, even above, the material world. In fact, human culture is inextricably linked to the natural material world; we are both a force and product of it.