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Amazonian Rain Forests
DEVELOPMENT AND DISTURBANCE IN AMAZON FORESTS Contrasting Impressions 6 2 The rain forests of the Amazon Basin cover approximately 5.8 x 10 km (Salati and Vose 1984). Flying over even just part of this basin, one gazes hour after hour upon this seemingly infinite blanket of green. The impression of immen sity is similar when viewed from the Amazon River itself, or from its tributar ies. From a hammock on the shaded deck of a riverboat, the immensity of the forest presents an incredible monotony as one view of the shoreline blends unnoticeably into another. From both perspectives, the overwhelming reaction to the sea of trees that stretches from horizon to horizon is a sense of the vastness of the rain forest. In September 1985, I got a different impression of the rain forest. Several students and I journeyed in a self-propelled car along the single-track railroad that stretches almost 1000 km from the Carajas iron ore mine in the rain forest of Para State, Brazil, all the way to Sao Luis on the coast (Fig. 1.1).
The Struggle for the Land
At an 1887 council when his people were told to learn farming in the semidesert region east of the Wind River Mountains, the Shosone chief Washakie exploded with "God damn a potato!" His instincts were all against the cultivation of semiarid land. The relationship between the buffalo hunter and the potato eater?between indigenous peoples and industrial empire?is the basic theme of the studies in The Struggle for the Land. As the editor, Paul A. Olson, points out in his introduction, the theme is as old as the biblical battle between the descendents of Nimrod, the city dweller, and of Abraham, the pastoralist. But the environmental cost of developing the world's semiarid regions is a new and ...
Common and Contested Ground
In Common and Contested Ground, Theodore Binnema provides a sweeping and innovative interpretation of the history of the northwestern plains and its peoples from prehistoric times to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The real history of the northwestern plains between a.d. 200 and 1806 was far more complex, nuanced, and paradoxical than often imagined. Drawn by vast herds of buffalo and abundant resources, Native peoples, fur traders, and settlers moved across the region establishing intricate patterns of trade, diplomacy, and warfare. In the process, the northwestern plains became a common and contested ground. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Binnema examines the impact of technology on the peoples of the plains, beginning with the bow and arrow and continuing through the arrival of the horse, European weapons, Old World diseases, and Euroamerican traders. His focus on the environment and its effect on patterns of behaviour and settlement brings a unique perspective to the history of the region.
Human Ecology as Human Behavior
Human interaction with the natural environment has a dual character. By turning increasing quantities of natural substances into physical resources, human beings might be said to have freed themselves from the constraints of low-technology survival pressures. However, the process has generated a new dependence on nature in the form of complex "socionatural systems," as Bennett calls them, in which human society and behavior are so interlocked with the management of the environment that small changes in the systems can lead to disaster. Bennett's essays cover a wide range: from the philosophy of environmentalism to the ecology of economic development; from the human impact on semi-arid lands ...
Reimagining Political Ecology
A collection of ethnographies grounded in second-generation political ecology, which focuses on the interchanges between nature and culture, and the local and the global.
Wet Prairie
The Canadian prairies are often envisioned as dry, windswept fields; however, much of southern Manitoba is not arid plain but wet prairie, poorly drained land subject to frequent flooding. Shannon Stunden Bower brings to light the complexities of surface-water management in Manitoba, from early artificial drainage efforts to late-twentieth-century attempts at watershed management. She engages scholarship on the state, liberalism, and bioregionalism in order to probe the connections between human and environmental change in the wet prairie. This account of an overlooked aspect of the region’s environmental history reveals how the biophysical nature of southern Manitoba has been an important factor in the formation of Manitoba society and the provincial state.
Plant Migration
Using cases of plant migration documented by both historical and fossil evidence, Jonathan D. Sauer provides a landmark assessment of what is presently known, and not merely assumed, about the process.
Annual Report
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Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890-1915
This “anthropological history” tells the story of homesteading and community organization in the Canadian-American West through personal reminiscences and locally written histories. John W. Bennett and Seena B. Kohl interpret those stories through the lenses of history and social science, and they present a view of settlement experience as one phase of the evolving postfrontier society and culture of western North America. Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890–1915 contains a synthesis of Canadian and U.S. settlement experiences giving, to the extent possible, equal space to both sides of the international boundary. The experiences of people in these adjacent territories were virtually identical, with emigrant populations from the same countries and socioeconomic strata. Among other aspects of the homesteading experience, the authors explore the “interactive adaptation” that developed in the West. Networks of mutual aid, reverently remembered by the voices found in these pages, eased the inevitable hardships.
The Geography of South America
South America is an area of fascination and study for geographers and other scholars from around the world, and its land and people have played important roles in the discovery and distribution of civilizations, resources, and nations for millennia. The region has long stimulated a large amount of research across the many subdisciplines of geography, and Thomas A. Rumney collects, organizes, and presents as many scholarly publications as possible in The Geography of South America: A Scholarly Guide and Bibliography. Every South American nation is included: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Beginning w...
