An exploration of the rise of the crop strain that came to dominate the American tobacco industry and its toll on the Southern landscape that produced it

Drew A. Swanson has written an -environmental- history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the author provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters.

Swanson, who...

A penetrating anthropological inquiry into remote areas as understood by their inhabitants and by the outsiders who encounter them
This groundbreaking book is the first sustained anthropological inquiry into the idea of remote areas. Shafqat Hussain examines the surprisingly diverse ways the people of Hunza, a remote independent state in Pakistan, have been viewed by outsiders over the past century. He also explores the Hunza people's perceptions of British colonialists, Pakistani state officials, modern-day Westerners, and others, and how the local people used their remote status...

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times, yet also seemingly intractable. This book offers novel insights on this contemporary challenge, drawing together the state-of-the-art thinking in anthropology. Approaching climate change as a nexus of nature, culture, science, politics, and belief, the book reveals nuanced ways of understanding the relationships between society and climate, science and the state, certainty and uncertainty, global and local that are manifested in climate change debates. The contributors address three major areas of inquiry: how climate change...

A provocative reassessment of the relationship between states and environmental politics in Africa
From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term concerns about sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, and biodiversity conservation, African states face a range of environmental issues. As Carl Death demonstrates, the ways in which they are addressing them have important political ramifications, and challenge current understandings of green politics. Death draws on almost a decade of research to reveal how central African environmental politics are...

A highly regarded academic and former policy analyst and consultant charts the forty-year history of neoliberalism, environmental governance, and resource rights in Madagascar

Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet the island nation's habitats are still in decline. In this important ethnographic study, Catherine Corson illustrates how the effort to attract high-level political attention to conservation by isolating the environment in national parks and blaming...

An intimate portrait of India's child runaways, and the sociopolitical forces shaping their lives

A profound reinterpretation of both the Dust Bowl on the U.S. southern plains and its relevance for today