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In the history of Western thought, men have persistently asked three questions concerning the habitable earth and their relationships to it. Is the earth, which is obviously a fit environment for man and other organic life, a purposefully made creation? Have its climates, its relief, the configuration of its continents influenced the moral and social nature of individuals, and have they had an influence in molding the character and nature of human culture? In his long tenure of the earth, in what manner has man changed it from its hypothetical pristine condition? From the time of the Greeks to our own, answers to these questions have been and are being given so frequently and so continually ...
Clarence Glacken wrote one of the most important books on environmental issues published in the twentieth century. His magnum opus, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, first published in 1967, details the ways in which perceptions of the natural environment have profoundly influenced human enterprise over the centuries while, conversely, permitting humans to radically alter the Earth. Although Glacken did not publish a comparable book before his death in 1989, he did write a follow-up collection of essays—lost works now compiled at last in Genealogies of Environmentalism. This new volume comprises all of Glacken's unpublished writings to follow Traces and covers a broad temporal and geographic ca...
In the history of Western thought, men have persistently asked three questions concerning the habitable earth and their relationships toit. From the time of the Greeks to our own, answers to these questions have been and are being given so frequently and so continually that we may restate them in the form of general ideas.
Challenging the conventional wisdom that French environmentalism can be dated only to the post-1945 period, Caroline Ford argues that a broadly shared environmental consciousness emerged in France much earlier. Natural Interests unearths the distinctive features of French environmentalism, in which a large and varied cast of social actors played a role. Besides scientific advances and colonial expansion, nostalgia for a vanishing pastoral countryside and anxiety over the pressing dangers of environmental degradation were important factors in the success of this movement. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, war, political upheaval, and natural disasters—especially the devastating f...
The environmental history of early modern times is a seminal and lively field of historical research. This volume offers ten concise essays that provide an overview of current research debates on a broad span of topics, such as historical climatology and climate reconstruction, coping with disaster, land use and agricultural knowledge, forest history, urbanization, the perceptions of (alpine) nature, and societal dealings with water and rivers. Taken together, the contributions establish early modern studies as a promising laboratory for new avenues in environmental history. (Series: Austria: Research and Science - History / Austria: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Geschichte - Vol. 10) [Subject: History, Environmental Studies]
The term Fengshui, which literally means 'wind and water, ' is the ancient Chinese art of selecting an auspicious site to provide the most harmonious relationship between human and earth. The term is generally translated as "geomancy," and has had a deep and extensive impact on Korean, Chinese, and other East Asian cultures. Hong-key Yoon's book explores the nature of geomantic principles and the culture of practicing them in Korean cultural contexts. Yoon first examines the nature and historical background of geomancy, geomantic principles for auspicious sites (houses, graves, and cities) and provides an interpretation of geomantic principles as practiced in Korea. Yoon looks at geomancy's influence on cartography, religion and philosophy, and urban development in both Korea and China. Finally, Yoon debates the role of geomancy in the iconographical warfare between Japanese colonialism and Korean nationalism as it affected the cultural landscape of Kyongbok Palace in Seoul.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1955.
A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena. "The Restless Clock" examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals--dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency. "The Restless Clock "reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology.
A groundbreaking study of how sustainability became a social and political problem, and how to think about it today.
Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective presents 20 essays which explore diverse cultural interpretations of the earth's surface. Contrasted with each other and with the potentially cosmopolitan culture of science, these detailed studies of ways in which different cultures conceptualise nature appear in the context of global environmental change. Understanding across cultural lines has never been more important. This book shows how individual cultures see their own histories as offering protection for nature, while often viewing others as lacking such ethical restraints. Through such writing a discourse of understanding and common action becomes possible. The authors come from the ...