Download or read book Inescapable Ecologies written by Linda Nash and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-01-05 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of "ecological" ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California’s Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual, Inescapable Ecologies brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world.

Download or read book Inescapable Ecologies written by Linda Lorraine Nash and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book Managing the Unknown written by Frank Uekötter and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-03-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information is crucial when it comes to the management of resources. But what if knowledge is incomplete, or biased, or otherwise deficient? How did people define patterns of proper use in the absence of cognitive certainty? Discussing this challenge for a diverse set of resources from fish to rubber, these essays show that deficient knowledge is a far more pervasive challenge in resource history than conventional readings suggest. Furthermore, environmental ignorance does not inevitably shrink with the march of scientific progress: these essays suggest more of a dialectical relationship between knowledge and ignorance that has different shapes and trajectories. With its combination of empirical case studies and theoretical reflection, the essays make a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debate on the production and resilience of ignorance. At the same time, this volume combines insights from different continents as well as the seas in between and thus sketches outlines of an emerging global resource history.

Download or read book Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion written by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How literature of the British imperial world contended with the social and environmental consequences of industrial mining The 1830s to the 1930s saw the rise of large-scale industrial mining in the British imperial world. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller examines how literature of this era reckoned with a new vision of civilization where humans are dependent on finite, nonrenewable stores of earthly resources, and traces how the threatening horizon of resource exhaustion worked its way into narrative form. Britain was the first nation to transition to industry based on fossil fuels, which put its novelists and other writers in the remarkable position of mediating the emergence of extraction-based life. Miller looks at works like Hard Times, The Mill on the Floss, and Sons and Lovers, showing how the provincial realist novel’s longstanding reliance on marriage and inheritance plots transforms against the backdrop of exhaustion to withhold the promise of reproductive futurity. She explores how adventure stories like Treasure Island and Heart of Darkness reorient fictional space toward the resource frontier. And she shows how utopian and fantasy works like “Sultana’s Dream,” The Time Machine, and The Hobbit offer imaginative ways of envisioning energy beyond extractivism. This illuminating book reveals how an era marked by violent mineral resource rushes gave rise to literary forms and genres that extend extractivism as a mode of environmental understanding.

Download or read book Racial Fault Lines written by Tomás Almaguer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An excellent summary and interpretation of race relations in nineteenth-century California. Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, it is the last and best word on the historical origins of the racial hierarchy that contemporary multiculturalists are struggling to overcome."--George Fredrickson, Stanford University "Sometime soon in the 21st century, all of California's peoples will belong to minorities, and Almaguer's pathbreaking comparative history is indispensable for understanding how and why this society became so racially diverse. His study expands the borders of multicultural scholarship."--Ronald Takaki, University of California, Berkeley "Evocatively written and theoretically compelling, "Racial Fault Lines represents a benchmark in the writing of U.S. history. Almaguer blends sociological paradigms with rich historical narratives in his perspicacious examination of racial and class formation among nineteenth-century Californians. Me

Download or read book Thrown Among Strangers written by Douglas Monroy and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-11-15 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every California schoolchild's first interaction with history begins with the missions and Indians. It is the pastoralist image, of course, and it is a lasting one. Children in elementary school hear how Father Serra and the priests brought civilization to the groveling, lizard- and acorn-eating Indians of such communities as Yang-na, now Los Angeles. So edified by history, many of those children drag their parents to as many missions as they can. Then there is the other side of the missions, one that a mural decorating a savings and loan office in the San Fernando Valley first showed to me as a child. On it a kindly priest holds a large cross over a kneeling Indian. For some reason, though, the padre apparently aims not to bless the Indian but rather to bludgeon him with the emblem of Christianity. This portrait, too, clings to the memory, capturing the critical view of the missionization of California's indigenous inhabitants. I carried the two childhood images with me both when I went to libraries as I researched the missions and when I revisited several missions thirty years after those family trips. In this work I proceed neither to dubunk nor to reconcile these contrary notions of the missions and Indians but to present a new and, I hope, deeper understanding of the complex interaction of the two antithetical cultures.

Download or read book Territories of Difference written by Arturo Escobar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-26 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Territories of Difference, Arturo Escobar, author of the widely debated book Encountering Development, analyzes the politics of difference enacted by specific place-based ethnic and environmental movements in the context of neoliberal globalization. His analysis is based on his many years of engagement with a group of Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia’s Pacific rainforest region, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). Escobar offers a detailed ethnographic account of PCN’s visions, strategies, and practices, and he chronicles and analyzes the movement’s struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition. Yet he also does much more. Consistently emphasizing the value of local activist knowledge for both understanding and social action and drawing on multiple strands of critical scholarship, Escobar proposes new ways for scholars and activists to examine and apprehend the momentous, complex processes engulfing regions such as the Colombian Pacific today. Escobar illuminates many interrelated dynamics, including the Colombian government’s policies of development and pluralism that created conditions for the emergence of black and indigenous social movements and those movements’ efforts to steer the region in particular directions. He examines attempts by capitalists to appropriate the rainforest and extract resources, by developers to set the region on the path of modernist progress, and by biologists and others to defend this incredibly rich biodiversity “hot-spot” from the most predatory activities of capitalists and developers. He also looks at the attempts of academics, activists, and intellectuals to understand all of these complicated processes. Territories of Difference is Escobar’s effort to think with Afro-Colombian intellectual-activists who aim to move beyond the limits of Eurocentric paradigms as they confront the ravages of neoliberal globalization and seek to defend their place-based cultures and territories.

Download or read book Fit to Be Citizens written by Natalia Molina and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-03-13 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina’s compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.

Download or read book Transecology written by Douglas A. Vakoch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-10 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a growing recognition of the importance of transgender perspectives about the environment. Unlike more established approaches in the environmental humanities and queer studies, transecology is a nascent inquiry whose significance and scope are only just being articulated. Drawing upon the fields of gender studies and ecological studies, contributors to this volume engage major concepts widely used in both fields as they explore the role of identity, exclusion, connection, intimacy, and emplacement to understand our relationship to nature and environment. The theorists and ideas examined across multiple chapters include Stacy Alaimo’s notion of "trans-corporeality" as a "contact zone" between humans and the environment, Timothy Morton’s concept of "mesh" to explore the interconnectedness of all beings, Susan Stryker’s notion of trans identity as "ontologically inescapable," Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson’s history of the development of queer rural spaces, Judith Butler’s analysis of gender as "performative"—with those who are not "properly gendered" being seen as "abjects"—and Julia Serano’s contrasting rejection of gender as performance. Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature will be of great interest to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in transgender studies, gender studies, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities.

Download or read book Whitewashed Adobe written by William F. Deverell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-06-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling the rise of Los Angeles through shifting ideas of race and ethnicity, William Deverell offers a unique perspective on how the city grew and changed. Whitewashed Adobe considers six different developments in the history of the city—including the cementing of the Los Angeles River, the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1924, and the evolution of America's largest brickyard in the 1920s. In an absorbing narrative supported by a number of previously unpublished period photographs, Deverell shows how a city that was once part of Mexico itself came of age through appropriating—and even obliterating—the region's connections to Mexican places and people. Deverell portrays Los Angeles during the 1850s as a city seething with racial enmity due to the recent war with Mexico. He explains how, within a generation, the city's business interests, looking for a commercially viable way to establish urban identity, borrowed Mexican cultural traditions and put on a carnival called La Fiesta de Los Angeles. He analyzes the subtle ways in which ethnicity came to bear on efforts to corral the unpredictable Los Angeles River and shows how the resident Mexican population was put to work fashioning the modern metropolis. He discusses how Los Angeles responded to the nation's last major outbreak of bubonic plague and concludes by considering the Mission Play, a famed drama tied to regional assumptions about history, progress, and ethnicity. Taking all of these elements into consideration, Whitewashed Adobe uncovers an urban identity—and the power structure that fostered it—with far-reaching implications for contemporary Los Angeles.

Download or read book Marx s Ecology written by John Bellamy Foster and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-03-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it? This startling new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis. Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature. Marx's Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Ludwig Feuerbach, P. J. Proudhon, and William Paley. By reconstructing a materialist conception of nature and society, Marx's Ecology challenges the spiritualism prevalent in the modern Green movement, pointing toward a method that offers more lasting and sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis.

Download or read book Diamond written by Steve Lerner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006-02-17 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of how a mixed-income minority community in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor fought Shell Oil and won. For years, the residents of Diamond, Louisiana, lived with an inescapable acrid, metallic smell—the "toxic bouquet" of pollution—and a mysterious chemical fog that seeped into their houses. They looked out on the massive Norco Industrial Complex: a maze of pipelines, stacks topped by flares burning off excess gas, and huge oil tankers moving up the Mississippi. They experienced headaches, stinging eyes, allergies, asthma, and other respiratory problems, skin disorders, and cancers that they were convinced were caused by their proximity to heavy industry. Periodic industrial explosions damaged their houses and killed some of their neighbors. Their small, African-American, mixed-income neighborhood was sandwiched between two giant Shell Oil plants in Louisiana's notorious Chemical Corridor. When the residents of Diamond demanded that Shell relocate them, their chances of success seemed slim: a community with little political clout was taking on the second-largest oil company in the world. And yet, after effective grassroots organizing, unremitting fenceline protests, seemingly endless negotiations with Shell officials, and intense media coverage, the people of Diamond finally got what they wanted: money from Shell to help them relocate out of harm's way. In this book, Steve Lerner tells their story. Around the United States, struggles for environmental justice such as the one in Diamond are the new front lines of both the civil rights and the environmental movements, and Diamond is in many ways a classic environmental-justice story: a minority neighborhood, faced with a polluting industry in its midst, fights back. But Diamond is also the history of a black community that goes back to the days of slavery. In 1811, Diamond (then the Trepagnier Plantation) was the center of the largest slave rebellion in United States history. Descendants of these slaves were among the participants in the modern-day Diamond relocation campaign. Steve Lerner talks to the people of Diamond, and lets them tell their story in their own words. He talks also to the residents of a nearby white neighborhood—many of whom work for Shell and have fewer complaints about the plants—and to environmental activists and Shell officials. His account of Diamond's 30-year ordeal puts a human face on the struggle for environmental justice in the United States.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History written by Andrew C. Isenberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the methodology of environmental history, with an emphasis on the field's interaction with other historiographies such as consumerism, borderlands, and gender. It examines the problem of environmental context, specifically the problem and perception of environmental determinism, by focusing on climate, disease, fauna, and regional environments. It also considers the changing understanding of scientific knowledge.

Download or read book Migrant Ecologies written by Zhou Xiaojing and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Migrant Ecologies investigates the ways in which Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry exposes the entanglements of migrant ecologies embedded within local and global networks of capital and labor. The author contends that women migrant workers in particular, as portrayed in Zheng’s poems, are the visible manifestation of the interconnections between the so-called “factories of the world” and slum villages-in-the-city, between urban development and rural decline, and between the local environmental degradation and the global market. By adopting an ecological approach to Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers in China, the author explores what Donna Haraway calls “webbed ecologies” (49). The concept of “ecologies” serves to enhance not only the layered, complex interconnections underlying women migrant workers’ plight and environmental degradation in China, but also the emergence and transformation of migrant spaces, subjects, activism, and networks resulting in part from globalization.

Download or read book Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High Tech Urbanism written by Jason A. Heppler and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the half century after World War II, California’s Santa Clara Valley transformed from a rolling landscape of fields and orchards into the nation’s most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. How Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley and came to embody both the triumphs and the failures of a new vision of the American West is the question Jason A. Heppler explores in this book. A revealing look at the significance of nature in social, cultural, and economic conceptions of place, the book is also a case study on the origins of American environmentalism and debates about urban and suburban sustainability. Between 1950 and 1990, business and community leaders pursued a new vision of the landscape stretching from Palo Alto to San Jose—a vision that melded the bucolic naturalism of orchards, pleasant weather, and green spaces with the metropolitan promise of modern industry, government-funded research, and technology. Heppler describes the success of a new, clean, future-facing economy, coupled with a pleasant, green environment, in drawing people to Silicon Valley. And in this overwhelming success, he also locates the rapidly emerging faults created by competing ideas about forming these idyllic communities—specifically, widespread environmental degradation and increasing social stratification. Cities organized around high-tech industries, suburban growth, and urban expansion were, as Heppler shows, crucibles for empowering elites, worsening human health, and spreading pollution. What do “nature” and “place” mean, and who gets to define these terms? Key to Heppler’s work is the idea that these questions reflect and determine what, and who, matters in any conversation about the environment. Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism vividly traces that idea through the linked histories of Silicon Valley and environmentalism in the West.

Download or read book The Material Gene written by Kelly E. Happe and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2014 Diamond Anniversary Book Award Finalist for the 2014 National Communications Association Critical and Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year Award In 2000, the National Human Genome Research Institute announced the completion of a “draft” of the human genome, the sequence information of nearly all 3 billion base pairs of DNA. Since then, interest in the hereditary basis of disease has increased considerably. In The Material Gene, Kelly E. Happe considers the broad implications of this development by treating “heredity” as both a scientific and political concept. Beginning with the argument that eugenics was an ideological project that recast the problems of industrialization as pathologies of gender, race, and class, the book traces the legacy of this ideology in contemporary practices of genomics. Delving into the discrete and often obscure epistemologies and discursive practices of genomic scientists, Happe maps the ways in which the hereditarian body, one that is also normatively gendered and racialized, is the new site whereby economic injustice, environmental pollution, racism, and sexism are implicitly reinterpreted as pathologies of genes and by extension, the bodies they inhabit. Comparing genomic approaches to medicine and public health with discourses of epidemiology, social movements, and humanistic theories of the body and society, The Material Gene reworks our common assumption of what might count as effective, just, and socially transformative notions of health and disease.

Download or read book Contested Eden written by Ramón A. Gutiérrez and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-03-31 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrating the 150th birthday of the state of California offers the opportunity to reexamine the founding of modern California, from the earliest days through the Gold Rush and up to 1870. In this four-volume series, published in association with the California Historical Society, leading scholars offer a contemporary perspective on such issues as the evolution of a distinctive California culture, the interaction between people and the natural environment, the ways in which California's development affected the United States and the world, and the legacy of cultural and ethnic diversity in the state. California before the Gold Rush, the first California Sesquicentennial volume, combines topics of interest to scholars and general readers alike. The essays investigate traditional historical subjects and also explore such areas as environmental science, women's history, and Indian history. Authored by distinguished scholars in their respective fields, each essay contains excellent summary bibliographies of leading works on pertinent topics. This volume also features an extraordinary full-color photographic essay on the artistic record of the conquest of California by Europeans, as well as over seventy black-and-white photographs, some never before published.