Donald Worster - Böcker

The discovery of the Americas around 1500 AD was an extraordinary watershed in human experience. It gave rise to the modern period of human ecology, a phenomenon global in scope that set in motion profound changes in almost every society on earth. This new period, which saw the depletion of the lands of the New World, proved tragic for some, triumphant for others, and powerfully affecting for all.In this work, acclaimed environmental historian Donald Worster takes a global view in his examination of the ways in which complex issues of worldwide abundance and scarcity have shaped American society and behavior over three centuries. Looking at the limits nature imposes on human ambitions, he questions whether America today is in the midst of a shift from a culture of abundance to a culture of limits-and whether American consumption has become reliant on the global South. Worster engages with key political, economic, and environmental thinkers while presenting his own interpretation of the role of capitalism and government in issues of wealth, abundance, and scarcity. Acknowledging the earth's agency throughout human history, Shrinking the Earth offers a compelling explanation of how we have arrived where we are and a hopeful way forward on a planet that is no longer as large as it once was.

Donald Worster examines the development history of the American West, identifying the élite of technology and wealth who have controlled its most essential resource: water.

For decades, the story of the American West has been told as a glorious tale of conquest and rugged individualism - the triumph of progress. But recently, a new school of historians has challenged this view, creating what is known as the 'new western history', an approach that gives a central role to the environment, native peoples, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Foremost among these historians is Donald Worster.In Worster's writings, the western past emerges not as a march of Manifest Destiny but rather as an unfolding relationship between humankind and nature.In Under Western Skies, Worster provides an eloquent introduction to the changing traditions of western historical writing and then demonstrates his own approach through fascinating case studies. For example, he takes a hard look at the struggle by the Lakota to regain ownership of the Black Hills, examining not only the legal history of treaties and court cases but also the importance of the Black Hills in Indian religion and the way they have been mismanaged by the U.S. government.He discusses the cowboy in terms of the new ecology that arose from livestock ranching - the endless miles of fences, the changes in the environment wrought by extensive grazing, certain species of animals almost wiped out because they were considered a danger to sheep and cattle.But Worster's view of nature is not as simple or as linear as, for instance, Bill McKibben's stark picture in The End of Nature, a picture Worster argues against. From the mining ghost towns of the Rockies to the uprooted farm families of the Dust Bowl, nature sometimes wins the struggle. Even the Hoover Dam, he reminds us, may one day be overcome by the patient Colorado River.Under Western Skies both offers intriguing insights into important aspects of our history and instills a new appreciation for the place of nature, native peoples, and the struggles over money and power in the western past.

Hailed as "one of the most eminent environmental historians of the West" by Alan Brinkley in The New York Times Book Review, Donald Worster has been a leader in reshaping the study of American history. Winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Dust Bowl, Worster has helped bring humanity's interaction with nature to the forefront of historical thinking. Now, in The Wealth of Nature, he offers a series of thoughtful, eloquent essays which lay out his views on environmental history, tying the study of the past to today's agenda for change.The Wealth of Nature captures the fruit of what Worster calls "my own intellectual turning to the land." History, he writes, represents a dialogue between humanity and nature--though it is usually reported as if it were simple dictation. Worster takes as his point of departure the approach expressed early on by Aldo Leopold, who stresses the importance of nature in determining human history; Leopold pointed out that the spread of bluegrass in Kentucky, for instance, created new pastures and fed the rush of American settlers across the Appalachians, which affected the contest between Britain, France, and the U.S. for control of the area. Worster's own work offers an even more subtly textured understanding, noting in this example, for instance, that bluegrass itself was an import from the Old World which supplanted native vegetation--a form of "environmental imperialism." He ranges across such areas as agriculture, water development, and other questions, examining them as environmental issues, showing how they have affected--and continue to affect--human settlement. Environmental history, he argues, is not simply the history of rural and wilderness areas; cities clearly have a tremendous impact on the land, on which they depend for their existence. He argues for a comprehensive approach to understanding our past as well as our present in environmental terms."Nostalgia runs all through this society," Worster writes, "fortunately, for it may be our only hope of salvation." These reflective and engaging essays capture the fascination of environmental history--and the beauty of nature lost or endangered--underscoring the importance of intelligent action in the present.

If the word "hero" still belonged in the historian's lexicon, it would certainly be applied to John Wesley Powell. Intrepid explorer, careful scientist, talented writer, and dedicated conservationist, Powell led the expedition that put the Colorado River on American maps and revealed the Grand Canyon to the world. Now comes the first biography of this towering figure in almost fifty years--a book that captures his life in all its heroism, idealism, and ambivalent, ambiguous humanity. In A River Running West, Donald Worster, one of our leading Western historians, tells the story of Powell's great adventures and describes his historical significance with compelling clarity and skill. Worster paints a vivid portrait of how this man emerged from the early nineteenth-century world of immigrants, fervent religion, and rough-and-tumble rural culture, and barely survived the Civil War battle at Shiloh. The heart of Worster's biography is Powell's epic journey down the Colorado in 1869, a tale of harrowing experiences, lethal accidents, and breathtaking discoveries. After years in the region collecting rocks and fossils and learning to speak the local Native American languages, Powell returned to Washington as an eloquent advocate for the West, one of America's first and most influential conservationists. But in the end, he fell victim to a clique of Western politicians who pushed for unfettered economic development, relegating the aging explorer to a quiet life of anthropological contemplation.John Wesley Powell embodied the energy, optimism, and westward impulse of the young United States. A River Running West is a gorgeously written, magisterial account of this great American explorer and environmental pioneer, a true story of undaunted courage in the American West.

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing."In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence. A man for whom mountaineering was "a pathway to revelation and worship."For anyone wishing to more fully understand America's first great environmentalist, and the enormous influence he still exerts today, Donald Worster's biography offers a wealth of insight into the passionate nature of a man whose passion for nature remains unsurpassed.

In the mid 1930s, North America's Great Plains faced one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in world history. Donald Worster's classic chronicle of the devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells the story of the Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms.Now, twenty-five years after his book helped to define the new field of environmental history, Worster shares his more recent thoughts on the subject of the land and how humans interact with it. In a new afterword, he links the Dust Bowl to current political, economic and ecological issues--including the American livestock industry's exploitation of the Great Plains, and the on-going problem of desertification, which has now become a global phenomenon. He reflects on the state of the plains today and the threat of a new dustbowl. He outlines some solutions that have been proposed, such as "the Buffalo Commons," where deer, antelope, bison and elk would once more roam freely, and suggests that we may yet witness a Great Plains where native flora and fauna flourish while applied ecologists show farmers how to raise food on land modeled after the natural prairies that once existed.

Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards, yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, and a self-made man of wealth and political influence. The winner of numerous book awards, A Passion for Nature was also named a Best Book of 2008 by Washington Post Book World. It is the first comprehensive biography of Muir to appear in six decades.

The discovery of the Americas around 1500 AD was an extraordinary watershed in human experience. It gave rise to the modern period of human ecology, a phenomenon global in scope that set in motion profound changes in almost every society on earth. This new period, which saw the depletion of the lands of the New World, proved tragic for some, triumphant for others, and powerfully affecting for all.In this work, acclaimed environmental historian Donald Worster takes a global view in his examination of the ways in which complex issues of worldwide abundance and scarcity have shaped American society and behavior over three centuries. Looking at the limits nature imposes on human ambitions, he questions whether today's America is in the midst of a shift from a culture of abundance to a culture of limits-and whether American consumption has become reliant on the global South. Worster engages with key political, economic, and environmental thinkers while presenting his own interpretation of the role of capitalism and government in issues of wealth, abundance, and scarcity. Acknowledging the earth's agency throughout human history, Shrinking the Earth offers a compelling explanation of how we have arrived where we are today and a hopeful way forward on a planet that is no longer as large as it once was.

A groundbreaking history that explores how human desires have affected our relationship with the natural world, and why this is a cause for hope  Donald Worster looks back over 200,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens to show how human nature, especially the drive for food and sex, has responded to environmental conditions throughout history. Examining how this process led from foraging to the agrarian revolution and then to a capitalist way of life, Worster brings us face to face with a third transformation of human society that is beginning to take shape in China: an ecological civilization.  This meticulously researched book explores how human desires have driven us to overrun our environments, and how we have adapted by creating new relationships with the earth. Tying the past to the future and humans to the planet, Worster acknowledges that we are at a potentially dangerous tipping point. Yet he offers a surprisingly optimistic vision, full of faith in the strength of our human desires, to help us develop exciting futures in a changing world—as we have done time and again—and achieve a good life for the billions of us trying to survive on a finite planet.

Challenging the conventional wisdom conveyed by Western environmental historians about China, this book examines the correlations between economic and environmental changes in the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi from 1400 to 1850, but also provides substantial background from 2CE on. Robert Marks discusses the impact of population growth on land-use patterns, the agro-ecology of the region, and deforestation; the commercialization of agriculture and its implications for ecological change; the impact of climatic change on agriculture; and the ways in which the human population responded to environmental challenges. This book is a significant contribution to both Chinese and environmental history. It is groundbreaking in its methods and in its findings.

The living resources of California's rivers and coastal waters are among the most varied and productive in the world. They also offer a laboratory example of the mismanagement and waste that have attended the settlement and development of the North American continent. The Fisherman's Problem is a study of the interaction among resource ecology, economic enterprise, and law in the history of the California fishing industry. It analyzes the ways in which the natural environment not only provided the raw material for economic development but played an active role in it as well. As this book shows, the natural environment has a history both independent of, and yet influenced by, classic example of 'common property' re-environmental conservation generally, as well as in the management of the fisheries of the world's rivers and oceans. Professor McEvoy discusses the different ways in which human communities have harvested and managed the region's fisheries, from those of the American Indians and immigrants from Europe and Asia to those of modern, industrial-bureaucratic society. By reconstructing the ecological history of the fisheries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this study develops a new perspective on environmental problems as contemporary observers understood them and on the results of their efforts to deal with those problems. The book concludes with an analysis of significant changes taking place in the 1970s and 1980s in the politics and theory of resource management. By combining a synthesis of recent scholarship in such disciplines as law, economics, marine biology, and anthropology with original research into the fishing industry's history, the book represents a significant new departure in the study of ecology and change in human society.

Brazil once enjoyed a near monopoly in rubber when the commodity was gathered in the wild. By 1913, however, cultivated rubber in South-east Asia swept the Brazilian gathered product from the market. In this innovative study, Warren Dean demonstrates that environmental factors have played a key role in the many failed attempts to produce a significant rubber crop again in Brazil. In the Amazon attempts to shift to cultivated rubber failed repeatedly. Brazilian social and economic conditions have been blamed for these failures, in particular the failure of local capitalists and the refusal of the working class to accept wage labour. Dean shows in this study, however, that the difficulty was mainly ecological: the rubber tree in the wild lives in close association with a parasitic leaf fungus; when the tree was planted in close stands, the blight appeared in epidemic proportions.

Since 1492, when Columbus 'discovered' America, the world has been moving toward an increasingly integrated global economy, higher population levels and consequently greater resource demands, and an increasingly precarious state of the biosphere. These developments play a major part in both modern history and in daily life. Understanding their interrelationships and development is crucial to the future of humanity and of the Earth, and is the unifying theme of this collection of readings.

Since 1492, when Columbus 'discovered' America, the world has been moving toward an increasingly integrated global economy, higher population levels and consequently greater resource demands, and an increasingly precarious state of the biosphere. These developments play a major part in both modern history and in daily life. Understanding their interrelationships and development is crucial to the future of humanity and of the Earth, and is the unifying theme of this collection of readings.

The living resources of California's rivers and coastal waters are among the most varied and productive in the world. They also offer a laboratory example of the mismanagement and waste that have attended the settlement and development of the North American continent. The Fisherman's Problem is a study of the interaction among resource ecology, economic enterprise, and law in the history of the California fishing industry. It analyzes the ways in which the natural environment not only provided the raw material for economic development but played an active role in it as well. As this book shows, the natural environment has a history both independent of, and yet influenced by, classic example of 'common property' re-environmental conservation generally, as well as in the management of the fisheries of the world's rivers and oceans. Professor McEvoy discusses the different ways in which human communities have harvested and managed the region's fisheries, from those of the American Indians and immigrants from Europe and Asia to those of modern, industrial-bureaucratic society. By reconstructing the ecological history of the fisheries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this study develops a new perspective on environmental problems as contemporary observers understood them and on the results of their efforts to deal with those problems. The book concludes with an analysis of significant changes taking place in the 1970s and 1980s in the politics and theory of resource management. By combining a synthesis of recent scholarship in such disciplines as law, economics, marine biology, and anthropology with original research into the fishing industry's history, the book represents a significant new departure in the study of ecology and change in human society.

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.

This is the first book to document the origins and early history of environmentalism, concentrating especially on its hitherto unexplained colonial and global aspects. It highlights the significance of Utopian, physiocratic and medical thinking in the history of environmental ideas. The book shows how the new critique of the colonial impact on the environment depended on the emergence of a coterie of professional scientists, especially in the Dutch, French and English maritime empires. The prime importance of the oceanic island 'Eden' as a vehicle for new conceptions of nature is emphasised, and the significance of colonial island environments in stimulating conservationist notions is underlined, revealing how, for the first time, the limitability of local and global resources could be recognised.

When Europeans first reached the land that would become the United States they were staggered by the breadth and density of the forest they found. The existence of that forest, and the effort either to use or subdue it, have been constant themes in American history, literature, economics, and geography up to the meaning of the forest in American history and culture, he describes and analyzes the clearing and use of the forest from pre-European times to the present, and he traces the subsequent regrowth of the forest since the middle of the twentieth century. Dr Williams begins by exploring the role of the forest in American culture: the symbols, themes, and concepts - for example, pioneer woodsman, lumberjack, wilderness - generated by contact with the vast land of trees. He considers the Indian use of the forest, describing the ways in which native tribes altered it, primarily through fire, to promote a subsistence economy. Early European settlers, he shows, extracted many products from the forest, and also began the extensive clearance of trees that would continue for almost three hundred years. Succeeding chapters, organized by topic and region, cover agricultural and industrial effects upon and uses of the forest. Dr Williams explores the rise (and often fall) of industries based upon forest products: naval stores, timber for building, charcoal and the iron industry, the railroads. Attention is devoted to the forests of the Middle West, the South, and the Pacific Northwest. By the late nineteenth century Americans began to realize that the forest was not boundless and moved to preserve those portions, still extensive, that remained. In the wake of the movement for preservation, Dr Williams describes how the forest began to regrow, especially after 1950, in areas where it had originally been vigorous and healthy, a development that continues today.

Nature's Economy is a wide-ranging investigation of ecology's past, first published in 1994. It traces the origins of the concept, discusses the thinkers who have shaped it, and shows how it in turn has shaped the modern perception of our place in nature. Our view of the living world is a product of culture, and the development of ecology since the eighteenth century has closely reflected society's changing concerns. Donald Worster focuses on these dramatic shifts in outlook and on the individuals whose work has expressed and influenced society's point of view. The book includes portraits of Linnaeus, Gilbert White, Darwin, Thoreau, and such key twentieth-century ecologists as Rachel Carson, Frederic Clements, Aldo Leopold, James Lovelock, and Eugene Odum.

This book describes and analyses the environmental history of the mountain areas of the Mediterranean world, focusing on Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. The author examines the land and its people and concludes that great changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created the often barren and depopulated countrysides of today. These changes, he suggests, lie behind much of the social and political turbulence of modern times as mountain people came to terms with worsening conditions. Written in a lively style, the book is the first environmental history of the Mediterranean area.

This study focuses on the black biological experience in slavery, in the Caribbean. It begins with a consideration of the rapidly changing disease environment after the arrival of the Spaniards; it also looks at the slave ancestors in their West African homeland and examines the ways in which the nutritional and disease environments of that area had shaped its inhabitants. In a particularly innovative chapter, he considers the epidemiological and pathological consequences of the middle passage for newly enslaved blacks. The balance of the book is devoted to the health of the black slave in the West Indies. Using the general health and level of nutrition of the island whites as a control, Kiple pays especially close attention to the role that nutrition played in the development of diseases. The study closes with a look at the continuing demographic difficulties of the black West Indian from the abolition of slavery.

Brazil once enjoyed a near monopoly in rubber when the commodity was gathered in the wild. By 1913, however, cultivated rubber in South-east Asia swept the Brazilian gathered product from the market. In this innovative study, Warren Dean demonstrates that environmental factors have played a key role in the many failed attempts to produce a significant rubber crop again in Brazil. In the Amazon attempts to shift to cultivated rubber failed repeatedly. Brazilian social and economic conditions have been blamed for these failures, in particular the failure of local capitalists and the refusal of the working class to accept wage labour. Dean shows in this study, however, that the difficulty was mainly ecological: the rubber tree in the wild lives in close association with a parasitic leaf fungus; when the tree was planted in close stands, the blight appeared in epidemic proportions.

Nature Incorporated explores the Industrial Revolution in New England from an environmental perspective. The advent of the industrial age brought about significant changes in gender and class relations, and also in work and culture, but it also involved a fundamental change in the way the natural world was handled. Focusing on the legendary Waltham-Lowell style mills, this book examines how these textile factories brought water under their exclusive control. It examines the legal issues that arose in settling disputes over water. And it describes the far reaching ecological consequences of industrial change. Steinberg offers a reinterpretation of industrialization that centers on the struggle to control and master nature.

This is the first book to document the origins and early history of environmentalism, concentrating especially on its hitherto unexplained colonial and global aspects. It highlights the significance of Utopian, physiocratic and medical thinking in the history of environmental ideas. The book shows how the new critique of the colonial impact on the environment depended on the emergence of a coterie of professional scientists, especially in the Dutch, French and English maritime empires. The prime importance of the oceanic island 'Eden' as a vehicle for new conceptions of nature is emphasised, and the significance of colonial island environments in stimulating conservationist notions is underlined, revealing how, for the first time, the limitability of local and global resources could be recognised.

This is a book about the biological conquest of the New World. Taking as a case study the sixteenth-century history of a region of highland central Mexico, it shows how the environmental and social changes brought about by the introduction of Old World species aided European expansion. The book spells out in detail the environmental changes associated with the introduction of Old World grazing animals into New World ecosystems, demonstrates how these changes enabled the Spanish takeover of land, and explains how environmental changes shaped the colonial societies.

Challenging the conventional wisdom conveyed by Western environmental historians about China, this book examines the correlations between economic and environmental changes in the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi from 1400 to 1850, but also provides substantial background from 2CE on. Robert Marks discusses the impact of population growth on land-use patterns, the agro-ecology of the region, and deforestation; the commercialization of agriculture and its implications for ecological change; the impact of climatic change on agriculture; and the ways in which the human population responded to environmental challenges. This book is a significant contribution to both Chinese and environmental history. It is groundbreaking in its methods and in its findings.

First published in 1999, this book is a comparative history of the development of ideas about nature, particularly of the importance of native nature as a part of the culture in the Anglo settler countries of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It examines the development of natural history in the great nineteenth-century expansion of settlement. It explores settlers' adaptations to the end of expansion and scientists' shift from natural history to ecology. Finally it analyzes the diffusion of ecology through the Anglo world and to the general population as well as the rise of environmentalism. Addressing not only scientific knowledge, but also popular issues such as hunting, common names for plants and animals, landscape painting, and nature stories, this book explores the ways in which English-speaking settlers looked at nature in their new lands and at the place they gave it in their societies.

Africa's equatorial rain forests cover an area roughly the size of continental Western Europe, and yet the history of this area remains largely unexplored. Robert Harms makes an important advance in this book toward recovering that history by telling the story of the Nunu, who live in and around the swampy floodplains of the middle Zaire River. A key element in Nunu history has been the small-scale, short-distance migrations that continually led individuals and groups into new micro-environments. When an increasing population impinged upon the limits of available resources in the late eighteenth century, a crisis characterized by drastic change and incessant conflict ensued. The Nunu abandoned their ancestral estates to take up new forms of competition in river towns, causing a conflict of identity which culminated in civil war in the 1960s.