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Though still a relatively young field, the study of Latin American environmental history is blossoming, as the contributions to this definitive volume demonstrate. Bringing together thirteen leading experts on the region, A Living Past synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to offer new perspectives on environmental change in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Each chapter provides insightful, up-to-date syntheses of current scholarship on critical countries and ecosystems (including Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, the tropical Andes, and tropical forests) and such cross-cutting themes as agriculture, conservation, mining, ranching, science, and urbanization. Together, these studies provide valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing the region.
This volume brings to the reader the history of the alteration of environment by human action, and the reciprocal influence of the environment upon human history. A set of macro- and micro-regional studies of environmental history and economic development with respect to India, China, Bangladesh, and Brazil are discussed
DIVAuthoritative work on the complex history of modern Brazilian environmental policy and its relation to both transnational politics and domestic democratization processes./div
Socio-ecological conflicts about land use in Latin America are complex: they involve various actors and flare up due to the dynamics of colonization, spatial appropriation, and the commodification of land. This volume of the Handbook »The Anthropocene as Multiple Crisis« focuses on land use in the main macro-regions of Latin America from the colonial regime to the contemporary era of the Anthropocene. The contributions touch upon numerous aspects, from the transformations of material to the social practices, their political and legal regulations as well as the imaginaries of virgin territories. Consequently, far from limiting themselves to a static cartography of land use, the contributors investigate the appropriations of borders and historic transformations in land use.
Early sugar and ethanol policy, 1933-1959 -- Sugar, ethanol, and development, 1959-1975 -- Proálcool, 1975-1985 -- Lakes of sacrifice: ethanol and water pollution -- Proálcool, caneworkers, and the guariba strikes of 1984 -- Proálcool reimagined, 1985-2003.
From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world By the canons of orthodox social science, countries like India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, “too poor to be green.” In this deeply researched book, Ramachandra Guha challenges this narrative by revealing a virtually unknown prehistory of the global movement set far outside Europe or America. Long before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and well before climate change, ten remarkable individuals wrote with deep insight about the dangers of environmental abuse from within an I...
This book examines Brazil's position in the global ecological crisis and how social, political, ethical, scientific and economic issues affect its environmental performance.
Extinction Studies focuses on the entangled ecological and social dimensions of extinction, exploring the ways in which extinction catastrophically interrupts life-giving processes of time, death, and generations. The volume opens up important philosophical questions about our place in, and obligations to, a more-than-human world. Drawing on fieldwork, philosophy, literature, history, and a range of other perspectives, each of the chapters in this book tells a unique extinction story that explores what extinction is, what it means, why it matters—and to whom.
"Over the course of the past century, there has been a sustained reflective engagement about environmental risks, disasters, and human vulnerability in the technocene (a term used by some humanist scholars to characterize the era in which we live, characterized by complex technologies with accompanying hazards that can potentially harm human societies and their living environments on historically unprecedented scales). This inquiry has raised a host of crucial questions. Just how safe in humanity is in a world of toxic chemicals and industrial installations that have destructive potential? What are the discordant consequences of the transformations of the natural world by twentieth century technologies? To what extent is it feasible to contain chemical, nuclear, and other pollutants? Is it at all possible to prevent runaway disasters in highly complex industrial technoscapes? In what way do environmental hazards impact social and political orders? The purpose of this essay is to help scholars and indeed ordinary citizens not versed in the extent literature in scientific, public policy and humanistic genres, understand their social theoretic import"--
"This book argues that the 1970s energy crisis in the United States fostered the rise of neoliberalism in the United States by cultivating speculative discourses about energy that ultimately supported free market values expressed in trade and energy policies by the early 1980s. The book's interdisciplinary approach broadens the historiography of the energy crisis to consider the concepts, meanings, affects, and practices that comprised it, providing deeper context for the policy and geopolitical concerns that other scholars explore"--