Download or read book Spatializing the History of Ecology written by Raf de Bont and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances a spatial perspective on the history of ecology. Intrigued by broader debates in the humanities on the "spatial turn," the authors contribute to a more explicit and systematic development of spatial thinking in the history of ecology, exploring to which extent a spatial perspective can shed new light on the history of ecological science, and using ecology as a critical site to gain broader insights into the history of the environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Spatializing the History of Ecology written by Raf de Bont and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout its history, the discipline of ecology has always been profoundly entangled with the history of space and place. On the one hand, ecology is a field science that has thrived on the study of concrete spatial entities, such as islands, forests or rivers. These spaces are the workplaces in which ecological phenomena are identified, observed and experimented on. They provide both epistemic opportunities and constraints that structure the agenda and the analytical sensibilities of ecological researchers. On the other hand, ecological knowledge and practices have become important resources through which spaces and places are classified, delineated, explained, experienced and managed. The impact of these activities reaches far beyond the realms of the ecological discipline. Many ecological concepts such as "biotopes," "ecosystems" and "the biosphere" have become entities that widely resonate in public life and policy making. This book explores the mutual entanglement between space and knowledge-making in the history of ecology. Its first goal is to explore to which extent a spatial perspective can shed new light on the history of ecological science. Second, it uses ecology as a critical site to gain broader insights into the history of the environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Via a series of case studies – discussing topics that range from ecological field stations in the early-twentieth century Caribbean over wisent breeding in Nazi Germany to computer modelling in North American deserts – the book offers a tour through the changing landscapes of modern ecology.
Download or read book Greening Europe written by Anna-Katharina Wöbse and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, the environment seems omnipresent in European policy within and beyond the European Union. The idea of a shared European environment, however, has come a long way and is still being contested. Greening Europe focuses on the many ways people have interacted with nature and made it an issue of European concern. The authors ask how notions of Europe mattered in these activities and they expose the many entanglements of activists across the subcontinent who set out to connect and network, and to exchange knowledge, worldviews, and strategies that exceeded their national horizons. Moving beyond human agency, the handbook also highlights the eminent role nature played in both "greening" Europe and making Europe a shared environment.
Download or read book Nature s Diplomats written by Raf De Bont and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature’s Diplomats explores the development of science-based and internationally conceived nature protection in its foundational years before the 1960s, the decade when it launched from obscurity onto the global stage. Raf De Bont studies a movement while it was still in the making and its groups were still rather small, revealing the geographies of the early international preservationist groups, their social composition, self-perception, ethos, and predilections, their ideals and strategies, and the natures they sought to preserve. By examining international efforts to protect migratory birds, the threatened European bison, and the mountain gorilla in the interior of the Belgian Congo, Nature’s Diplomats sheds new light on the launch of major international organizations for nature protection in the aftermath of World War II. Additionally, it covers how the rise of ecological science, the advent of the Cold War, and looming decolonization forced a rethinking of approach and rhetoric; and how old ideas and practices lingered on. It provides much-needed historical context for present-day convictions about and approaches to the preservation of species and the conservation of natural resources, the involvement of local communities in conservation projects, the fate of extinct species and vanished habitats, and the management of global nature.
Download or read book Wild by Design written by Laura J. Martin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An environmental historian delves into the history, science, and philosophy of a paradoxical pursuit: the century-old quest to design natural places and create wild species. Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology. Restoration has been a touchstone of US environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be. In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.
Download or read book Living with the Land written by Liesbeth van de Grift and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-11-07 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a long time agriculture and rural life were dismissed by many contemporaries as irrelevant or old-fashioned. Contrasted with cities as centers of intellectual debate and political decision-making, the countryside seemed to be becoming increasingly irrelevant. Today, politicians in many European countries are starting to understand that the neglect of the countryside has created grave problems. Similarly, historians are remembering that European history in the twentieth century was strongly influenced by problems connected to the production of food, access to natural resources, land rights, and the political representation and activism of rural populations. Hence, the handbook offers an overview of historical knowledge on a variety of topics related to the land. It does so through a distinctly activity-centric and genuinely European perspective. Rather than comparing different national approaches to living with the land, the different chapters focus on particular activities – from measuring to settling the land, from producing and selling food to improving agronomic knowledge, from organizing rural life to challenging political structures in the countryside. Furthermore, the handbook overcomes the traditional division between East and West, North and South, by embracing a transregional approach that allows readers to gain an understanding of similarities and differences across national and ideological borders in twentieth-century Europe.
Download or read book American Tropics written by Megan Raby and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research. From these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American "tropical biologists" developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity. Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.
Download or read book Politics of Urban Knowledge written by Bert De Munck and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-23 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to understand how professionals, administrations, scholars, and social movements have surveyed, evaluated and theorized the city, identified problems, and shaped and legitimized practical interventions in planning and administration. Urbanization has been accompanied, and partly shaped by, the formation of the city as a distinct domain of knowledge. This volume uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to develop a new perspective on urban history and urban planning history. Through case studies of mainly 19th and 20th century examples, the book demonstrates that urban knowledge is not simply a neutral means to represent cities as pre-existing entities, but rather the outcome of historically contingent processes and practices of urban actors addressing urban issues and the power relations in which they are embedded. It shows how urban knowledge-making has reshaped the categories, rationales, and techniques through which urban spaces were produced, governed and contested, and how the knowledge concerned became performative of newly emerging urban orders. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of urban history and urban studies, as well as the history of technology, science and knowledge and of science studies.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire written by Andrew Goss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of this volume is the history of imperial science between 1600 and 1960, although some essays reach back prior to 1600 and the section about decolonization includes post-1960 material. Each contributed chapter, written by an expert in the field, provides an analytical review essay of the field, while also providing an overview of the topic. There is now a rich literature developed by historians of science as well as scholars of empire demonstrating the numerous ways science and empire grew together, especially between 1600 and 1960.
Download or read book A Monastery for the Ibex written by Wilko Graf von Hardenberg and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gran Paradiso National Park is Italy’s oldest, and was instrumental in preventing the extinction of the Alpine ibex between World War I and just after World War II. Today, there are more than 30,000 ibex living in the Alps, all of which descended from that last colony protected in Gran Paradiso under Mussolini’s rule. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg merges the history of conservation with the area’s social history and Italy’s larger political history to produce a multifaceted narrative about the park as an institution, the conflicts it triggered, and practices adopted to manage the ibex despite hurdles placed by the fascist regime. The book’s central argument is that, in fascist Italy, preservation—propaganda notwithstanding—was a product of the regime’s continuities with the previous liberal system. Italy’s total fascist transformation, accomplished only more than a decade after Mussolini took power, virtually unmade the early successes of preservation set in place by the nascent “nature state” in the regime’s early years. Despite this conflict, conservationists succeeded in preserving the ibex. Hardenberg positions this success within the broader history of science, conservation, and tourism in fascist Italy and the Alpine region, creating a comprehensive historical background and comparative reference to ongoing debates about the role of nature conservation in general and in relation to the state and its agencies.
Download or read book The League of Nations and the Protection of the Environment written by Omer Aloni and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first study of the environmental challenges handled by the League of Nations pioneers new perspectives on legal and environmental history.
Download or read book Spatializing Law written by Franz von Benda-Beckmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatializing Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law in Society focuses on law and its location, exploring how spaces are constructed on the terrestrial and marine surface of the earth with legal means in a rich variety of socio-political, legal and ecological settings. The contributors explore the interrelations between social spaces and physical space, highlighting the ways in which legal rules may localise people's rights and obligations in social space that may be mapped onto physical space. This volume also demonstrates how different notions of space and place become resources that can be mobilised in social, political and economic interaction, paying specific attention to the contradictory ways in which space may be configured and involved in social interaction under conditions of plural legal orders. Spatializing Law makes a significant contribution to the anthropological geography of law and will be useful to scholars across a broad array of disciplines.
Download or read book The Branches of Ecology written by Frank N. Egerton and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ecology grew from a minor science, in 1900, into a major discipline in the 20th century. This book describes this development. A dramatic increase in ecological knowledge was accompanied by the formation of ecological professional societies. Universities added ecologists to their faculties. And governments acknowledged the need for ecologists to advise on conservation of natural resources and to combat pollution. Ecology is still growing as a discipline and many local, regional and global environmental problems remain to be studied. Just how ecologists rose to these challenges is an exciting and inspiring narrative, which is the theme of this book"--
Download or read book Spatializing Culture written by Setha Low and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates the value of ethnographic theory and methods in understanding space and place, and considers how ethnographically-based spatial analyses can yield insight into prejudices, inequalities and social exclusion as well as offering people the means for understanding the places where they live, work, shop and socialize. In developing the concept of spatializing culture, Setha Low draws on over twenty years of research to examine social production, social construction, embodied, discursive, emotive and affective, as well as translocal approaches. A global range of fieldwork examples are employed throughout the text to highlight not just the theoretical development of the idea of spatializing culture, but how it can be used in undertaking ethnographies of space and place. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars from a number of disciplines who are interested in the study of culture through the lens of space and place.
Download or read book Spatializing Marcuse written by Margath Walker and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2022-07-25 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects of one of the leading social and political theorists of the 20th century. Margath A. Walker considers how Marcusean philosophies might challenge the way we think about space and politics, and create new sensibilities. Applying them to contemporary geopolitics, digital infrastructure, and issues like resistance and immigration, the book shows how social change has been stifled, and how Marcuse’s philosophies could provide the tools to overturn the status quo. She demonstrates Marcuse’s relevance to individuals and society, and finds this important theorist of opposition can point the way to resisting oppressive forces within contemporary capitalism.
Download or read book Models in Spatial Analysis written by Lena Sanders and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides a broad overview of the different types of models used in advanced spatial analysis. The models concern spatial organization, location factors and spatial interaction patterns from both static and dynamic perspectives. Each chapter gives a broad overview of the subject, covering both theoretical developments and practical applications. The advantages of an interdisciplinary approach are illustrated in the way that the viewpoint of each of the individual disciplines are brought together when considering questions relevant to spatial analysis. The authors of the chapters come from a range of different disciplines (geography, economy, hydrology, ecology, etc.) and are specialists in their field. They use a range of methods and modeling tools developed in mathematics, statistics, artificial intelligence and physics.
Download or read book Rethinking the Great White North written by Andrew Baldwin and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2011-09-21 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canadian national identity is bound to the idea of a Great White North. Images of snow, wilderness, and emptiness seem innocent, yet this path-breaking volume shows they contain the seeds of contemporary racism. Rethinking the Great White North moves the idea of whiteness to the centre of debates about Canadian history, geography, and identity. Informed by critical race theory and the insight that racism is geographical as well as historical and cultural, the contributors trace how notions of race, whiteness, and nature helped shape Canada’s identity as a white country in travel writing and treaty making; scientific research and park planning; and within small towns, cities, and tourist centres. These nuanced explorations of diverse historical geographies of nature not only revisit the past: they offer a new vocabulary for contemporary debates on Canada’s role in the North and the nature of multiculturalism.
