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.

This book tells the story of a fertile European country that, as a result of over-population and military armament, over-exploited its fields and forests in a nonsustainable fashion. By the eighteenth century, Denmark, along with other European countries, found itself in an ecological crisis: clear felling of forests, sand drift, floods, inadequate soil fertilization and cattle disease. This book explains how the crisis was overcome, and is the first attempt to understand early modern Europe from a consistently ecological viewpoint.

In this book, Timothy Silver traces the effects of English settlement on South Atlantic ecology, showing how all three cultures--Indian, European, and African--interacted with and were, in turn, affected by, their changing environment. In assessing such ecological changes, Silver pays particular attention to regional variations, explaining how local geography and settlement patterns influenced the environment. And while his focus is the English South, Silver also shows us how economic and ecological developments in Europe, the Caribbean, and elsewhere frequently dictated how South Atlantic...

For the last twenty years, The Destruction of the Bison has been an essential work in environmental history. Andrew C. Isenberg offers a concise analysis of the near-extinction of the North American bison population from an estimated 30 million in 1800 to fewer than 1000 a century later. His wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study carefully considers the multiple causes, cultural and ecological, of the destruction of the species. The twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new foreword connecting this seminal work to developments in the field – notably new perspectives in Native American...

In 1908, thunderous blasts and blazing fires from the sky descended upon the desolate Tunguska territory of Siberia. The explosion knocked down an area of forest larger than London and was powerful enough to obliterate Manhattan. The mysterious nature of the event has prompted a wide array of speculation and investigation, including from those who suspected that aliens from outer space had been involved. In this deeply researched account of the Tunguska explosion and its legacy in Russian society, culture, and the environment, Andy Bruno recounts the intriguing history of the disaster and...