Books in the Studies in Environment and History series

Silver traces the effects of English settlement on South Atlantic ecology, showing how three cultures interacted with their changing environment.

An environmental history of the mountain areas of Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Morocco.

In 1908, thunderous blasts and blazing fires from the sky descended upon the desolate Tunguska territory of Siberia. The explosion knocked down an area of forest larger than London and was powerful enough to obliterate Manhattan. The mysterious nature of the event has prompted a wide array of speculation and investigation, including from those who suspected that aliens from outer space had been involved. In this deeply researched account of the Tunguska explosion and its legacy in Russian society, culture, and the environment, Andy Bruno recounts the intriguing history of the disaster and researchers' attempts to understand it. Taking readers inside the numerous expeditions and investigations that have long occupied scientists, he foregrounds the significance of mystery in environmental history. His engaging and accessible account shows how the explosion has shaped the treatment of the landscape, how uncertainty allowed unusual ideas to enter scientific conversations, and how cosmic disasters have influenced the past and might affect the future.

Bringing together a wide range of environmental issues that have been debated since the mid-1950s, this book views these issues as a result of changes in values in American society since World War II. The author explores such substantive issues as pollution, natural lands, chemical carcinogens, and population-resources balances. He examines the politics of environmental science, economic analysis, planning, and management, and traces the impact of environmental issues on local, state, and federal government. The book explores political controversy to shed light on the working of political institutions and to establish their relationship to social change.

For centuries, bird guano has played a pivotal role in the agricultural and economic development of Latin America, East Asia and Oceania. As their populations ballooned during the Industrial Revolution, North American and European powers came to depend on this unique resource as well, helping them meet their ever-increasing farming needs. This book explores how the production and commodification of guano has shaped the modern Pacific Basin and the world's relationship to the region. Marrying traditional methods of historical analysis with a broad interdisciplinary approach, Gregory T. Cushman casts this once little-known commodity as an engine of Western industrialization, offering new insight into uniquely modern developments such as environmental consciousness and conservation movements; the ascendance of science, technology and expertise; international relations; and world war.

As cities from Cape Town to La Paz face acute water shortages, citizens need to know how urban water systems evolved to understand their vulnerabilities and alternatives. This volume sheds light on the challenges of water management in Australian cities drawing on environmental, urban and economy history.

Pipe Dreams analyzes the transformation of Central Asia's landscapes through tsarist- and Soviet-era hydraulic projects. Arguing that water was a central concern, Maya K. Peterson brings a critical region into view across a long period and engages environmental questions through a rich political and social framework.

This book tells the story of a fertile European country that, as a result of over population and military armament, found itself in an ecological crisis. This book explores Denmark's successful strategies for recovery, and provides an important historical background to the modern ecological crisis.

Snowshoe Country is an environmental and cultural history of winter in the colonial Northeast, closely examining indigenous and settler knowledge of snow, ice, and life in the cold. Indigenous communities in this region were more knowledgeable about the cold than European newcomers from temperate climates, and English settlers were especially slow to adapt. To keep surviving the winter year after year and decade after decade, English colonists relied on Native assistance, borrowed indigenous winter knowledge, and followed seasonal diplomatic protocols to ensure stable relations with tribal leaders. Thomas M. Wickman explores how fluctuations in winter weather and the halting exchange of winter knowledge both inhibited and facilitated English colonialism from the 1620s to the early 1700s. As their winter survival strategies improved, due to skills and technologies appropriated from Natives, colonial leaders were able to impose a new political ecology in the greater Northeast, projecting year-round authority over indigenous lands.

The Guts of the Matter investigates our oldest ecological challenge. This engaging interdisciplinary study will provide students of public health, environmental history, global history, and medicine with an incisive analysis of the key issues in our ongoing struggle against the transmission of infectious intestinal diseases.

What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history, which spans from 1760 to 1920, demonstrates how colonial property law and hydraulic engineering transformed the ecology of the Bengal delta to drain Calcutta.

The first detailed analysis of how climate change influenced the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the eighteenth century. For environmental historians, scholars of Dutch history, and anyone interested in climate change.

This book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history, environmental history, and disaster studies. It analyses of one of the most lethal floods in history, exploring its environmental, social, and cultural dimensions. It examines the historical development of water problems in Yangzi region, which remain relevant today.

This book investigates the bitterly contested development of environmental conservation in France from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, suggesting that conflicts over forests between the state, landowning elites, and the peasantry reflected escalating demand for this most vital of natural resources and shaped the country's revolutionary struggles.

Edmund Russell's much-anticipated new book examines interactions between greyhounds and their owners in England from 1200 to 1900 to make a compelling case that history is an evolutionary process. Five forces - politics, economics, technology, ecology, and culture - consistently shaped greyhounds and their owners, with a radical transition in 1831.

Part materialist manifesto, part empirical case study, and part methodological guide, The Matter of History develops a radical new post-anthropocentric understanding of the past that explains how powerful organisms and things pushed diverse nations and cultures towards a global 'Great Convergence'.

Operating within the context of a global history of feralization, this book focuses on providing a fresh perspective on both the American South and the human condition. It charts the social, cultural, and evolutionary consequences of domestication and feralization, while examining humans' relationships with dogs, pigs, and horses in the American South.

This book will appeal to readers interested in labor and environmental issues, rethinking conventional narratives that workers oppose environmental protections. It addresses the history of timber workers and nature from the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1910s through the battles over protecting the spotted owl in the 1990s.

The first history of the human-engineered flooding of China's Yellow River, and how the creation of the delta affected the state, the environment, and the inhabitants of the region.

During the twentieth century, the Soviet Union turned the Kola Peninsula into one of the most populated, industrialized, militarized, and polluted parts of the Arctic. This in-depth exploration of five industries in the region examines cultural perceptions of nature, plans for development, lived experiences, and modifications to the physical world.

Waste into Weapons is the first in-depth history of twentieth-century recycling in Britain. Based on meticulous research, Peter Thorsheim examines the relationship between armaments production, civil liberties, cultural preservation, and diplomacy as these elements played out during Britain's government-sponsored recycling campaign in the Second World War.

George Colpitts offers new perspectives on the market economy of the western prairie after 1780, one that created asymmetric power among traders and informed the bioregional history of the West where the North American bison became a food commodity hunted to nearly the last animal.

Climate Change and the Course of Global History presents the first global study by a historian to fully integrate the earth-system approach of the new climate science with the material history of humanity. Starting with the role of environmental change in biological and human evolution, the book uses the results of three decades of climate science to present a new understanding of human history.

This study follows a generation of American naturalists across the Appalachian Mountains and into the middle-western frontier and lays before the reader their impressions of a vast natural world soon to become a domesticated landscape of fields, meadows, and pastures.

This book explores the serious and far-reaching impacts of Little Ice Age climate fluctuations in Ottoman lands. This study demonstrates how imperial systems of provisioning and settlement that defined Ottoman power in the 1500s came unraveled in the face of ecological pressures and extreme cold and drought, leading to the outbreak of the destructive Celali Rebellion.