"Editorial" for Global Environment 3
Covers the content of this issue’s analysis of modern environmental systems, and how these systems have changed over time.
climate change
Review of Global Environmental History: 10,000 BC to AD 2000 by Ian Gordon Simmons
Economic historian Paolo Malanima reviews a work of ambitious scale by geographer Ian Gordon Simmons.
There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho
The Polynesian community of Takuu, a tiny low-lying atoll in the South Western Pacific, experiences the devastating effects of climate change first-hand.
Paul Crutzen popularizes the concept of the Anthropocene
The theory states that humanity is a major geological and geobiological factor on Earth.
Themes:
Roundtable Review of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers by Mark Carey
In this book Mark Carey identifies glacial retreat as a historical reality that has played a substantial role in the political, economic, and social dramas of South America.
Roundtable Review of Fixing the Sky by James R. Fleming
If climate change mitigation through political agreement has no hope of succeeding, does it make sense to tinker with the climate?
Roundtable Review of Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Why do we continue to talk about the debate over global warming as if it were a scientific controversy?
World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF)
The WWF is one of the world’s biggest environmental protection organizations with more than five million supporters worldwide.
"Historical Evidence for Climate Instability and Environmental Catastrophes in Northern Syria and the Jazira: The Chronicle of Michael the Syrian"
The article argues that diversified subsistence and a high degree of flexibility were essential for ancient Mesopotamian societies to absorb the many risks that life in this marginal semiarid environment involved.
"Environmental Anxiety in New Zealand, 1840–1941: Climate Change, Soil Erosion, Sand Drift, Flooding and Forest Conservation"
The history of environmental anxiety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New Zealand can be traced by focusing on problems caused by deforestation.