This volume explores some of the diverse niches created by humans in different times and places. The essays span the globe, from Texas to China, from Scandinavia to Papua New Guinea, exploring agricultural spaces and indoor biomes, human aesthetics, and Anthropocentric perspectives.
Content
Veit Braun explores the troubling and often contradictory nature of care, revealing the restrictions of simplifying the duality of caring or violent states.
Allan Curtis and Terry De Lacey analyze perceptions of the Australian grassroots movement “Landcare” through landholder surveys, thereby discussing wider concepts of natural resource management, stewardship and sustainable agriculture in Australia.
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.
Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia brings together case studies from across the globe to reveal underlying cultural ontologies and call for more integration between the work of scholars and practitioners.
Building on Water focusses on the relationship between early modern agriculture and water management in Europe, and the history of Venetian hydraulic management.
Ellis argues that the unparalleled capacity of human societies to construct ecological niches at growing social and spatial scales has allowed them to alter the Earth permanently and profoundly.
Kluiving and Hamel explore why the Anthropocene emerged. They suggest that an analysis of global changes in human niche construction using geoarchaeological data offers new perspectives on the causes and effects of the Anthropocene.
Eriksson and Arnell address the ecological and cultural effects of the Swedish infield system in Scandinavia. Their essay sheds light on how the human construction and management of infields maintained a spatial continuity that greatly altered, and continues to impact, how humans and other organisms have developed.
David Bello explores the fraught struggle between humans and locusts for occupancy of the agricultural niches created by farmers during China’s Qing dynasty.
