Human society has constructed many varied notions of the environment. Scientific information about the environment is often seen as the only worthwhile knowledge. This ignores the complexities created by interaction between people and the environment. Idealist thinking argues that everything we know is based on a construct of our minds and that all is possible. Can both be correct and true?
Interpreting Nature explores the position of humanity in the environment from the principle that the models we construct are imperfect and can only be provisional. Having examined the way in...

This is a history of the impact of humankind on the natural environment from earliest times to the present. The first edition has been widely adopted in universities, acclaimed both for its wide scholarship and its author's readable style. The new edition is fully revised throughout and takes account of comments and suggestions received from all over the world. It has been restructured into a form appropriate for new methods of university teaching, the diagrams have been clarified, and references and sections of further reading provided at the end of each chapter.

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This is a history of the environment of England, Wales and Scotland, and of the interactions of people, place and nature since the last ice sheet withdrew some ten thousand years ago. It is concerned with the changing cultures (in the full anthropological sense) of the peoples inhabiting Britain as well as with the environment they transformed, exploited, abused and cherished. As the author points out, every culture in Britain has had to acknowledge its placement on a set of islands 50 N where any month of the year can be the wettest month of the year, where there are some long shallow...

Courses which deal with environmental history have long lacked a comprehensive overview. I. G. Simmons has made a significant contribution with a book that looks at the long-term history of environment and humanity from 10,000 BC to AD 2000. This far-reaching text considers the global picture and recognises the contributions of many disciplines including the natural sciences, the social sciences, and increasingly, the humanities.As a starting point, this book takes the major phases of human technological evolution of the last 12,000 years and considers how these have affected the natural...