Mountains Of Northern Europe

This publication contains the proceedings of an international conference, held in Pitlochry, Scotland in November 2002, to mark the UN International Year of Mountains 2002. The conference participants discussed the state of current knowledge about the mountains of Northern Europe and considered issues arising from the interactions between people and nature, and the conservation and sustainable development activities needed to benefit the natural heritage of mountain regions in the UK, Norway and Sweden, Finland and Iceland.

A fascinating handbook providing a rare synthesis of the environmental history of northern Europe from the Paleolithic era to the present day. Of interest to students and academics alike, this book provides a much-needed synthesis of the recent literature on northern Europe's environmental history. Beginning with the Paleolithic period and the recolonization of Europe after the Ice Age, this book maps out the key environmental trends in the history of the region's environment and its interaction with the human population. The book also highlights how dramatic events outside Europe, such as the Tomboro volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815, had dramatic consequences for the region's climate. Given the culturally diverse nature of modern Europe, a vital aspect of the book is its identification of the common themes that unite the interaction of the region's nation-states with the natural environment. Part of ABC-CLIO's Nature and Human Societies series, the book enables readers to better grasp the extent of humanity's effect on our world.

Encompasses the true complexity of climate change, presenting in simple terms, the processs that drive the Earth's present climate system. The author outlines the nature and reasons for temperature fluctuations over millennia, including recent human-induced climate change.

IN the beginning the world appeared to mankind like a fairy tale; everything that lay beyond the circle of familiar experience was a shifting cloudland of the fancy, a playground for all the fabled beings of mythology; but in the farthest distance, towards the west and north, was the region of darkness and mists, where sea, land and sky were merged into a congealed mass—and at the end of all gaped the immeasurable mouth of the abyss, the awful void of space. Out of this fairy world, in course of time, the calm and sober lines of the northern landscape appeared. With unspeakable labour the eye of man has forced its way gradually towards the north, over mountains and forests, and tundra, onward through the mists along the vacant shores of the polar sea—the vast stillness, where so much struggle and suffering, so many bitter failures, so many proud victories, have vanished without a trace, muffled beneath the mantle of snow. When our thoughts go back through the ages in a waking dream, an endless procession passes before us—like a single mighty epic of the human mind’s power of devotion to an idea, right or wrong—a procession of struggling, frost-covered figures in heavy clothes, some erect and powerful, others weak and bent so that they can scarcely drag themselves along before the sledges, many of them emaciated and dying of hunger, cold and scurvy; but all looking out before them towards the unknown, beyond the sunset, where the goal of their struggle is to be found. We see a Pytheas, intelligent and courageous, steering northward from the Pillars of Hercules for the discovery of Britain and Northern Europe; we see hardy Vikings, with an Ottar, a Leif Ericson at their head, sailing in undecked boats across the ocean into ice and tempest and clearing the mists from an unseen world; we see a Davis, a Baffin forcing their way to the north-west and opening up new routes, while a Hudson, unconquered by ice and winter, finds a lonely grave on a deserted shore, a victim of shabby pilfering. We see the bright form of a Parry surpassing all as he forces himself on; a Nordenskiöld, broad-shouldered and confident, leading the way to new visions; a Toll mysteriously disappearing in the drifting ice. We see men driven to despair, shooting and eating each other; but at the same time we see noble figures, like a De Long, trying to save their journals from destruction, until they sink and die. Midway in the procession comes a long file of a hundred and thirty men hauling heavy boats and sledges back to the south, but they are falling in their tracks; one after another they lie there, marking the line of route with their corpses—they are Franklin’s men.