Umwelt als Ressource highlights the interaction and co-evolution of modern industry and the environment, using the example of the German paper industry in Saxony.
Beschädigte Vegetation und sterbender Wald traces the history of the environmental problem of air pollution and its damaging effects on forests in Germany.
Der gezähmte Prometheus traces large fire catastrophes and the rise of the insurance business from its beginnings in fifteenth century Europe to its boom in nineteenth century globalized metropoles across the world.
Projektion Natur is a collection of articles contextualising “green” genetic engineering within the debate about nature and society.
Wasser correlates the control of water supply with power in a comparative collection of articles on water in ancient, early modern, and modern states.
A grippingly perceptive tale of changing social attitudes and scientific practices.
In Recycling, former Rachel Carson Center fellow Finn Arne Jørgensen investigates the benefits and drawbacks of recycling.
Weltmeere examines society’s relationship with the oceans in the nineteenth century, through subjects such as whale fishing, polar expeditions, the sea in literature and psychology, and marine studies.
In case studies ranging from the Early Modern secondhand trade to utopian visions of human-powered vehicles, the contributions gathered here explore the historical fortunes of bicycling and waste recycling—tracing their development over time and providing valuable context for the policy successes and failures of today.
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.
