Society And Environment A Historical Review

Now in its second edition and refreshed by a decade of new research, The Environment in World History uncovers the deep-rooted causes of interconnected climate, biodiversity, and ecological crises that have brought the environment to the top of the global political agenda in the twenty-first century. Its expanded chapters and case studies explore a wide range of issues including the following: the hunting of wildlife and the loss of biodiversity across the globe; deforestation and the development of strategies to protect the world’s forests; soil degradation caused by worldwide agricultural expansion, one of the most profound ways that humans have altered the planet; the widening impact of urban-industrial growth and the deepening ecological footprints of the world’s cities; and the rising levels of air, land and water pollution as the trade-off for continued economic growth worldwide. Covering the last five hundred years, it offers an essential environmental perspective on well-known world history narratives of imperialism and colonialism, trade and commerce, technological progress and the advance of civilisation. Clearly written and fully up-to-date, it is an invaluable resource for all students of world history and environmental studies.

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905-1983) was a British town planner, editor, and educator. This book includes four of Tyrwhitt’s key texts to illustrate how she forged and promoted a synthesis of Patrick Geddes’ bioregionalism and the utopian ideals of European Modernist urbanism, which influenced post-war academic discourse and professional practice in urban planning and design internationally. The key texts reprinted in this book are contributions from the Town and Country Planning Textbook (1950) which was published as an outcome for the Correspondence Course in Town Planning for members of the Allied Forces, which Tyrwhitt ran. It was designed to meet the requirements created by passage of the 1947 Town and Country Act and helped to shape a generation of planning practitioners in the UK and commonwealth countries.

Concern For The Environment Is Not New; It Has Always Existed. One Of The Flash Points In The Inner Conflicts Within Human Societies Of The Past Was Fuelled By The Continuous Effort To Resolve The Legitimate Use Of The Natural World. Nature Is One Of Those Spaces Where We Observe The Most Intense Forms Of Class Struggle And Power Politics - The More Privileged Control The Natural Resources.

The untold history of how people came to conceive, to manage, and to dispute environmental crisis, The Environment is essential reading for anyone who wants to help protect the environment from the numerous threats it faces today.

A groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between capitalism, communism, and Arctic ecology since the dawn of the industrial age. Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history. Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that immense human needs and ambitions have brought, and will continue to bring, to a finite planet.

Climate change over the past thousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impact on past human societies. This book explores the link between climate and society in ancient worlds, focusing on the ancient economies of western Eurasia and northern Africa from the fourth millennium BCE up to the end of the first millennium CE. This book contributes to the multi-disciplinary debate between scholars working on climate and society from various backgrounds. The chronological boundaries of the book are set by the emergence of complex societies in the Neolithic on the one end and the rise of early-modern states in global political and economic exchange on the other. In order to stimulate comparison across the boundaries of modern periodization, this book ends with demography and climate change in early-modern and modern Italy, a society whose empirical data allows the kind of statistical analysis that is impossible for ancient societies. The book highlights the role of human agency, and the complex interactions between the natural environment and the socio-cultural, political, demographic, and economic infrastructure of any given society. It is intended for a wide audience of scholars and students in ancient economic history, specifically Rome and Late Antiquity.

In 11 essays, the contributors examine the connections between environmental change and other major topics of early modern world history: population growth, commercialization, imperialism, industrialization, the fossil fuel revolution, and more.