Download or read book Pierre Poivre and the Networking Naturalists written by Gillian Jones and published by Austin Macauley Publishers. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although climate change is seen as a very 21st-century concern, back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century naturalists around the world in places as far apart as Mauritius in the Indian ocean and St Vincent in the Caribbean were becoming aware of what they referred to as desiccation, the drying of the land and absence of rainfall due to the cutting down of large swathes of forest trees. This book traces the connections between those naturalists, scientists and men of letters to reveal the surprising truths that they discovered and which must inspire us to follow the trail they blazed.
Download or read book Chaos in the Heavens written by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If you want to understand the long path to the climate crisis, read this book." –Deborah Coen, Professor of History and the History of Science and Medicine, Yale University Politicians and scientists have debated climate change for centuries in times of rapid change Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences of our actions upon the environment for centuries. The subject was raised wherever history accelerated: by the Conquistadors in the New World, by the French revolutionaries of 1789, by the scientists and politicians of the nineteenth century, by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa until the Second World War. Climate change was at the heart of fundamental debates about colonisation, God, the state, nature, and capitalism. From these intellectual and political battles emerged key concepts of contemporary environmental science and policy. For a brief interlude, science and industry instilled in us the reassuring illusion of an impassive climate. But, in the age of global warming, we must, once again, confront the chaos in the heavens.
Download or read book Creolised Science written by Dorit Brixius and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-04 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This rich, deeply researched study offers the first comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural plant knowledge in eighteenth-century Mauritius. Using the concept of creolisation – the process by which elements of different cultures are brought together to create entangled and evolving new entities – Brixius examines the production of knowledge on an island without long-established traditions of botany as understood by Europeans. Once foreign plants and knowledge arrived in Mauritius, they were adapted to new environmental circumstances and a new socio-cultural space. Brixius explores how French colonists, settlers, mediators, labourers and enslaved people experienced and shaped the island's botanical past, centring the contributions of subaltern actors. By foregrounding neglected non-European actors from both Africa and Asia, within a melting pot of cultivation traditions from around the world, she presents a truly global history of botanical knowledge.
Download or read book Pierre Poivre and the Networking Naturalists written by Gillian Jones and published by Austin Macauley. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although climate change is seen as a very 21st-century concern, back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century naturalists around the world in places as far apart as Mauritius in the Indian ocean and St Vincent in the Caribbean were becoming aware of what they referred to as desiccation, the drying of the land and absence of rainfall due to the cutting down of large swathes of forest trees. This book traces the connections between those naturalists, scientists and men of letters to reveal the surprising truths that they discovered and which must inspire us to follow the trail they blazed.
Download or read book Eco Cultural Networks and the British Empire written by James Beattie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 19th-century British imperial expansion dramatically shaped today's globalised world. Imperialism encouraged mass migrations of people, shifting flora, fauna and commodities around the world and led to a series of radical environmental changes never before experienced in history. Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire explores how these networks shaped ecosystems, cultures and societies throughout the British Empire and how they were themselves transformed by local and regional conditions. This multi-authored volume begins with a rigorous theoretical analysis of the categories of 'empire' and 'imperialism'. Its chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, draw methodologically from recent studies in environmental history, post-colonial theory and the history of science. Together, these perspectives provide a comprehensive historical understanding of how the British Empire reshaped the globe during the 19th and 20th centuries. This book will be an important addition to the literature on British imperialism and global ecological change.
Download or read book Herbs and the Evolution of Human Societies written by Yue Yue and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-14 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions gathered together in this volume analyse the link that humankind establishes with nature, examining the way in which a dialogue has been initiated between these two worlds and how it has evolved. From a geographical point of view, the text takes the reader to Africa, America, Asia and Europe via Brazil, Canada, China, Ethiopia, France, Somalia, Switzerland, Tibet, Tunisia, Ukraine, and the United States, providing a meeting ground between plants and humanity in different dimensions.
Download or read book Imperialism and Science written by George N. Vlahakis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-04-26 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique resource that synthesizes existing primary and secondary sources to provide a fascinating introduction to the development and dissemination of science within history's great empires, as well as the complex interaction between imperialism and scientific progress over two centuries. Imperialism and Science is a scholarly yet accessible chronicle of the impact of imperialism on science over the past 200 years, from the effect of Catholicism on scientific progress in Latin America to the importance of U.S. government funding of scientific research to America's preeminent place in the world. Spanning two centuries of scientific advance throughout the age of empire, Imperialism and Science sheds new light on the spread of scientific thought throughout the former colonial world. Science made enormous advances during this period, often being associated with anti-Imperialist struggle or, as in the case of the science brought to 19th-century China and India by the British, with Western cultural hegemony.
Download or read book Nature and Society in Historical Context written by Mikulas Teich and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-02-13 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays describing the historical connection between nature and society.
Download or read book Elephant Treaties written by Rachelle Adam and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a legal history of international biodiversity treaties from the late nineteenth century to the present, Rachelle Adam argues that todayÕs biodiversity crisis is rooted in European colonial history, especially in the conservation treaties that the colonial powers (and their non-governmental counterparts) negotiated to protect AfricaÕs big-game animals. Reflecting on the colonial pastÑparticularly on efforts to manage the commerce in elephant ivoryÑAdam sheds light on why more recent attempts to arrest the decline in biodiversity by way of international agreement have failed. This volume will spur a rethinking of such agreements and trigger a search for alternatives outside of existing international structures.
Download or read book Utopia s Garden written by E. C. Spary and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific practitioners. Yet unlike many such institutions, the Jardin not only survived the French Revolution but by 1800 had become the world's leading public establishment of natural history: the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. E. C. Spary traces the scientific, administrative, and political strategies that enabled the foundation of the Muséum, arguing that agriculture and animal breeding rank alongside classification and collections in explaining why natural history was important for French rulers. But the Muséum's success was also a consequence of its employees' Revolutionary rhetoric: by displaying the natural order, they suggested, the institution could assist in fashioning a self-educating, self-policing Republican people. Natural history was presented as an indispensable source of national prosperity and individual virtue. Spary's fascinating account opens a new chapter in the history of France, science, and the Enlightenment.
Download or read book The Vortex written by Frank Uekötter and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2024-04-18 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises—climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes—means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure, must be considered collectively if we are to stay afloat in what Uekötter describes as a vortex: a powerful metaphor for the flow of history, capturing the momentum and the many crosscurrents that swept people and environments along. His book invites us to look at environmental challenges from multiple perspectives, including all the twists and turns that have helped to create the mess we find ourselves in. Uekötter has written a world history for an age where things are falling apart: where we know what lies ahead and are equipped with the right tools—technological and otherwise—and plenty of experience to deal with environmental challenges, but somehow fail to get our affairs in order.
Download or read book Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission written by Martha Frederiks and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This selection of texts introduces students and researchers to the multi- and interdisciplinary field of mission history. The four parts of this book acquaint the readers with methodological considerations and recurring themes in the academic study of the history of mission. Part one revolves around methods, part two documents approaches, while parts three and four consist of thematic clusters, such as mission and language, medical mission, mission and education, women and mission, mission and politics, and mission and art.Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission is suitable for course-work and other educational purposes.
Download or read book In the Herbarium written by Maura C. Flannery and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How herbaria illuminate the past and future of plant science Collections of preserved plant specimens, known as herbaria, have existed for nearly five centuries. These pressed and labeled plants have been essential resources for scientists, allowing them to describe and differentiate species and to document and research plant changes and biodiversity over time—including changes related to climate. Maura C. Flannery tells the history of herbaria, from the earliest collections belonging to such advocates of the technique as sixteenth-century botanist Luca Ghini, to the collections of poets, politicians, and painters, and to the digitization of these precious specimens today. She charts the growth of herbaria during the Age of Exploration, the development of classification systems to organize the collections, and herbaria’s indispensable role in the tracking of climate change and molecular evolution. Herbaria also have historical, aesthetic, cultural, and ethnobotanical value—these preserved plants can be linked to the Indigenous peoples who used them, the collectors who sought them out, and the scientists who studied them. This book testifies to the central role of herbaria in the history of plant study and to their continued value, not only to biologists but to entirely new users as well: gardeners, artists, students, and citizen-scientists.
Download or read book Climate Change and the Humanities written by Alexander Elliott and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays fills a lacunae in the current climate change debate by bringing new perspectives on the role of humanities scholars within this debate. The humanities have historically played an important role in the various debates on environment, climate and society. The past two decades especially have seen a resurfacing of these environmental concerns across humanities disciplines in the wake of what has been termed climate change. This book argues that these disciplines should be more confident and vocal in responding to climate change while questioning the way in which the climate change debate is currently being conducted in academic, political and social arenas. Addressing climate change through the varied approaches of the humanities means re-thinking and re-evaluating its fundamental assumptions and responses to perceived crisis through the lens of history, philosophy and literature. The volume aims thus to be a catalyst for emerging scholarship in this field and to appeal to an academic and popular readership.
Download or read book Green Imperialism written by Richard H. Grove and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-03-29 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to document the origins and early history of environmentalism, especially its colonial and global aspects.
Download or read book British Politics and the Environment in the Long Nineteenth Century written by Peter Hough and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of archival source material chronicles British environmental politics between 1789 and 1914. This text examines scientific discoveries during this period and the result of these findings on the political environment, bringing the publics attention to public health issues such as acid rain and river pollution. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students of environmental and political history.
Download or read book Handbook of the Birds of the World written by Josep del Hoyo and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All manner of information about birds is presented. Following each lengthy description are full-color plates of typical members of each species with range-pattern maps for each family's genus and species.
