White Horse Press – förlag

Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods explores the potential of multimodal art practices in doing qualitative research beyond the human. Through artful endeavours such as creative writing, photography, filmmaking, drawing and poetry, the volume aims to overcome the shortcomings of conventional, anthropocentric and logocentric methods in multispecies research. To move beyond the limitations of language and linguistic communication, the contributors build on the long tradition of visual and sensory anthropology while also engaging in and consciously reflecting on innovative, creative and artistic methods. Taking a multispecies and more-than-human perspective - ranging from snow and trees to animals and an AI oracle - the volume investigates ways to touch, speak, listen, feel, walk with and reach across different species.This book and accompanying multimedia website advance the frontier of publishing artful expressions of academic research by highlighting how creative practices can be the very core of data collection, analysis and the communication of research. As such, the artful pieces are not 'just' illustrations of textual representations, but are practised as part of an iterative process of data collection and analysis. The contributions by well-established scholars, early career researchers and postgraduates who carry out new, cutting-edge research offer an engaging range of analytical, methodological and empiric orientations, while conversing at the intersection of multispecies ethnography and artful methods.

This volume is the first to collect climate histories from across all the Nordic countries. It combines research from climatologists, historians, archaeologists and museologists to explore how climate and culture interacted in the past and what we might learn from these interactions today.Down the centuries, the people of the Nordic countries have confronted challenges from climatic variability and change and sought ways to survive and adapt. In a time of accelerating global warming, these climate histories take on new contemporary significance. Drawing on tools from the natural and historical sciences, the innovative scholarship in this volume addresses questions such as: How did Nordic societies cope with past climatic hazards? What was the historical significance of the 'Little Ice Age' or the 'Medieval Climate Anomaly' for Nordic countries? And how do we study, narrate and learn from these past experiences?This volume is the first to collect climate histories from across all the Nordic countries. It combines research from climatologists, historians, archaeologists and museologists to explore how climate and culture interacted in the past and what we might learn from these interactions today.The chapters range from in-depth case studies to reflexive meta-histories; cover periods from the Bronze Age to the present; and draw on sources from tree rings to material culture to poetry. They also discuss how these histories can be communicated today, including how museums and literature can bring them into conversation with a current audience looking for lived experiences of climate adaptation.The volume was conceived during an international conference at the University of Oslo in May 2024. This interdisciplinary forum connected leading scholars in the field with practitioners and stakeholders. The essays presented here engage a rapidly growing field of intense public and political concern in the Nordics and beyond.The book speaks to various academic communities (climatology, history, literature) and stakeholders (museum practitioners, climate communicators and advocates). It includes the growing research and student community invested in this topic across several disciplines, practitioners and communicators in the field and the wider public interested in the vibrant debates about climate adaptation and experience.

When this seminal collection of essays was first published in 1978, the philosophical 'problem' of obligations to fixture generations was not widely recognised. But as the contributors point out, the theories that have constituted the stock-in-trade of moral philosophers for the past two hundred years often produce weird and counter-intuitive results when they are extended to try to include those who are as yet unborn. Utilitarianism can appear to recommend practically unlimited population increase, with quantity of life taking precedence over quality; theories based on a social contract present difficulties involving reciprocity - we can affect the lives of future people while they apparently cannot affect ours; while the idea of rights seems difficult to apply to those whose future existence may depend on our present choice of action - do 'potential' people have a 'right' to be born? On its original publication, the journal Ethics devoted 30 pages to a review of Obligations to Future Generations, and the book is still frequently and extensively cited and discussed.The philosophical questions raised here centre around 'whether and to what degree it can be morally incumbent on us to make sacrifices to bring happy people into the world or to avoid preventing them being brought into the world'. The implications surrounding this central question are becoming ever more urgent in the light of increasing concerns over dwindling resources, population growth, globalisation and environmental risk. This collection is essential reading for students of ethics and social policy, and for anyone concerned with the relation between the present choices and future chances of humanity.

This controversial work discusses a theory of "plurallism", claiming that there is not merely a plurality of correct theories and world views, but a corresponding plurality of actual worlds. Plurality penetrates deeper than the linguistic surface or than conceptual or theoretical structure.

"The Subterrranean Forest" studies the historical transition from the agrarian solar energy regime to the use of fossil energy, which has fuelled the industrial transformation of the last 200 years. The author argues that the analysis of historical energy systems provides an explanation for the basic patterns of different social formations. It is the availability of free energy that defines the framework within which socio-metabolic processes can take place. This thesis explains why the industrial revolution started in Britain, where coal was readily available and firewood already depleted or difficult to transport, whereas Germany, with its huge forests next to rivers, was much later. This landmark text was originally published in German in 1982 and was thoroughly revised and updated for the White Horse Press in 2001.

Described in "Nature" as 'a delight for the soil aficionado', this multi-authored collection examines the complex interrelations between societies in different parts of the world and the soils they relied on from the perspectives of geomorphology, archaeology, pedology and history. The geographical spread includes Mesoamerica, Africa, Europe, Australia, India and Easter Island. Few things are more important to human survival than the fertility of the soils from which so much of our food comes. Yet few aspects of the relationship between human society and the environment get so little attention. This book explores some of the enormous variety in the ways that people have worked with, thought about, damaged and restored soils. It also shows some of the ways in which soils, their properties and their histories have influenced human affairs. Soils are the substrate of all human society: from the palaeolithic to the present, their history is our history.

We are pleased to announce a new series of environmental history readers, suitable for students. Comprising essays selected from our journals, Environment and History and Environmental Values, each inexpensive paperback volume will address an important theme in environmental history, combining underlying theory and specific case-studies. The first volume, Bio-invaders, investigates the rhetoric and realities of exotic, introduced and 'alien' species. The book comprises a number of general essays, exploring and challenging common perceptions about such species, and a series of case studies of specific species in specific contexts. Its geographical coverage ranges from the United Kingdom to New Zealand by way of South Africa, India and Palestine; and the essays cover both historical and recent introductions.

Enclosing Water is an environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, as inscribed on the Liri valley in Italy's Central Apennines. Amid forces of revolution and empire, and Enlightenment discourses of 'improvement' and political economy, the Liri's natural wealth - water-power - generated sweeping changes in its landscape and working and living environments. This book tells the story of how defining water as property - both materially and discursively - led to the emergence of an industrial riverscape, and of a concomitant new ecological consciousness; to heightened environmental risks and awareness of those risks. A dramatic century in the Liri's socio-environmental history, with its cast of new industrial bourgeoisie, engineers and civil servants, illuminates how material developments and ideological currents completely reshaped the relationship between society and nature at the periphery of 19th century Europe. By integrating Political Economy into the narrative of European environmental history, this pioneering book offers a critical new view of discourses of water disorder and environmental politics in the Mediterranean region.

Enclosing Water is an environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, as inscribed on the Liri valley in Italy's Central Apennines. Amid forces of revolution and empire, and Enlightenment discourses of 'improvement' and political economy, the Liri's natural wealth - water-power - generated sweeping changes in its landscape and working and living environments. This book tells the story of how defining water as property - both materially and discursively - led to the emergence of an industrial riverscape, and of a concomitant new ecological consciousness; to heightened environmental risks and awareness of those risks. A dramatic century in the Liri's socio-environmental history, with its cast of new industrial bourgeoisie, engineers and civil servants, illuminates how material developments and ideological currents completely reshaped the relationship between society and nature at the periphery of 19th century Europe. By integrating Political Economy into the narrative of European environmental history, this pioneering book offers a critical new view of discourses of water disorder and environmental politics in the Mediterranean region.

Landscapes is the second in our new series of environmental history readers, suitable for students and researchers. Comprising essays selected from our journals, Environment and History and Environmental Values, each inexpensive paperback volume addresses an important theme in environmental history, combining underlying theory and specific case-studies. Landscapes explores the conceptualisation of environments as landscape, philosophically and historically. Excursions in landscape aesthetics contextualise case studies of landscapes perceived, constructed and responded to, from the plantations of South Africa to the Australian outback, the medieval Ardennes to nuclear-age America. Literary and artistic versions of landscape are studied alongside those driven by policy and pragmatism, probing the intersections of the transcendent and the ideological.

The world is full of environmental injustices and inequalities, yet few European historians have tackled these subjects head on; nor have they explored their relationships with social inequalities. In this innovative collection of historical essays the contributors consider a range of past environmental injustices, spanning seven northern and western European countries and with several chapters adding a North American perspective. In addition to an introductory chapter that surveys approaches to this area of environmental history, individual chapters address inequalities in the city as regards water supply, air pollution, waste disposal, factory conditions, industrial effluents, fuel poverty and the administrative and legal arrangements that discriminated against segments of society.

Thinking through the Environment: Green Approaches to Global History is a collection offering global perspectives on the intersections of mind and environment across a variety of discourses - from history and politics to the visual arts and architecture. Its geographical coverage extends to locations in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. A primary aim of the volume is, through the presentation of research cases, to gather an appropriate methodological arsenal for the study of environmental history. Among its concerns are interdisciplinarity, eco-biography, the relationship of political and environmental history and culturally varied interpretations and appreciations of space - from Bangladesh to the Australian outback. The approaches of the indigenous peoples of Lapland, Mount Kilimanjaro and elsewhere to their environments are scrutinised in several chapters.Balancing survival - both in terms of resource exploitation and of response to natural catastrophes - and environmental protection is shown to be an issue for more and less developed societies, as illustrated by chapters on Sami reindeer herding, Sudanese cattle husbandry and flooding and water resource-use in several parts of Europe. As the title suggests, the volume exposes the lenses - tinted by culture and history - through which humans consider environments; and also foregrounds the importance of rigor- ous 'thinking through' of the lessons of environmental history and the challenges of the environmental future.

A CONSERVATION HISTORY WITH LESSONS FOR TODAY Conservation Song explores ways in which colonial relations shaped meanings and conflicts over environmental control and management in Malawi. By focus- ing on soil conservation, which required an integrated approach to the use and management of such natural resources as land, water and forestry, it examines the origins and effects of policies and their legacies in the post-colonial era. That interrelationship has fundamental contemporary significance and is not simply a phenomenon created in the colonial period. For instance, like other countries in the region, post-colonial Malawi has been bedevilled by increasing rates of environmental degradation due, in part, to the expansion of human and ani- mal populations, cash crop production, drought and consequent deforestation. These issues are as critical today as they were six or seven decades ago. In fact, they are part of a conservation song that has a long and complex history.The song of conservation was initially composed and performed in the colonial peri- od, modified during the immediate postcolonial period and further refashioned in the post-dictatorship period to suit the evolving political climate; but the basic lyrics remain essentially the same. This book attempts to explain the evolution of the conservationist idea whilst demonstrating changes and continuities in peasant-state relations under different political systems. The dominant narrative posits conservation as a progressive movement aimed at re-organising natural resources and protecting them from destruction but the idea was contested and deeply embedded in colonial power relations and scien- tific ethos. Conservation emerged as an important tool of colonial state interven- tion and control concerning people and scarce resources. Conservation Song shows how the idea of conservation was rooted in and driven by a particular type of science about the organisation of space and landscapes. It offers a strategic entry point to understanding the historical roots of Africa's social and ecological problems over time, which are also intertwined with power and poverty relation- ships.In the postcolonial period, the conservation tempo subsided and became neglected in public discourse, only to re-emerge in the 1990s through the democratisation movement.

Landscape, politics and history: the Italian mountains as a crucible of national and natural identity. This book is part of a wider current in environmental history, that explores the links between nature and nation. It uncovers how Italian identity and mountains have constituted one another. It argues that state regimes since unification in 1861 have made mountains into national symbols and resources, thereby affecting mountain communities and ecosystems. The nationalisation of Italian mountains has been a story of military conquest and resistance, ecological and social transformation, expropriating resources and imposing meanings. The wind of 'big' history was rolling through the Alps and the Apennines: State building and national identities, totalitarianism and democracy, economic development and environmental protection, scientific knowledge and vernacular practices are the substance of this book. The book starts with the revaluation of mountains as the repository of the last Italian wilderness and chronicles the discovery/ invention of mountains as wild, primitive, and rebellious places needing to be tamed.War World I permanently transformed mountain landscapes and people, nationalising both. When the Fascists came to power, the process of politicisation of mountains reached its acme; the regime constructed and exploited mountains both rhetorically and materially, on one hand celebrating ruralism and rural people and, on the other, giving mountain natural resources to large hydro-electric corporations. Having been the sanctuary of Resistance against the Nazi-Fascist occupation, the Italian mountains were emptied by the economic boom of the 1960s; only recently have the green of natural parks and the white of the ski resorts become the distinctive colors of the new, tourist-oriented Italian mountains.

The third volume in the reader series, 'Themes in Environmental History'. Comprising essays selected from our journals, Environment and History and Environmental Values, these inexpensive paperbacks address important aspects of environmental history, by means of theoretical essays and case studies. Indigenous Knowledge investigates how indigenous peoples from various cultures interact with and conceptualise their environments, past and present; it offers accounts of indigenous conservation practice and traditional environmental knowledge alongside challenging explorations of how 'knowledge' is filtered through ideologies and subjectivities, from the Western scientific worldview to individual memory.

Deserts - vast, empty places where time appears to stand still. The very word conjures images of endless seas of sand, blistering heat and a virtual absence of life. However, deserts encompass a large variety of landscapes and life beyond our stereotypes. As well as magnificent Saharan dunes under blazing sun, the desert concept encompasses the intensely cold winters of the Gobi, the snow- covered expanse of Antarctica and the rock- strewn drylands of Pakistan. Deserts are environments in perpetual flux and home to peoples as diverse as their surroundings, peoples who grapple with a broad spectrum of cultural, political and environmental issues as they wrest livelihoods from marginal lands. The cultures, environments and histories of deserts, while fundamentally entangled, are rarely studied as part of a network. To bring different disciplines together, the 1st Oxford Interdisciplinary Deserts Conference in March 2010 brought together a wide range of researchers from backgrounds as varied as physics, history, archaeology anthropology, geology and geography. This volume draws on the diversity of papers presented to give an overview of current research in deserts and drylands.Readers are invited to explore the wide range of desert environments and peoples and the ever-evolving challenges they face.

Landscape, politics and history: the Italian mountains as a crucible of national and natural identity. This book is part of a wider current in environmental history, that explores the links between nature and nation. It uncovers how Italian identity and mountains have constituted one another. It argues that state regimes since unification in 1861 have made mountains into national symbols and resources, thereby affecting mountain communities and ecosystems. The nationalisation of Italian mountains has been a story of military conquest and resistance, ecological and social transformation, expropriating resources and imposing meanings. The wind of 'big' history was rolling through the Alps and the Apennines: State building and national identities, totalitarianism and democracy, economic development and environmental protection, scientific knowledge and vernacular practices are the substance of this book. The book starts with the revaluation of mountains as the repository of the last Italian wilderness and chronicles the discovery/ invention of mountains as wild, primitive, and rebellious places needing to be tamed.World War I permanently transformed mountain landscapes and people, nationalising both. When the Fascists came to power, the process of politicisation of mountains reached its acme; the regime constructed and exploited mountains both rhetorically and materially, on one hand celebrating ruralism and rural people and, on the other, giving mountain natural resources to large hydro-electric corporations. Having been the sanctuary of Resistance against the Nazi-Fascist occupation, the Italian mountains were emptied by the economic boom of the 1960s; only recently have the green of natural parks and the white of the ski resorts become the distinctive colors of the new, tourist-oriented Italian mountains.

Thinking through the Environment: Green Approaches to Global History is a collection offering global perspectives on the intersections of mind and environment across a variety of discourses - from history and politics to the visual arts and architecture. Its geographical coverage extends to locations in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. A primary aim of the volume is, through the presentation of research cases, to gather an appropriate methodological arsenal for the study of environmental history. Among its concerns are interdisciplinarity, eco-biography, the relationship of political and environmental history and culturally varied interpretations and appreciations of space - from Bangladesh to the Australian outback. The approaches of the indigenous peoples of Lapland, Mount Kilimanjaro and elsewhere to their environments are scrutinised in several chapters.Balancing survival - both in terms of resource exploitation and of response to natural catastrophes - and environmental protection is shown to be an issue for more and less developed societies, as illustrated by chapters on Sami reindeer herding, Sudanese cattle husbandry and flooding and water resource-use in several parts of Europe. As the title suggests, the volume exposes the lenses - tinted by culture and history - through which humans consider environments; and also foregrounds the importance of rigor- ous 'thinking through' of the lessons of environmental history and the challenges of the environmental future.

A CLASSIC STUDY OF CULTURAL ENDURANCE AND RADICAL CHANGE IN THE ARABIAN DESERT The Bedouin tribes of Northern Arabia have lived thousands of years as pastoralists, migrating across the semi-arid badia in search of graze and browse for their herds. Romantic images of Bedouin - black tents, robed Arabs and camels - still persist. However, mobile pastoral livelihoods have come under pressure to change in recent years. The modern nation-states of the Middle East view pastoralism as anachronistic and encourage Bedouin to become settled cultivators. An even more dramatic shift has taken place within the last few decades: the Bedouin have traded in their camels as beasts of burden in favour of the half-ton truck. The ship of the desert is now a Toyota, Datsun, Nissan or General Motors pick-up. Nevertheless, many Bedouin continue to herd livestock - sheep, goat and camel - at the same time as engaging in new economic activities. They have been open to remarkable change whilst firmly holding onto their culture, and their traditional moral and value systems.The truck has allowed many the possibility of interacting with the region's modern economy while still pursuing their mobile pastoral livelihoods. Extensive field research underlies anthropologist Dawn Chatty's comprehensive study. She examines contemporary Bedouin society of Lebanon and Syria in the contexts of history, economy and political and moral culture. She details the consequences of motorized transport for this community - and she draws some surprising conclusions about its future viability.

This book tells the story of the hopeful science and trusting art of forestry. It is a story about the hopes of foresters and other scientists to understand the forests more deeply, and about their unspoken trust that their knowledge could ensure an enduring sylvan future. Much has been written on the origins and development of modern forestry in various countries, and on the people and institutions involved, but there is little in the forest history literature that explains what the science actually is. Forest knowledge has an ancient history documented since classical times and applied within the intricate social and legal systems of medieval Europe. This volume is concerned with the modern form of forest science, founded in Europe early in the nineteenth century, when regimes for managing the forests, that could be traced to the ancient world and had flourished in the Middle Ages, were disrupted. New ways had to be found. Foresters have tried to know their forests scientifically for over three centuries and have hoped to apply their knowledge to good effect, even though they could not live to see the futures they envisioned.How far did their scientific understanding enable a sylvan future? What, over the three centuries discussed in this book, were their successes and failures? And now what might the future hold for forest science and its application? This is no tale of triumph: the outlook for the world's forests is too bleak for that. While many forests are flourishing, the climate is changing, tropical forests are disappearing, others are degrading, species are being lost, governments dither, international conferences fail. This is another, longer story - one of inquiry, of science and persistent endeavour to find a better future for the forests.

Changing pastoral dynamics make knowledge of pastoralism vital to understanding landscapes, development and governance across dryland regions. Modern Pastoralism and Conservation: Old Problems, New Challenges presents new pastoral research from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The volume addresses the nature and viability of pastoralism in practice and examines current pastoral conditions in diverse locations. Pastoralists engage with changing climatic and environmental conditions whilst encountering policy, population and socio-economic challenges. Issues of transformation and sustainability are at the heart of the book, whose chapters highlight the contemporary practice of pastoralism in order to enhance understanding of this unique livelihood and lifestyle. The Commission on Nomadic Peoples (CNP), part of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Union Sciences (IUAES), unites researchers, practitioners, government and non-government organisations to further pastoral knowledge. As Commission members, the authors have had extensive interactions with and possess rich experience of diverse pastoral societies.This book's chapters originate in papers presented at CNP sessions during the 2009 IUAES Congress in Kunming, China. Two perspectives were stressed: pastoralism in an international context and in the host nation, China. This approach identified both the impact of rapid development on nomadic practices and livelihoods in China and the country's growing integration into the global pastoral research community. Modern Pastoralism and Conservation: Old Problems, New Challenges builds an international perspective on the wide-ranging approaches and challenges to traditional pastoralism in the twenty-first century.

HISTORIES OF HUMAN CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATURE Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination assembles eleven substantive and original essays on the cultural and social dimensions of environmental history. They address a global cornucopia of social and ecological systems, from Africa to Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and their temporal range extends from the 1830s into the twenty-first century. The imaginative (and actual) construction of landscapes and the appropriation of Nature - through image-fashioning, curating museum and zoo collections, making 'friends', 'enemies' and mythical symbols from animals - are recurring subjects. Among the volume's thought-provoking essays are a group enmeshing nature and the visual culture of photography and film. Canonical environmental history themes, from colonialism to conservation, are re-inflected by discourses including gender studies, Romanticism, politics and technology. The loci of the studies included here represent both the microcosmic - underwater laboratory, zoo, film studio; and broad canvases - the German forest, the Rocky Mountains, the islands of Haiti and Madagascar.Their casts too are richly varied - from Britain's otters and Africa's Nile crocodiles to Hollywood film-makers and South African cattle. The volume represents an excitingly diverse collection of studies of how humans, in imagination and deed, act on and are acted on by 'wild things'.

This book, a much-augmented translation of the author's original Hungarian version, is an account of Hungary's past from the perspective of environmental history, incorporating a wide range of environmentally-relevant research findings. Data on climate, agriculture, mining, hunting, urban development and political administration are synthesised to create a rich account of a people in the environment, and the processes of adaptation, exploitation and co-existence required for survival. Importantly, it offers anglophone readers access a considerable digest of important scholarship previously only available in Hungarian. Until now, there has been no environmental history in English of Hungary and the wider region from which the present country crystallised. The book covers the environmental history of Hungary prior to the Industrial Revolution. It begins with the prehistory of the two protagonists in this environmental story, the Carpathian Basin and the Hungarians; and traces the transformation of the Hungarians, under environmental, social and economic forces, from nomadic tribes to a settled society in the Middle Ages.The environmental developments of the later Middle Ages, a period of relative stability, are explored before the story turns to a long era of war with the Ottoman Empire, during which the key to survival lay in finding adaptive forms of settlement and subsistence systems. Finally, the book chronicles the age of reconstruction following the Ottoman wars and the challenges posed as the country's population more than doubled, a growth unmatched by agricultural or industrial development. The present volumes leaves Hungary at the dawn of the Industrial Age, a country displaying symptoms of over-population and environmental over-exploitation.

Conservation Song explores ways in which colonial relations shaped meanings and conflicts over environmental control and management in Malawi. By focusing on soil conservation, which required an integrated approach to the use and management of such natural resources as land, water and forestry, it examines the origins and effects of policies and their legacies in the post-colonial era. That interrelationship has fundamental contemporary significance and is not simply a phenomenon created in the colonial period. For instance, like other countries in the region, post-colonial Malawi has been bedevilled by increasing rates of environmental degradation due, in part, to the expansion of human and animal populations, cash crop production, drought and consequent deforestation. These issues are as critical today as they were six or seven decades ago. In fact, they are part of a conservation song that has a long and complex history.The song of conservation was initially composed and performed in the colonial period, modified during the immediate postcolonial period and further refashioned in the post-dictatorship period to suit the evolving political climate; but the basic lyrics remain essentially the same. This book attempts to explain the evolution of the conservationist idea whilst demonstrating changes and continuities in peasant-state relations under different political systems. The dominant narrative posits conservation as a progressive movement aimed at re-organising natural resources and protecting them from destruction but the idea was contested and deeply embedded in colonial power relations and scientific ethos. Conservation emerged as an important tool of colonial state intervention and control concerning people and scarce resources. Conservation Song shows how the idea of conservation was rooted in and driven by a particular type of science about the organisation of space and landscapes. It offers a strategic entry point to understanding the historical roots of Africa's social and ecological problems over time, which are also intertwined with power and poverty relationships.In the postcolonial period, the conservation tempo subsided and became neglected in public discourse, only to re-emerge in the 1990s through the democratisation movement

A pioneering examination of the three-dimensionality of the earth from the perspective of history and the humanities. This book considers the variegated world of mountains and their development during the last 500 years. It takes as its starting point the United Nations environmental conference of 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, where the mountains were officially recognised as a topic of the world community. Important precedents for this new agenda were built in the early modern period and in the nineteenth century, as European societies began to exceed their traditional limitations. The book begins with an investigation of this long-term process with respect to science, culture and politics, each of which has transformed our attitudes toward mountainous regions. It then takes up historical problems that have been debated in the latest research, placing them in a comparative framework. At the book's heart stands the question of whether and in what way the 'three-dimensional history' of mountain people may reveal distinctive forms of development.

AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY OF TWO PIONEERS OF ECO-LOGICAL LIVING Richard Sylvan and Val Plumwood were eminent twentieth-century Australian philosophers who, in the way of philosophers, devoted their lives to examining fundamental assumptions about thought and the world. Though they were both renowned logicians - and probed metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, social and political theory and economics - it was their determination to fuse the practical and the intellectual, to 'walk the talk', that made them special. The world they sought to elucidate was not primarily interior; not for them navel-gazing or abstract theorising, but a passionate concern about the non-human world and the non-human others with which we share it: Sylvan was convinced of the culpability of the philosopher who could 'fiddle while the Earth begins to burn'. They were renowned as practical and rhetorical defenders of Australia's forests, as zealous conservationists who not only campaigned for the non-human world but tried to codify philosophically an 'environmental culture' that would be ethically and rationally engaged with it.Their philosophical endeavours to provide a modern foundation for such a culture were as much rooted in the forests they inhabited and worked physically to protect as in the academy; indeed Plumwood claimed that her every word had 'the thought of the forest behind it, as the ultimate progenitor and meaning of my speech'. To them, the separation of physical and intellectual labour was as wrong as, and symptomatic of, human alienation from nature; and they strove to reconnect these artificial, dangerous dichotomies. While Sylvan strove for the general 'greening of ethics', Plumwood became increasingly aware of other toxic dichotomies that infused gender politics, going on to gain recognition as a pioneering eco-feminist. Sylvan and Plumwood were iconoclastic, even anarchic, and spoke what they believed without concern for social nicety. In their lives and in their works they promoted an 'eco-logic' to live by, a world view that, in the years since their deaths, has become ever more essential. In the present volume Dominic Hyde explores their intertwined lives and complex ideas with lucidity, respect and clear-sighted affection.

The fourth volume in the reader series, 'Themes in Environmental History'. Comprising essays selected from Environment and History and Environmental Values, these inexpensive paperbacks address important aspects of environmental history through theoretical essays and case studies. The readers are attracting increasing interest from course-organisers. Animals examines human relationships with non-human others, exploring dynamics of exploitation, preservation and cultural interpretation. The essays, whose animal actors range from whales to goats, cormorants to crocodiles, cover such diverse topics as hunting, farming, conservation and display. The authors are alive to the complexities and conflicts inherent in human - animal interactions: as friend, as food, as object of ethical discourse or of power-play between human societies, this volume shows that there is no simple answer to the question posed in the opening essay - 'An Animal: What is it?'

AN ACCESSIBLE INTRODUCTION TO BIODIVERSITY, CONSERVATION AND THE ECO-CULTURAL NATURE OF LANDSCAPES Key issues are addressed in short, focused chapters, supported by a detailed thousand-year timeline based on the British Isles. Rotherham is convinced that to conserve wildlife or ecology, and to heal the wounds of human impacts, we must understand our own history and how, over countless centuries, we have forged today's ecologies from our impacts on, and utilisation of, nature. He argues that the interlinked concepts of biodiversity, nature conservation and of sustainability are too often mixed with notions of 'wilderness' and 'nature' and 'naturalness'. Much of the biodiversity that we hope to conserve is the result of long-term interactions between people and nature. It is a 'cultural ecology', the product of the environment, history and tradition. Recognising that the landscapes around us are 'eco-cultural' not 'natural' is, Rotherham suggests, the key to understanding contemporary biodiversity and major challenges for ideas of future conservation and sustainability.The book introduces the background to humanity's interactions with Nature and the forces at work in shaping today's world. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the nature of the global environmental crisis and how we got here. In particular, it will be a stimulating guide to students and teachers or lecturers from sixth form and college to university. It will also appeal to the ordinary wildlife enthusiast wishing understand the past, and to gain insight into what might be in store for the future.

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS PLACING THE HUMAN - WOLF RELATIONSHIP IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE International in range and chronological in organisation, this volume aims to grasp the maincurrents of thought about interactions with the wolf in modern history. It focuses on perceptions, interactions and dependencies, and includes cultural and social analyses as well as biological aspects. Wolves have been feared and admired, hunted and cared for. At the same historical moment, different cultural and social groups have upheld widely diverging ideas about the wolf. Fundamental dichotomies in modern history, between nature and culture, wilderness and civilisation and danger and security, have been portrayed in terms of wolf - human relationships. The wolf has been part of aesthetic, economic, political, psychological and cultural reasoning albeit it is nowadays mainly addressed as an object of wildlife management. There has been a major shift in perception from dangerous predator to endangered species, but the big bad fairytale wolf remains a cultural icon.