Frank Uekotter – författare

Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises - climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes - means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure, must be considered collectively if we are to stay afloat in what Uekötter describes as a vortex: a powerful metaphor for the flow of history, capturing the momentum and the many crosscurrents that swept people and environments along. His book invites us to look at environmental challenges from multiple perspectives, including all the twists and turns that have helped to create the mess we find ourselves in. Uekötter has written a world history for an age where things are falling apart: where we know what lies ahead and are equipped with the right tools - technological and otherwise - and plenty of experience to deal with environmental challenges, but somehow fail to get our affairs in order.

Worldwide, plantations are key economic institutions of the modern era. From an environmental perspective, they are also the settings for some of the most powerful, consequential, and frequently destructive modes of production ever to have existed. This volume assembles essays on commodities as diverse as coffee, cotton, rubber, apples, oranges, and tobacco, to provide an overview of plantation systems from Latin America to New Zealand that exposes the many dimensions of environmental history incorporated in these robust institutions. The global history of plantation systems not only highlights the great institutional resilience of our modern monocultures, but also the price that humans and environments have paid for them.