Green Imperialism is the first book to document the origins and early history of environmentalism, concentrating especially on its hitherto unexplained colonial and global aspects. It highlights the significance of Utopian, Physiocratic, and medical thinking in the history of environmentalist ideas. The book shows how the new critique of the colonial impact on the environment depended on the emergence of a coterie of professional scientists, and demonstrates both the importance of the oceanic island "Eden" as a vehicle for new conceptions of nature and the significance of colonial island...

When Europeans first reached the land that would become the United States they were staggered by the breadth and density of the forest they found. The existence of that forest, and the effort either to use or subdue it, have been constant themes in American history, literature, economics, and geography up to the meaning of the forest in American history and culture, he describes and analyzes the clearing and use of the forest from pre-European times to the present, and he traces the subsequent regrowth of the forest since the middle of the twentieth century. Dr Williams begins by exploring...

Nature's Economy is a wide-ranging investigation of ecology's past. It traces the origins of the concept, discusses the thinkers who have shaped it, and shows how it in turn has shaped the modern perception of our place in nature. The book includes portraits of Linnaeus, Gilbert White, Darwin, Thoreau, and such key twentieth-century ecologists as Rachel Carson, Frederic Clements, Aldo Leopold, James Lovelock, and Eugene Odum. It concludes with a new Part VI, which looks at the directions ecology has taken most recently.

This book describes and analyses the environmental history of the mountain areas of the Mediterranean world, focusing on Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. The author examines the land and its people and concludes that great changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created the often barren and depopulated countrysides of today. These changes, he suggests, lie behind much of the social and political turbulence of modern times as mountain people came to terms with worsening conditions. Written in a lively style, the book is the first environmental history of the Mediterranean...

This study focuses on the black biological experience in slavery, in the Caribbean. It begins with a consideration of the rapidly changing disease environment after the arrival of the Spaniards; it also looks at the slave ancestors in their West African homeland and examines the ways in which the nutritional and disease environments of that area had shaped its inhabitants. In a particularly innovative chapter, he considers the epidemiological and pathological consequences of the middle passage for newly enslaved blacks. The balance of the book is devoted to the health of the black slave in...

Brazil once enjoyed a near monopoly in rubber when that commodity was gathered in the wild. By 1913, however, cultivated rubber from Southeast Asia swept the Brazilian gathered product from the market. In this innovative study, Warren Dean demonstrates that environmental factors have played a key role in the many failed attempts to once again produce a significant rubber crop in Brazil. Dean traces the numerous attempts to plant rubber in Brazil, including the ill-fated Ford estates, and others established by the major multinational tire companies. He also analyzes the struggles of the...

Nature Incorporated explores the Industrial Revolution in New England from an environmental perspective. The advent of the industrial age brought about significant changes in gender and class relations, and also in work and culture. But it also involved a fundamental change in the way the natural world was handled. Focusing on the legendary Waltham-Lowell style mills, this book examines how these textile factories brought water under their exclusive control. It examines the legal issues that arose in settling disputes over water, and describes the far reaching ecological consequences of...

Green Imperialism is the first book to document the origins and early history of environmentalism, concentrating especially on its hitherto unexplained colonial and global aspects. It highlights the significance of Utopian, Physiocratic, and medical thinking in the history of environmentalist ideas. The book shows how the new critique of the colonial impact on the environment depended on the emergence of a coterie of professional scientists, and demonstrates both the importance of the oceanic island "Eden" as a vehicle for new conceptions of nature and the significance of colonial island...

This is a book about the biological conquest of the New World. Taking as a case study the sixteenth century history of a region of highland central Mexico, it shows how the environmental and social changes brought about by the introduction of Old World species aided European expansion. The book spells out in detail the environmental changes associated with the introduction of Old World grazing animals into New World ecosystems, demonstrates how these changes enabled the Spanish takeover of land, and explains how environmental changes shaped the colonial societies.

Challenging the conventional wisdom of Western environmental historians, this book examines the correlations between economic and environmental changes in the southern imperial Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi (a region historically known as Lingnan, "South of the Mountains") from 1400 to 1850. Marks discusses the impact of population growth on land use patterns, the agro-ecology, and deforestation; the commercialization of agriculture and its implications; the impact of climatic change on agriculture; and the ways in which the human population responded to environmental...