This article examines the development of North American environmental history as a field on the edges of the historical profession to an increasing application of environmental history to the central events of mainstream North American history.
This article aims to demonstrate the complexity of the interchange of Japanese and European knowledge of natural history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This article studies the aetiology underlying water management by exploring the social hermeneutics that determined its construction. It details how science, technology and political relations construct each other mutually, both producing and harnessing the scientific discourse on the environment.
This article examines the contribution of socio-cultural and economic motives to the process of introductions and invasions of species, in this case, the introduction of the common carp (Cyprinus carpio) to Palestine’s freshwaters in the 1930s, while suggesting a third motive, an ideological one.
A new research station at the South Pole is a sign of increasing international scientific collaboration. The newest Amundsen-Scott Station is larger than previous stations and has a better design, offering the potential for increased longevity in one of the world’s harshest climates.
This article examines the conflicts behind the scenes, within the AAS, between the AAS and the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority (SMA), and within the SMA. It argues that the scientists’ conflict with the SMA over plans for the summit area of Mount Kosciusko (now Kosciuszko) not only established ecology as a scientific basis for conservation thinking: It foreshadowed the current idea that management of a healthy country involves recognition of the links between aesthetic and scientific thinking.
The Sydney Tar Ponds are a huge waste site in Nova Scotia, Canada that contains large amounts of toxic chemicals. The ponds formed in a river mouth, where steel corporations let their largely coal-based pollutants and sludge drain off for many decades.
The history of the Swiss National Park is told for the first time in Creating Wilderness. The deliberate reinterpretation of the American idea of the national park, as implemented in Yellowstone, was innovative and radical, but its consequences were not limited to Switzerland. The Swiss park became the prime example of a “scientific national park,” thereby influencing the course of national parks worldwide.
Powerless Science? looks at complex historical, social, and political dynamics, made up of public controversies, environmental and health crises, economic interests, and political responses, and demonstrates how and to what extent scientific knowledge about toxicants has been caught between scientific, economic, and political imperatives.
Managing the Unknown offers essays that show that deficient knowledge is a far more pervasive challenge in resource history than conventional readings suggest. Furthermore, environmental ignorance does not inevitably shrink with the march of scientific progress. This volume combines insights from different continents as well as the seas in between and thus sketches outlines of an emerging global resource history.
