Tom Griffiths argues for the importance of environmental history, and gives us three reasons for the uniqueness of the environmental history of Australia.
The contributions in this volume explore the way that Australasian environments have been envisioned, worked, and changed in the past, and how ideas about places inform the present and future of the continent.
Content
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.
Euer Dorf soll schöner werden captures the transformation of Germany’s rural landscape through modernization between 1961 and 1979, through the inter-village contest, “Unser Dorf soll schöner werden” (“May our village become more beautiful”).
Harry Barton examines a 1991 proposal to embark upon the largest mining project in Europe, on the remote island of Harris and Lewis in Scotland. He argues that different groups perceive their environments differently, and pleads for a wider recognition of this diversity, as well as expansions of concepts of development and sustainability.
Brian Baxter responds to Onora O’Neill’s argument that environmental ethics could and should be reformulated in terms of a search for the obligations held by moral agents towards each other, with respect to the non-human world.
Ben A. Minteer criticises the tendency in environmental ethics to demonstrate a preference for foundationalist approaches in the theoretical justification of environmentalism. He argues for a more contextual, social, and pragmatic approach.
Holmes Rolston III discusses nature and development in an invited response to other articles in this issue of Environmental Values.
Cultivating Arctic Landscapes gives a well-rounded portrait of wildlife management, aboriginal rights, and politics in the circumpolar north. The book reveals unexpected continuities between socialist and capitalist ecological styles, and addresses the problems facing a new era of cultural exchanges between aboriginal peoples in each region.
This short film follows a spoiled tomato as it moves through the Brazilian food chain.
