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Place-centric island historiesThe study of islands is booming. Small wonder: islands have played a key role in the history of continents, have been crucial locales of state-making, have served dictatorships as sites of prison systems and have acted as frontiers and stepping stones of empires. However, the role that island environments have played in creating and shaping these histories has so far received little attention. To understand why an island became a penal colony, an atomic test site or a tourist destination we need to take a close look at its environmental peculiarities: its physical shape, its geology, its climate, its flora and fauna, and its position vis-à-vis other places. And to more deeply comprehend an island's place in history we must consider the changing ways in which it was perceived, used, valued or dismissed, protected or mistreated over time.Through fourteen stories of islands and archipelagos from around the globe Entire of Itself? Towards an Environmental History of Islands showcases islands as dynamic entities that both shape history and are shaped by it. Covering time periods from antiquity to the present day, Entire of Itself? attempts a group portrait of this exceptional category of places in the context of environmental history. Exploring the intertwined temporal, material and identity layers of island environments, and their transformations in response to human endeavours of conservation, exploitation and experimentation, the contributions in this volume challenge the traditional center-periphery perspective, and instead take an island-centred approach, delving into both the islands' own stories and their role in larger historical developments.

Strolling and striding through Britain's historyWalking is a simple and popular recreation, but one that comes freighted with meaning, social attitudes and value judgements. We are not simply left to walk if we feel like it - we are urged by various levels of government and opinion formers to walk more, in order to help the environment or improve our mental and physical health. What is recreational walking anyway? A walk can be a stroll round a small open space in a city or a long hike over demanding terrain in weather that blurs the boundary between exercise and endurance. The stroller and the strider can be the same person at different times, though most walkers have a preference for one end of the spectrum. Walking has appealed to all sorts of people throughout its long recorded history, and this volume delves into a rich variety of sources about walking from the 12th to the 20th century, including diaries, letters, memoirs, poems, fiction, government reports and newspapers.The more committed have not only enjoyed walking but have thought of themselves and been recognised by others as 'walkers', even though all manner of people have walked for recreation. Walking in a socially approved place, in the right sort of clothing, observing the decorum of the time, was a mark of respectability until quite recently. When large numbers of young people were able to take new opportunities to get to the countryside in the 1920s and 1930s, dressing and behaving in ways that expressed their own needs and desires, they were often seen as comic, deplorably urban, socially inferior and in the wrong place. Walkers of all kinds have frequently been regarded as 'in the wrong place'. In the countryside the walker is potentially in disputed territory, questioning one of the sacred tenets of post-enclosure Britain - the association of landownership with power, prestige and the foundations of the social order. This has led to the pattern of exclusion which marks our present relationship with the countryside. In response, an organised social movement to represent the interests and advance the causes of recreational walking claimed a place in the politics of landownership, which is once again in the public eye.

Paradise Blues is an unconventional history of the United States of America, an unusual travel guide that follows and renders visible the country's paths of nature, history and civilisation. Christof Mauch is a leading German historian who has spent many years in the US and in this book he attempts, from a European perspective, to grasp the diversity of American culture and the transformation of its environments, combining travel reporting with nature writing, personal observation and philosophical reflection. Mauch seeks the familiar in unfamiliar places and the curious in places that seem common and well-known. The journey begins in tiny Wiseman, Alaska and the final portrait is of Portland, Oregon, famously America's most sustainable city. In between, Mauch's wanderings in space and time, his serendipitous and planned encounters with places and people, bring to light the tension and ambivalence in most Americans' attitudes towards their often-perilous environment, the intertwining throughout history of valuation, conservation and destruction. Interactions between human beings and the environment have settled like sediment down the centuries and may be read in the present - in the form of landscapes and collective memory, in bodies of water and the earth's strata, tree rings and human cells. One of Mauch's dominant themes is that the grand hopes and bitter disappointments of the American paradise are not equally distributed - the blues is the voice of the dispossessed and disadvantaged; and here environmental injustice toward Black, Indigenous and other marginalised people is a recurring and haunting motif.This is a book of melancholia and hope - Mauch exposes the beauty, the imperilment, at times the wreckage, of the American environment. And he shows us that, more powerfully than abstract ideas, governmental edicts or technological forces, stories reveal the infinite discoveries to be made in humans' relationship to nature - in beautiful landscapes where danger lurks as well as in visions and behaviours that change the world and ecosystems. Above all, stories demonstrate that where we come from and where we are going are intimately connected and therefore nothing has to remain as it is. The stories told in Paradise Blues demonstrate that vulnerabilities and pressures are almost always political constructions and, for that reason, it must be possible to deconstruct them.

Finland has often been labelled a 'green superpower', lauded as one of the world's cleanest and greenest countries. Nordic countries in general have tended to be idealised as 'pristine and green', in contrast to the rest of the rapidly contaminating world where the race for markets and profits has enormously accelerated consumption, imposing on the environment an alarming level of extraction and commerce, and a wide array of new and old forms of pollution.Environmental historians, however, can perceive that the reputed 'greenness' of the Nordic countries is partly an illusion. Authors in this volume argue that Finland, similarly to Denmark, Norway and Sweden, has evolved into a green superpower at the cost of considerable environmental problems. Ironically, Finland's current leading position in sustainable development has been built on the heavy use of natural resources and by sacrificing ecosystem health.This volume thus seeks to acquaint the reader with many stories of long-lasting negative environmental impacts in and around Finland: old-growth forests have been replaced by intensive forest farming for lumber and pulp industries; most wetlands have been drained for agriculture, forest cultivation and peat extraction; wild animal populations have been decimated; and Finland today is confined to the south and west by arguably the most polluted sea in the world.There are lessons for the future to be learnt from Finland's tendency to rest on the laurels of a positive environmental reputation built at least in part on myth. In the twenty-first century, the world badly needs less greenwashing and a truer commitment to green-ness.

The Ottoman Empire was one of the greatest early modern world empires, stretching from the outskirts of Vienna in the west to the Caucasus Mountains in the east and from the tip of Arabian Peninsula in the south to the Ukrainian steppes in the north, covering an area of 3.81 million square kilometres. The Ottomans were remarkable not just for their political and military success but also for their desire and ability to understand, adapt, modify and manage different environments. This edited volume is the first collective effort to take an original look at the Ottomans through the lens of environmental history. In its wide-ranging essays, environmental perspectives illuminate diverse historical processes and events in the long history of the Ottoman Empire. The essays thus offer new answers to old questions - but also ask new questions - about the ways the Ottomans related to, depended on, thought about and interacted with the natural environment. It will appeal to anyone interested in the environmental history of one of the world's largest and most durable empires, the longest-lasting in the history of the Muslim world.

The Return of Malthus is the first comprehensive analysis of the post-war fear of scarcity. Linnér traces the development of an international discourse of crisis through the influence of such thinkers as William Vogt, Fairfield Osborn and Georg Börgström, labelled 'neo-Malthusians' for their emphasis on an impending clash between population growth and resource limits, after the manner of the nineteenth-century father of scarcity economics. The book analyses the role of science and technology in securing food supply, the transmutation of older ideas about preserving nature into a new conservation ideology based on sustainable use, and the preoccupation of the industrialised nations with forestalling communism and controlling power relations.First published by The White Horse Press in 2003. Even more relevant today, this revised edition charts perceptions of and prescriptions for crises of population growth and resource shortage, which have had profound influence on agricultural, population and security policies from the Second World War to the present.

Mount Kailash in Asia, the Black Hills in North America, Uluru in Australia: around the globe, numerous mountains have been and continue to be attributed sacredness. Worship of these mountains involves prayer, meditation and pilgrimage. Christianity, which long showed little interest in nature, provides a foil to these practices and was one factor in the tensions that arose in the age of colonialism. Decolonisation and the 'ecological turn' changed the religious power of interpretation and imparted new meaning to discourses about sacred mountains. This succinct and erudite study demonstrates how, globally, these mountains remain outstanding examples of cultural diversity and convergence points of issues such as gender justice and environmental protection.

Is that the nub of the world's environmental crisis: that in the business of everyday, we pass by with our connections unacknowledged?Anthropocene Days gathers 27 easy-to-read short essays about the environment and climate change in everyday life. While the world and governments are beset by the great woes of changing climate, deforestation, species extinction, air pollution, fouling oceans and so on, we go about individually and locally as best we can from day to day. Anthropocene Days contends that these two domains, so apparently separate, are essentially connected. The book looks at the diverse and mundane activities of daily life to show how the environment is experienced, and does this very personally by drawing its observations from the author's life. It is part memoir, part recent history - a medley of short essays with themes of landscape change, forests, trees, war, fire, pestilence and the domestic life of housing, dusting and clutter. Motivated by present concerns, some reach back to the 1940s. They are set in Australia, Britain, India, Singapore and America.Anthropocene Days is a deceptively easy read. It does not hector readers on what to do, but its ruminations, drawn from long engagement with environments, encourage reflection on how we pass our everyday lives while the planet changes.

Exported Experts, Latin American Farmers and Negotiating ModernityThe Making of Modern Agriculture addresses how an American philanthropic agency - the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) - influenced the course of agricultural development in Latin America during the Cold War. Operating from 1946 to 1968, the AIA was an endeavour designed by the multimillionaire and politician Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (1908-1979) to maintain the United States' influence on foreign policy through Latin America. With a major presence in Venezuela and Brazil, the AIA also conducted rural development programmes in Chile, Costa Rica, as well as studies of Trinidad & Tobago, Paraguay, Peru, China and India. With an unwavering faith in the principles of science and technology, the AIA exported experts who began their careers in reformist organisations during the New Deal and later expected to accommodate similar programmes in Latin America during and after WWII.By exploring previously unpublished primary sources, The Making of Modern Agriculture demonstrates the role of Latin American elites and governments in adapting and rejecting programmes of US origin. Based on numerous examples, the book demonstrates how the encounters and clashes between foreign experts, governments, and local technicians with affected populations resulted not only in the adaptation of exogenous projects, but, in a certain way, forced the AIA to rethink its strategies and formulate new models to be adopted later in other Southern Hemisphere countries. The book also demonstrates, from an approach mingling history of science, environment and international relations, how the encounters between experts, politicians, and rural populations rendered the notions of development and modernisation even more polysemic.Da Silva illustrates how, in addition to the notable Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, agencies less known to academics played a differentiated and fundamental role in the geopolitics of Latin America and the United States. As the book demonstrates, the AIA is one of the fundamental references for the establishment of Harry Truman's Point Four and, among other legacies, influenced the formation of the largest agricultural extension service outside the United States, in Brazil. Finally, it contributes a historical perspective to current debates about how Latin America has become a paradoxical agricultural power, producing commodities for global markets even as environmental injustice is dramatically advancing.

Paths exist because there is walking, or at least the trampling of many feet, human and other-than-human. They connect us, here and now, with those who walked before us and those who might follow our footsteps. Even when other forms of mobility have grown in importance and changed our societies in dramatic ways, most of us still depend on walking in our daily life. The authors of this volume follow footpaths in various historical and geographical settings, some of which may be deeply remembered locally, and raise questions: What happens if we considerpaths and trails as a distinct kind of heritage?This heritage is physical, as in traces in landscape and effects on vegetation; but it is also immaterial and digital, as it appears in computer games and mobile images. The chapters collected in this volume deal with walking and trails through many perspectives and sources, including maps, literature, sound and art, and often way beyond the beaten track. They point to historical and current forms of land use that are sustainable in the most basic meaning of the word.The exploration of paths speaks to a main feature of recent thinking on heritage making - the capacity of heritage not just to sit there in monumental fashion, but also to make. Paths change, act, and perform in relation to humans and other ani- mals. Paths are part of an endless co-creation of heritage, as we go.

A blend of old and new meaningsWho are the rural people of Africa? What does it mean to be part of a 'rural' community in contemporary Tanzania? And why is it important to debate questions of African rurality beyond the mere GDP contribution of rural land-based production? This book seeks to address questions like these. Rural people(s) in contemporary Africa are often conceived of in terms of how to efficiently integrate them into international markets and global value chains; this book analyses the question of integration of rural people in Tanzania by delving into how they deal with local-global connections and engage with policy objectives on their own terms, between local forms of associational life and global markets. In so doing, it explores local socio-economic dynamics that find little space in the national and global policy vision of a rural sector geared towards growth - a vision that is peculiar to African states, including Tanzania. Informed by anthropological theory and de-re-agrarianisation/de-re-peasantisation debates, and grounded in ethnographic evidence, the book eschews 'orthodox' approaches that see (rural) people as passive recipients of policies, and policies as instruments of oppression. Instead, it departs from the rural land/place-based practices of grazing, fishing and farming to look at rurality in Tanzania as a blend of old and new meanings, values and practices at the local-global interface, continually reshuffled as rural people encounter different social and economic spheres. As the world rediscovers the urgency of questions connected to neo-colonialism and de-colonisation, this book brings to the forefront the position, worldview and ambitions of African rural peoples intersecting with international policy models, visions and objectives.

The book fully situates the Tyne's fluvial transformations within political, economic, cultural, social and intellectual contexts.

This pioneering overview of how social relations were constructed as interspecies relations offers the reader a starting point for bringing these encounters into a historical narrative that unfolds over the course of several centuries of Portuguese South American colonial life.

This book offers new perspectives on the environmental history of lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule by paying attention to 'place' and 'nature' in the intersection between humans and the environments that surround the

This book analytically reconstructs the events of the Italian nature protection movement, contextualising them in the cultural and political-institutional climate of the time; highlights the movement's full inclusion in contemporary European protectionist initiatives; and attempts to take stock of its significance and historical legacy.

Dealing with environmental issues over more than fifty years in a historical perspective enables us to gain a better understanding transformations such as the emergence of a European public sphere and how this is changing decision-making processes.

Exploring the place of nature in the French urban environment from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century

How did beauty become, and why does it largely remain, what Emory Elliot dubbed `the forbidden subject'? This book reviews the devastating impacts modernist avant-garde, Marxism, some feminisms and postmodernism have enacted - through paranoia, blame, cynicism - on beauty, hope and desire.

The State in the Forest uses a case study of conflict over use of wood - the principal source of energy and the primary raw material at the time - to offer an environmental history of the nineteenth century `great transformation'. The focus is on Cadore, a supposedly peripheral area that was, in fact, at the core of the wood economy.

Explores historical processes and transformations that shaped the Ottoman Empire from the viewpoint of environmental history. Brings into view a vast array of integral actors and agents that played a key role in the social, economic and ecological transformations of the Ottoman Empire.