Results by title

475 books match the query 'Environmental' and 37 start with c

cover of California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations

California Futures

Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations

Daniel Lanza Rivers

Duke University Press, 2026

California Futures is a critical study of California as a site of liberatory dreaming—one that takes up the history, politics, and afterlives of the region’s colonial imaginings as well as archives of resistance and world-making which strive toward Indigenous, decolonial, Black, queer, feminist, and anti-white supremacist futures. Attending carefully to the colonial, commercial, and environmental entanglements of the region, Daniel Lanza Rivers offers an account of the processes of speculation that worlded California into being. Rivers examines case studies such as the colonial cultures of grizzly bear eradication and reintroduction; the convergence of drought, industrial agriculture, and environmental toxicity in California's Central Valley; utopianism in the Klamath Mountains, from the Black Bear Ranch commune to Octavia Butler’s Parable series; dam removal and Native climate adaptation on the Klamath watershed; and the policing of unhoused people around Oakland's Lake Merritt. Through these case studies, Rivers interrogates the long histories of settler conquest, extractive and racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy that have shaped California. They chart strategies for thinking beyond the colonial Anthropocene and toward the post-extractive and liberatory futures that emerge from and with decolonial land relations.
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cover of California: A Fire Survey

California

A Fire Survey

Stephen J. Pyne

University of Arizona Press, 2016

The coastal sage and shrublands of California burn. The mountain-encrusting chaparral burns. The conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and Trinity Alps burn.  The rain-shadowed deserts after watering by El Niño cloudbursts and the thick forests of the rumpled Coast Range—all burn according to local rhythms of wetting and drying. Fire season, so the saying goes, lasts 13 months.

In this collection of essays on the region, Stephen J. Pyne colorfully explores the ways the region has approached fire management and what sets it apart from other parts of the country. Pyne writes that what makes California’s fire scene unique is how its dramatically distinctive biomes have been yoked to a common system, ultimately committed to suppression, and how its fires burn with a character and on a scale commensurate with the state’s size and political power. California has not only a ferocity of flame but a cultural intensity that few places can match. California’s fires are instantly and hugely broadcast. They shape national institutions, and they have repeatedly defined the discourse of fire’s history. No other place has so sculpted the American way of fire.

California is part of the multivolume series describing the nation’s fire scene region by region. The volumes in To the Last Smoke also cover Florida, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, and several other critical fire regions. The series serves as an important punctuation point to Pyne’s fifty-year career with wildland fire—both as a firefighter and a fire scholar. These unique surveys of regional pyrogeography are Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”
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cover of Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography

Camera Geologica

An Elemental History of Photography

Siobhan Angus

Duke University Press, 2024

In Camera Geologica Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements is a precondition of photography. Photography, Angus contends, begins underground and, in photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, she illustrates histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to expose the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Angus places nineteenth-century photography in dialogue with digital photography and its own entangled economies of extraction, demonstrating the importance of understanding photography’s complicity in the economic, geopolitical, and social systems that order the world.
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cover of Cape Cod: An Environmental History of a Fragile Ecosystem

Cape Cod

An Environmental History of a Fragile Ecosystem

John T. Cumbler

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

To many, Cape Cod represents the classic setting for an American summer vacation. Attracting seasonal tourists with picturesque beaches and abundant seafood, the Cape has held a place in our national imagination for almost two hundred years. People have been drawn to its beauty and resources since Native Americans wandered up its long sandy peninsula some 12,000 years ago, while writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Norman Mailer have celebrated its mystery and allure. But, despite its idealized image, Cape Cod has a long history of scarcity and an increasingly evident fragility.

John T. Cumbler's book offers an environmental, social, and economic history of Cape Cod told through the experiences of residents as well as visitors. He notes that over the past four hundred years the Cape has experienced three regimes of resource utilization. The first regime of Native Americans who lived relatively lightly on the land was supplanted by European settlers who focused on production and extraction. This second regime began in the age of sail but declined through the age of steam as the soil and seas failed to yield the resources necessary to sustain continuing growth. Environmental and then economic crises during the second half of the nineteenth century eventually gave way to the third regime of tourism and recreation. But this regime has its own environmental costs, as residents have learned over the last half century.

Although the Cape remains a special place, its history of resource scarcity and its attempts to deal with that scarcity offer useful lessons for anyone addressing similar issues around the globe.
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cover of Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery

Captive Ecologies

The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery

Jennifer C. James

Duke University Press, 2026

Captive Ecologies makes a case for the ecological significance of slavery’s afterlife, tracing the complex entanglements between racial capitalism and Black ecological freedom. Attending to the ways that racial capitalism implicates both captive bodies and captive land, Jennifer C. James brings into relief the harm that racial capitalism does to Black people as well as the human and non-human worlds they inhabit. James looks to a range of case studies and media from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including Black music, ecopoetics, literature, social history, biography, and Black feminist and queer art, tracing the various ways that the environmental stakes of racial capitalism have shaped the Black ecological imagination. In these works, the concept of captivity signals not only slavery but also Black life in the “wake”: carceral spaces and enclosures, exploitative economic systems, sacrifice zones, and more. James offers novel concepts and frameworks to generate new modes of ecocriticism that are equipped to grapple with the unique demands and stakes of captive ecologies.
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cover of Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes

Ronald C. Kramer

Rutgers University Press, 2020

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective. It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of disciplines, to analyze four specific state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate disruption. The final chapter reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.
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cover of Carbon Strategies: How Leading Companies Are Reducing Their Climate Change Footprint

Carbon Strategies

How Leading Companies Are Reducing Their Climate Change Footprint

Andrew J. Hoffman

University of Michigan Press, 2007

Carbon Strategies describes specific steps any business can take to implement sound, practical, climate-related corporate policies. Based on Andrew J. Hoffman’s widely praised report from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and significantly revised in light of subsequent developments, Carbon Strategies teaches practitioners and students about the importance of timing policy implementation, establishing appropriate levels of internal and external commitment, influencing beneficial policy development, and creating new business opportunities based on climate policy. Hoffman presents real-life “lessons learned” at each step of the climate-strategy development process and concludes this concise guidebook with six case studies (Cinergy, Swiss Re, DuPont, Alcoa, Shell Group, and Whirlpool) that demonstrate the principles of corporate climate policymaking in action.
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cover of Cartographies of Danger: Mapping Hazards in America

Cartographies of Danger

Mapping Hazards in America

Mark Monmonier

University of Chicago Press, 1997

No place is perfectly safe, but some places are more dangerous than others. Whether we live on a floodplain or in "Tornado Alley," near a nuclear facility or in a neighborhood poorly lit at night, we all co-exist uneasily with natural and man-made hazards. As Mark Monmonier shows in this entertaining and immensely informative book, maps can tell us a lot about where we can anticipate certain hazards, but they can also be dangerously misleading.

California, for example, takes earthquakes seriously, with a comprehensive program of seismic mapping, whereas Washington has been comparatively lax about earthquakes in Puget Sound. But as the Northridge earthquake in January 1994 demonstrated all too clearly to Californians, even reliable seismic-hazard maps can deceive anyone who misinterprets "known fault-lines" as the only places vulnerable to earthquakes.

Important as it is to predict and prepare for catastrophic natural hazards, more subtle and persistent phenomena such as pollution and crime also pose serious dangers that we have to cope with on a daily basis. Hazard-zone maps highlight these more insidious hazards and raise awareness about them among planners, local officials, and the public.

With the help of many maps illustrating examples from all corners of the United States, Monmonier demonstrates how hazard mapping reflects not just scientific understanding of hazards but also perceptions of risk and how risk can be reduced. Whether you live on a faultline or a coastline, near a toxic waste dump or an EMF-generating power line, you ignore this book's plain-language advice on geographic hazards and how to avoid them at your own peril.
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cover of Cataclysms: An Environmental History of Humanity

Cataclysms

An Environmental History of Humanity

Laurent Testot

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Humanity is by many measures the biggest success story in the animal kingdom; but what are the costs of this triumph? Over its three million years of existence, the human species has continuously modified nature and drained its resources. In Cataclysms, Laurent Testot provides the full tally, offering a comprehensive environmental history of humanity’s unmatched and perhaps irreversible influence on the world.

Testot explores the interconnected histories of human evolution and planetary deterioration, arguing that our development from naked apes to Homo sapiens has entailed wide-scale environmental harm. Testot makes the case that humans have usually been catastrophic for the planet, “hyperpredators” responsible for mass extinctions, deforestation, global warming, ocean acidification, and unchecked pollution, as well as the slaughter of our own species. Organized chronologically around seven technological revolutions, Cataclysms unspools the intertwined saga of humanity and our environment, from our shy beginnings in Africa to today’s domination of the planet, revealing how we have blown past any limits along the way—whether by exploding our own population numbers, domesticating countless other species, or harnessing energy from fossils. Testot’s book, while sweeping, is light and approachable, telling the stories—sometimes rambunctious, sometimes appalling—of how a glorified monkey transformed its own environment beyond all recognition.
 
In order to begin reversing our environmental disaster, we must have a better understanding of our own past and the incalculable environmental costs incurred at every stage of human innovation. Cataclysms offers that understanding and the hope that we can now begin to reform our relationship to the Earth.
 
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cover of Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies: Turkana Ecology, Politics, and Raiding in a Disequilibrium System

Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies

Turkana Ecology, Politics, and Raiding in a Disequilibrium System

J. Terrence McCabe

University of Michigan Press, 2004

An in-depth look at the ecology, history, and politics of land use among the Turkana pastoral people in Northern Kenya

Based on sixteen years of fieldwork among the pastoral Turkana people, McCabe examines how individuals use the land and make decisions about mobility, livestock, and the use of natural resources in an environment characterized by aridity, unpredictability, insecurity, and violence. The Turkana are one of the world's most mobile peoples, but understanding why and how they move is a complex task influenced by politics, violence, historical relations among ethnic groups, and the government, as well as by the arid land they call home.

As one of the original members of the South Turkana Ecosystem Project, McCabe draws on a wealth of ecological data in his analysis. His long-standing relationship with four Turkana families personalize his insights and conclusions, inviting readers into the lives of these individuals, their families, and the way they cope with their environment and political events in daily life.

J. Terrence McCabe is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado at Boulder.
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cover of Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945

Chemical Lands

Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945

David D. Vail

University of Alabama Press, 2018

An exploration of the elaborate relationship between farmers, aerial sprayers, agriculturalists, crop pests, chemicals, and the environment.

The controversies in the 1960s and 1970s that swirled around indiscriminate use of agricultural chemicals—their long-term ecological harm versus food production benefits—were sparked and clarified by biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). This seminal publication challenged long-held assumptions concerning the industrial might of American agriculture while sounding an alarm for the damaging persistence of pesticides, especially chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT, in the larger environment.

In Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 David D. Vail shows, however, that a distinctly regional view of agricultural health evolved. His analysis reveals a particularly strong ethic in the North American grasslands where practitioners sought to understand and deploy insecticides and herbicides by designing local scientific experiments, engineering more precise aircraft sprayers, developing more narrowly specific chemicals, and planting targeted test crops. Their efforts to link the science of toxicology with environmental health reveal how the practitioners of pesticides evaluated potential hazards in the agricultural landscape while recognizing the production benefits of controlled spraying. 

Chemical Lands adds to a growing list of books on toxins in the American landscape. This study provides a unique Grasslands perspective of the Ag pilots, weed scientists, and farmers who struggled to navigate novel technologies for spray planes and in the development of new herbicides/insecticides while striving to manage and mitigate threats to human health and the environment.

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cover of Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution

Choked

Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution

Beth Gardiner

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Nothing is as elemental, as essential to human life, as the air we breathe. Yet around the world, in rich countries and poor ones, it is quietly poisoning us. 

Air pollution prematurely kills seven million people every year, including more than one hundred thousand Americans. It is strongly linked to strokes, heart attacks, many kinds of cancer, dementia, and premature birth, among other ailments. In Choked, Beth Gardiner travels the world to tell the story of this modern-day plague, taking readers from the halls of power in Washington and the diesel-fogged London streets she walks with her daughter to Poland’s coal heartland and India’s gasping capital. In a gripping narrative that’s alive with powerful voices and personalities, she exposes the political decisions and economic forces that have kept so many of us breathing dirty air. This is a moving, up-close look at the human toll, where we meet the scientists who have transformed our understanding of pollution’s effects on the body and the ordinary people fighting for a cleaner future.

In the United States, air is far cleaner than it once was. But progress has failed to keep up with the science, which tells us that even today’s lower pollution levels are doing real damage. And as the Trump administration rips up the regulations that have brought us where we are, decades of gains are now at risk. Elsewhere, the problem is far worse, and choking nations like China are scrambling to replicate the achievements of an American agency—the EPA—that until recently was the envy of the world.

Clean air feels like a birthright. But it can disappear in a puff of smoke if the rules that protect it are unraveled. At home and around the world, it’s never been more important to understand how progress happened and what dangers might still be in store. Choked shows us that we hold the power to build a cleaner, healthier future: one in which breathing, life’s most basic function, no longer carries a hidden danger.
 
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cover of Christianity, Wilderness, and Wildlife

Christianity, Wilderness, and Wildlife

Susan Bratton

University of Scranton Press, 2009

In Christianity, Wilderness, and Wildlife, Susan Bratton brings to life the tradition of Christian wilderness spirituality, from Noah’s and Moses’ experiences in the Old Testament to Celtic monasteries and the Franciscan order. She traces a long history of divine encounters in biblical literature such as visions, providential protection, spiritual guidance and calls to leadership—all of which highlight the importance of nature in Christian thought. This book will command the attention of the growing audience for works at the intersection of environment and spirituality.
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cover of Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle

Citizens of Worlds

Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle

Jennifer Gabrys

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

An unparalleled how-to guide to citizen-sensing practices that monitor air pollution

Modern environments are awash with pollutants churning through the air, from toxic gases and intensifying carbon to carcinogenic particles and novel viruses. The effects on our bodies and our planet are perilous. Citizens of Worlds is the first thorough study of the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies to monitor and respond to air pollution. It presents practice-based research on working with communities and making sensor toolkits to detect pollution while examining the political subjects, relations, and worlds these technologies generate. 

Drawing on data from the Citizen Sense research group, which worked with communities in the United States and the United Kingdom to develop digital-sensor toolkits, Jennifer Gabrys argues that citizen-oriented technologies promise positive change but then collide with entrenched and inequitable power structures. She asks: Who or what constitutes a “citizen” in citizen sensing? How do digital sensing technologies enable or constrain environmental citizenship? 

Spanning three project areas, this study describes collaborations to monitor air pollution from fracking infrastructure, to document emissions in urban environments, and to create air-quality gardens. As these projects show, how people respond to, care for, and struggle to transform environmental conditions informs the political subjects and collectives they become as they strive for more breathable worlds.

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cover of Citizens, Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge

Citizens, Experts, and the Environment

The Politics of Local Knowledge

Frank Fischer

Duke University Press, 2000

The tension between professional expertise and democratic governance has become increasingly significant in Western politics. Environmental politics in particular is a hotbed for citizens who actively challenge the imposition of expert theories that ignore forms of local knowledge that can help to relate technical facts to social values.
Where information ideologues see the modern increase in information as capable of making everyone smarter, others see the emergence of a society divided between those with and those without knowledge. Suggesting realistic strategies to bridge this divide, Fischer calls for meaningful nonexpert involvement in policymaking and shows how the deliberations of ordinary citizens can help solve complex social and environmental problems by contributing local contextual knowledge to the professionals’ expertise. While incorporating theoretical critiques of positivism and methodology, he also offers hard evidence to demonstrate that the ordinary citizen is capable of a great deal more participation than is generally recognized. Popular epidemiology in the United States, the Danish consensus conference, and participatory resource mapping in India serve as examples of the type of inquiry he proposes, showing how the local knowledge of citizens is invaluable to policy formation. In his conclusion Fischer examines the implications of the approach for participatory democracy and the democratization of contemporary deliberative structures.
This study will interest political scientists, public policy practitioners, sociologists, scientists, environmentalists, political activists, urban planners, and public administrators along with those interested in understanding the relationship between democracy and science in a modern technological society.
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cover of City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago

City Water, City Life

Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago

Carl Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2013

A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas that are a support for the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created the city. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian Carl Smith explores this concept through an insightful examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s. By examining the place of water in the nineteenth-century consciousness, Smith illuminates how city dwellers perceived themselves during the great age of American urbanization. But City Water, City Life is more than a history of urbanization. It is also a refreshing meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essential—and central—part of how we define our civilization.

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cover of Civic Empowerment in an Age of Corporate Greed

Civic Empowerment in an Age of Corporate Greed

Edward C. Lorenz

Michigan State University Press, 2012

A thought-provoking investigation of an urgent issue facing American communities today, Edward C. Lorenz’s book examines the intersection of corporate irresponsibility and civic engagement. At the heart of this case study is a group of firms responsible for seven of the most contaminated Superfund sites in the United States, the largest food contamination accident in U.S. history, stunning stock and financial manipulations, and a massive shift of jobs off shore. In the face of these egregious environmental, employee, and investor abuses, several communities impacted by these firms organized to confront and combat failures in corporate and bureaucratic leadership, winning notable victories over major financiers, lobbyists, and indifferent or ineffective government agencies. A critical analysis of public and private leadership, business and economic ethics, and civic life, this book concludes with a stirring blueprint for other communities facing similarly overwhelming opposition.

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cover of Climate Bridge: An International Perspective on How to Enact Climate Action at the Government Public Interface

Climate Bridge

An International Perspective on How to Enact Climate Action at the Government Public Interface

Wolfram Höfer

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Climate change is creating new challenges for spatial and environmental planning on both sides of the Atlantic. Planning and policy must balance moderating climate change impact from rising temperatures, extreme precipitation, and sea level rise with social equity and environmental justice. Climate Bridge compares New Jersey and the German Ruhr region to build an international perspective on how to enact climate action at the government-public interface. The book grew from fifteen years of collaboration between scholars in New Jersey and Germany through summer programs, a landscape architecture design studio, internships for Rutgers University students, and joint publications. Notably, settlement patterns and brownfield issues reveal similarities between the underserved in both regions. The first section compares international environmental planning approaches and outlines different approaches to common problems. The second section presents case studies that highlight adaptation strategies for uncertainties caused by climate change. Finally, the closing section reminds us of our dependence on ecological systems for physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Contributors to this landmark volume include planners, designers, scholars, public administrators, and decision-makers on both sides of the Atlantic. Together, the chapters bring interdisciplinary approaches and diverse perspectives to the environmental, economic, political, and social dimensions of planning and design in the context of climate change.
 
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cover of Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic

Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics

Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic

Lisa E. Bloom

Duke University Press, 2022

In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom’s examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.
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cover of Climate, God and Uncertainty: A Transcendental Naturalistic Approach Beyond Bruno Latour

Climate, God and Uncertainty

A Transcendental Naturalistic Approach Beyond Bruno Latour

Arthur C. Petersen

University College London, 2023

An inquiry into the philosophical implications of climate change and its associated uncertainties.

Climate, God and Uncertainty brings together the philosophical approaches of pragmatism and (neo-) Kantianism in transcendental naturalism. The new approach is based on combining an expansive concept of “nature” with an emphasis on the separate ontological status of transcendental values. This book moves beyond Bruno Latour’s thought to understand what climate change means for philosophical anthropology and wider culture.

Referring mainly to works by Latour, William James, and Heinrich Rickert, this book develops a cultural philosophical approach called “transcendental naturalism.” This approach reinterprets the interface between science and politics in the context of climate change, highlighting, for instance, issues such as the religious disenchantment of nature, the scientific disbelief in a plurality of value-laden perspectives, and the disregard for non-modern worldviews in politics. In developing its argument, the book makes a methodological intervention on the sort of naturalism that guides both Latour’s work and a large part of the academic field called “science and religion.”
 
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cover of Cold Running River

Cold Running River

David N. Cassuto

University of Michigan Press, 1994

At a mere glance, Cold Running River has obvious regional and environmental appeal, but it goes far beyond those interests. Besides the fact that the Pere Marquette is a well-known, National Scenic River, and besides the fact that ecosystem management is a monumentally important and far-reaching topic, this book happens to read like a cold river runs: fast, refreshing, exuberant. It is special because David Cassuto has a beautiful way with the English language. Only he can make a chapter on lamprey eel infestation a gripping read. His style is so affecting, so warm, so "Norman Macleany"—you might be sitting on the river's bank, hearing the locals tell their tales of the river's history.That's what this book is: the river's history. It follows the miraculous course of the Pere Marquette: from its tumultuous glacial birth; to its devastation in the nineteenth century by unsustainable logging practices; to its recovery due to benign neglect. Cassuto approaches the river as both microcosm and metaphor; the controversies surrounding it speak to environmental and human dilemmas the world over.
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cover of Companion to A Sand County Almanac: Interpretive and Critical Essays

Companion to A Sand County Almanac

Interpretive and Critical Essays

J. Baird Callicott

University of Wisconsin Press, 1987

The first sustained study of Leopold's seminal book as well as a work of art, philosophy, and social commentary.
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cover of Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City

Composting Utopia

Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City

Guy Schaffer

University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

New Yorkers generate millions of tons of trash annually, which, through the magic of infrastructure and one of the largest waste management systems in the world, disappears from city sidewalks each night. Under pressure from environmentalists, activists, policymakers, and industry, the New York City Department of Sanitation started exploring ways to divert organic material from the waste stream, and in 2013, launched its composting pilot program.

Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork with community composters and microhaulers in New York City, alongside the rollout of the city’s curbside organics collection system, Composting Utopia describes how local, grassroots organizations intervened in the city’s waste system, enacting change and presenting an alternative vision of the composting city. As Guy Shaffer argues, movement-driven infrastructure projects develop new tools for organizing the world, give communities agency over urban design, and promote just sustainability.

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cover of Conserving Migratory Pollinators and Nectar Corridors in Western North America

Conserving Migratory Pollinators and Nectar Corridors in Western North America

Gary Paul Nabhan

University of Arizona Press, 2004

When migrating birds and other creatures move along a path of plant communities in bloom, they follow what has come to be known as a nectar trail. Should any of these plants be eliminated from the sequence—whether through habitat destruction, pests, or even aberrant weather—the movement of these pollinators may be interrupted and their very survival threatened. In recent efforts by ecologists and activists to envision a continental-scale network of protected areas connected by wildlife corridors, the peculiar roles of migratory pollinators which travel the entire length of this network cannot be underestimated in shaping the ultimate conservation design.

This book, a unique work of comparative zoogeography and conservation biology, is the first to bring together studies of these important migratory pollinators and of what we must do to conserve them. It considers the similarities and differences among the behavior and habitat requirements of several species of migratory pollinators and seed dispersers in the West—primarily rufous hummingbirds, white-winged doves, lesser long-nosed bats, and monarch butterflies. It examines the population dynamics of these four species in flyways that extend from the Pacific Ocean to the continental backbone of the Sierra Madre Oriental and Rocky Mountains, and it investigates their foraging and roosting behaviors as they journey from the Tropic of Cancer in western Mexico into the deserts, grasslands, and thornscrub of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The four pollinators whose journeys are traced here differ dramatically from one another in foraging strategies and stopover fidelities, but all challenge many of the truisms that have emerged regarding the status of migratory species in general. The rufous hummingbird makes the longest known avian migration in relation to body size and is a key to identifying nectar corridors running through northwestern Mexico to the United States. And there is new evidence to challenge the long-supposed separation of eastern and western monarch butterfly populations by the Rocky Mountains as these insects migrate.

Conserving Migratory Pollinators and Nectar Corridors in Western North America demonstrates new efforts to understand migratory species and to determine whether their densities, survival rates, and health are changing in response to changes in the distribution and abundance of nectar plants found within their ranges. Representing collaborative efforts that bridge field ecology and conservation biology in both theory and practice, it is dedicated to safeguarding dynamic interactions among plants and pollinators that are only now being identified.
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cover of Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone: Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem

Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone

Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem

Robert B. Keiter

University of Chicago Press, 2025

The story of how Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the world’s first national park, has become synonymous with nature conservation—and an examination of today’s challenges to preserve the region’s wilderness heritage.
 
For more than 150 years, the Yellowstone region—now widely known as the twenty-three million acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—has played a prominent role in the United States’ nature conservation agenda. In this book, Robert B. Keiter, an award-winning public land law and policy expert, traces the evolution and application of fundamental ecological conservation concepts tied to Yellowstone.
 
Keiter’s book highlights both the conservation successes and controversies connected with this storied region, which has been enmeshed in change. During the 1980s, leaders in Yellowstone embraced ecosystem management concepts to recover a dwindling grizzly bear population and to support wolf reintroduction. Since then, management policies in the region’s two national parks and adjacent national forests have largely followed suit, prioritizing ecosystem-level conservation over industrial activity. Groundbreaking efforts are currently afoot to protect elk, deer, and pronghorn migration corridors and to maintain the park’s bison population, effectively expanding the scope of regional conservation initiatives. But in the face of explosive human population growth and related development pressures, new efforts must also account for the region’s privately owned lands along with accelerating recreational activities that present quite different problems.
 
Indeed, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—extending across three states and twenty counties and embracing more than sixteen million acres of federal land as well as private and tribal lands —can only be characterized as a complex, jurisdictionally fragmented landscape. As Keiter makes clear, the quest for common ground among federal land managers, state officials, local communities, conservationists, ranchers, Indigenous tribes, and others is a vital, enduring task.
 
Exploring both notable conservation accomplishments and the ongoing challenges confronting this special place, Keiter’s book explains the many forces—scientific, political, economic, legal, cultural, climatic, and more—at work driving controversy and change across the region. But more than this, Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone shows us that the lessons gleaned from Yellowstone’s expansive nature conservation efforts are profoundly important for both the country and the world.
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cover of Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone: Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem

Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone

Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem

Robert B. Keiter

University of Chicago Press, 2025

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

The story of how Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the world’s first national park, has become synonymous with nature conservation—and an examination of today’s challenges to preserve the region’s wilderness heritage.
 
For more than 150 years, the Yellowstone region—now widely known as the twenty-three million acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—has played a prominent role in the United States’ nature conservation agenda. In this book, Robert B. Keiter, an award-winning public land law and policy expert, traces the evolution and application of fundamental ecological conservation concepts tied to Yellowstone.
 
Keiter’s book highlights both the conservation successes and controversies connected with this storied region, which has been enmeshed in change. During the 1980s, leaders in Yellowstone embraced ecosystem management concepts to recover a dwindling grizzly bear population and to support wolf reintroduction. Since then, management policies in the region’s two national parks and adjacent national forests have largely followed suit, prioritizing ecosystem-level conservation over industrial activity. Groundbreaking efforts are currently afoot to protect elk, deer, and pronghorn migration corridors and to maintain the park’s bison population, effectively expanding the scope of regional conservation initiatives. But in the face of explosive human population growth and related development pressures, new efforts must also account for the region’s privately owned lands along with accelerating recreational activities that present quite different problems.
 
Indeed, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—extending across three states and twenty counties and embracing more than sixteen million acres of federal land as well as private and tribal lands —can only be characterized as a complex, jurisdictionally fragmented landscape. As Keiter makes clear, the quest for common ground among federal land managers, state officials, local communities, conservationists, ranchers, Indigenous tribes, and others is a vital, enduring task.
 
Exploring both notable conservation accomplishments and the ongoing challenges confronting this special place, Keiter’s book explains the many forces—scientific, political, economic, legal, cultural, climatic, and more—at work driving controversy and change across the region. But more than this, Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone shows us that the lessons gleaned from Yellowstone’s expansive nature conservation efforts are profoundly important for both the country and the world.
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cover of Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India

Cookstove Chronicles

Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India

Meena R. Khandelwal

University of Arizona Press, 2024

Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options?

Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.

Meena Khandelwal, a feminist anthropologist, describes her collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, and others. She employs critical social theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies (STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior.

Cookstove Chronicles critically examines why, despite extensive development efforts, use of the chulha persists. It offers an important new framework for looking at development, technology, environmental change, and human behavior.
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cover of Corporate Crops: Biotechnology, Agriculture, and the Struggle for Control

Corporate Crops

Biotechnology, Agriculture, and the Struggle for Control

By Gabriela Pechlaner

University of Texas Press, 2012

Biotechnology crop production area increased from 1.7 million hectares to 148 million hectares worldwide between 1996 to 2010. While genetically modified food is a contentious issue, the debates are usually limited to health and environmental concerns, ignoring the broader questions of social control that arise when food production methods become corporate-owned intellectual property. Drawing on legal documents and dozens of interviews with farmers and other stakeholders, Corporate Crops covers four case studies based around litigation between biotechnology corporations and farmers. Pechlaner investigates the extent to which the proprietary aspects of biotechnologies—from patents on seeds to a plethora of new rules and contractual obligations associated with the technologies—are reorganizing crop production.

The lawsuits include patent infringement litigation launched by Monsanto against a Saskatchewan canola farmer who, in turn, claimed his crops had been involuntarily contaminated by the company’s GM technology; a class action application by two Saskatchewan organic canola farmers launched against Monsanto and Aventis (later Bayer) for the loss of their organic market due to contamination with GMOs; and two cases in Mississippi in which Monsanto sued farmers for saving seeds containing its patented GM technology. Pechlaner argues that well-funded corporate lawyers have a decided advantage over independent farmers in the courts and in creating new forms of power and control in agricultural production. Corporate Crops demonstrates the effects of this intersection between the courts and the fields where profits, not just a food supply, are reaped.

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Cowbirds and Other Brood Parasites

Catherine P. Ortega

University of Arizona Press, 1998

The Brown-headed Cowbird is known to use the nests of more than 200 other bird species, and cowbirds in general are believed to play a role in the decline of some migratory songbird populations. These brood parasites—birds that lay their eggs in the nests of others—have long flourished in North America.

In this timely book, Catherine Ortega summarizes and synthesizes a wealth of information on cowbirds from around the world that has appeared since the publication of Herbert Friedmann's classic 1929 monograph on these birds. Most of this information has appeared in the last quarter-century and reflects advances in our understanding of how brood parasitism influences, and is influenced by, host species. Ortega shows that in order to manage cowbirds without further damaging delicate balances in host-parasite relationships, it is necessary to understand such factors as behavior, reproduction, population dynamics, and response to landscape patterns. She examines and explains the origin, evolution, and costs of brood parasitism, and she discusses the philosophical and ecological considerations regarding the management of cowbirds—a controversial issue because of their perceived influence on threatened and endangered birds.

Because brood parasitism has evolved independently in various bird families, information on this adaptive strategy is of great ecological interest and considerable value to wildlife management. Cowbirds and Other Brood Parasites is an important reference on these creatures that enhances our understanding of both their behavior and their part in the natural world.
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cover of Cracked Coverage: Television News, The Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy

Cracked Coverage

Television News, The Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy

Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell

Duke University Press, 1994

Carefully documenting the deceptions and excesses of television news coverage of the so-called cocaine epidemic, Cracked Coverage stands as a bold indictment of the backlash politics of the Reagan coalition and its implicit racism, the mercenary outlook of the drug control establishment, and the enterprising reporting of crusading journalism. Blending theoretical and empirical analyses, Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell explore how TV news not only interprets "reality" in ways that reflect prevailing ideologies, but is in many respects responsible for constructing that reality. Their examination of the complexity of television and its role in American social, cultural, and political conflict is focused specifically on the ways in which American television during the Reagan years helped stage and legitimate the "war on drugs," one of the great moral panics of the postwar era.
The authors persuasively argue, for example, that powder cocaine in the early Reagan years was understood and treated very differently on television and by the state than was crack cocaine, which was discovered by the news media in late 1985. In their critical analysis of 270 news stories broadcast between 1981 and 1988, Reeves and Campbell demonstrate a disturbing disparity between the earlier presentation of the middle- and upper-class "white" drug offender, for whom therapeutic recovery was an available option, and the subsequent news treatment of the inner-city "black" drug delinquent, often described as beyond rehabilitation and subject only to intensified strategies of law and order. Enlivened by provocative discussions of Nancy Reagan’s antidrug activism, the dramatic death of basketball star Len Bias, and the myth of the crack baby, the book argues that Reagan’s war on drugs was at heart a political spectacle that advanced the reactionary agenda of the New and Religious Right—an agenda that dismissed social problems grounded in economic devastation as individual moral problems that could simply be remedied by just saying "no."
Wide ranging and authoritative, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy is a truly interdisciplinary work that will attract readers across the humanities and social sciences in addition to students, scholars, journalists, and policy makers interested in the media and drug-related issues.
[more]
cover of Cracked Coverage: Television News, The Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy

Cracked Coverage

Television News, The Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy

Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell

Duke University Press, 0

Carefully documenting the deceptions and excesses of television news coverage of the so-called cocaine epidemic, Cracked Coverage stands as a bold indictment of the backlash politics of the Reagan coalition and its implicit racism, the mercenary outlook of the drug control establishment, and the enterprising reporting of crusading journalism. Blending theoretical and empirical analyses, Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell explore how TV news not only interprets "reality" in ways that reflect prevailing ideologies, but is in many respects responsible for constructing that reality. Their examination of the complexity of television and its role in American social, cultural, and political conflict is focused specifically on the ways in which American television during the Reagan years helped stage and legitimate the "war on drugs," one of the great moral panics of the postwar era.
The authors persuasively argue, for example, that powder cocaine in the early Reagan years was understood and treated very differently on television and by the state than was crack cocaine, which was discovered by the news media in late 1985. In their critical analysis of 270 news stories broadcast between 1981 and 1988, Reeves and Campbell demonstrate a disturbing disparity between the earlier presentation of the middle- and upper-class "white" drug offender, for whom therapeutic recovery was an available option, and the subsequent news treatment of the inner-city "black" drug delinquent, often described as beyond rehabilitation and subject only to intensified strategies of law and order. Enlivened by provocative discussions of Nancy Reagan’s antidrug activism, the dramatic death of basketball star Len Bias, and the myth of the crack baby, the book argues that Reagan’s war on drugs was at heart a political spectacle that advanced the reactionary agenda of the New and Religious Right—an agenda that dismissed social problems grounded in economic devastation as individual moral problems that could simply be remedied by just saying "no."
Wide ranging and authoritative, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy is a truly interdisciplinary work that will attract readers across the humanities and social sciences in addition to students, scholars, journalists, and policy makers interested in the media and drug-related issues.
[more]
cover of Creating the Hudson River Park: Environmental and Community Activism, Politics, and Greed

Creating the Hudson River Park

Environmental and Community Activism, Politics, and Greed

Tom Fox

Rutgers University Press, 2024

The 4-mile-long, 550-acre Hudson River Park is nearing completion and is the largest park built in Manhattan since Central Park opened more than 150 years ago. It has transformed a derelict waterfront, protected the Hudson River estuary, preserved commercial maritime activities, created new recreational opportunities for millions of New Yorkers, enhanced tourism, stimulated redevelopment in adjacent neighborhoods, and set a precedent for waterfront redevelopment. The Park attracts seventeen million visitors annually. Creating the Hudson River Park is a first-person story of how this park came to be. Working together over three decades, community groups, civic and environmental organizations, labor, the real estate and business community, government agencies, and elected officials won a historic victory for environmental preservation, the use and enjoyment of the Hudson River, and urban redevelopment. However, the park is also the embodiment of a troubling trend toward the commercialization of America’s public parks.

After the defeat of the $2.4 billion Westway plan to fill 234 acres of the Hudson in 1985, the stage was set for the revitalization of Manhattan’s West Side waterfront. Between 1986 and 1998 the process focused on the basics like designing an appropriate roadway, removing noncompliant municipal and commercial activities from the waterfront, implementing temporary improvements, developing the Park’s first revenue-producing commercial area at Chelsea Piers, completing the public planning and environmental review processes, and negotiating the 1998 Hudson River Park Act that officially created the Park. From 1999 to 2009 planning and construction were funded with public money and focused on creating active and passive recreation opportunities on the Tribeca, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and Hell’s Kitchen waterfronts.

However, initial recommendations to secure long term financial support for the Park from the increase in adjacent real estate values that resulted from the Park’s creation were ignored. City and state politicians had other priorities and public funding for the Park dwindled. The recent phase of the project, from 2010 to 2021, focused on “development” both in and adjacent to the Park. Changes in leadership, and new challenges provide an opportunity to return to a transparent public planning process and complete the redevelopment of the waterfront for the remainder of the 21st-century. Fox’s first-person perspective helps to document the history of the Hudson River Park, recognizes those who made it happen and those who made it difficult, and provides lessons that may help private citizens and public servants expand and protect the public parks and natural systems that are so critical to urban well-being. 


 
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cover of Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America

Crisis of the Wasteful Nation

Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America

Ian Tyrrell

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Long before people were “going green” and toting reusable bags, the Progressive generation of the early 1900s was calling for the conservation of resources, sustainable foresting practices, and restrictions on hunting. Industrial commodities such as wood, water, soil, coal, and oil, as well as improvements in human health and the protection of “nature” in an aesthetic sense, were collectively seen for the first time as central to the country’s economic well-being, moral integrity, and international power. One of the key drivers in the rise of the conservation movement was Theodore Roosevelt, who, even as he slaughtered animals as a hunter, fought to protect the country’s natural resources.

In Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, Ian Tyrrell gives us a cohesive picture of Roosevelt’s engagement with the natural world along with a compelling portrait of how Americans used, wasted, and worried about natural resources in a time of burgeoning empire. Countering traditional narratives that cast conservation as a purely domestic issue, Tyrrell shows that the movement had global significance, playing a key role in domestic security and in defining American interests around the world. Tyrrell goes beyond Roosevelt to encompass other conservation advocates and policy makers, particularly those engaged with shaping the nation’s economic and social policies—policies built on an understanding of the importance of crucial natural resources. Crisis of the Wasteful Nation is a sweeping transnational work that blends environmental, economic, and imperial history into a cohesive tale of America’s fraught relationships with raw materials, other countries, and the animal kingdom.
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cover of Cultivating Environmental Justice: A Literary History of U.S. Garden Writing

Cultivating Environmental Justice

A Literary History of U.S. Garden Writing

Robert S. Emmett

University of Massachusetts Press, 2016

While Michael Pollan and others have popularized ideas about how growing one's own food can help lead to environmental sustainability, environmental justice activists have pushed for more access to gardens and fresh food in impoverished communities. Now, Robert S. Emmett argues that mid-twentieth-century American garden writing included many ideas that became formative for these contemporary environmental writers and activists.

Drawing on ecocriticism, environmental history, landscape architecture, and recent work in environmental justice and food studies, Emmett explores how the language of environmental justice emerged in descriptions of gardening across a variety of literary forms. He reveals early egalitarian associations found in garden writing, despite a popular focus on elite sites such as suburban lawns and formal southern gardens. Cultivating Environmental Justice emphasizes the intergenerational work of gardeners and garden writers who, from the 1930s on, asserted increasingly radical socioeconomic and ecological claims to justice. Emmett considers a wide range of texts by authors including Bernard M'Mahon, Scott and Helen Nearing, Katharine S. White, Elizabeth Lawrence, Alice Walker, and Novella Carpenter.
[more]
cover of Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia

Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia

Karl L. Hutterer, A. Terry Rambo, and George Lovelace, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1981

Ecologists have long based their conceptual frameworks in the natural sciences. Recently, however, they have acknowledged that ecosystems cannot be understood without taking into account human interventions that may have taken place for thousands of years. And for their part, social scientists have recognized that human behavior must be understood in the environment in which it is acted out. Researchers have thus begun to develop the area of “human ecology.” Yet human ecology needs suitable conceptual frameworks to tie the human and natural together.
In response, Cultural Values and Human Ecology uses the framework of cultural values to collect a set of highly diverse contributions to the field of human ecology. Values represent an important and essential aspect of the intellectual organization of a society, integrated into and ordained by the over-arching cosmological system, and constituting the meaningful basis for action, in terms of concreteness and abstraction of content as well as mutability and permanence. Because of this balance, values lend themselves to the kinds of analyses of ecological relationships conducted here, those that demand a reasonable amount of specificity as well as historical stability.
The contributions to Cultural Values and Human Ecology are exceedingly diverse. They include abstract theoretical discussions and specific case studies, ranging across the landscape of Southeast Asia from the islands to southern China. They deal with hunting-gathering populations as well as peasants operating within contemporary nation-states, and they are the work of natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists of Western and Asian origin. Diversity in the backgrounds of the authors contributes most to the varied approaches to the theme of this volume, because differences in cultural background and academic tradition will lead to different research interests and to differences in the empirical approaches chosen to pursue given problems.
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cover of Culture and Global Change: Social Perceptions of Deforestation in the Lacandona Rain Forest in Mexico

Culture and Global Change

Social Perceptions of Deforestation in the Lacandona Rain Forest in Mexico

Lourdes Arizpe, Fernanda Paz, and Margarita Velazquez

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Never before in history have humans had such power over the environment as we have today, and never before have we been so close to the end of nature. With the destruction of the earth a realistic possibility, global change is the point on which theoretical discussions and practical challenges must converge.
The authors of this compelling book argue that before suitable solutions can be found to pressing environmental problems, we need a way to gather information on the human dimensions of global changes. How do small and everyday individual actions add up to the intricate networks of global interactions? What are our rights and responsibilities as humans toward the planet and its natural resources?
The Lacandon rain forest in Mexico provides a vivid example of an environmental challenge that will demand the concerted efforts of many different groups, and not only technical solutions, to resolve successfully. Using data taken largely from in-depth interviews with landowners, farm workers, cattle raisers, housewives, professionals, and civil servants, the authors draw a rich portrait of the varied perceptions and positions these groups and individuals hold. At issue are the social, rather than psychological, bases of their perspectives.
Culture and Global Change offers a model for how the social sciences, and anthropology in particular, can lead the way in developing comprehensive understandings of the interrelationships between groups at the local, regional, and international levels that affect perceptions of the environment and thus the viability of solutions. It is required reading for anthropologists and environmental activists alike.
Lourdes Arizpe is Assistant Director-General for Culture, UNESCO. Fernanda Paz and Margarita Vel´zquez work for the Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México.
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cover of Custodians of the Land: Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania

Custodians of the Land

Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania

Gregory H. Maddox

Ohio University Press, 1995

Farming and pastoral societies inhabit ever-changing environments. This relationship between environment and rural culture, politics and economy in Tanzania is the subject of this volume which will be valuable in reopening debates on Tanzanian history.

In his conclusion, Isaria N. Kimambo, a founding father of Tanzanian history, reflects on the efforts of successive historians to strike a balance between external causes of change and local initiative in their interpretations of Tanzanian history.

He shows that nationalist and Marxist historians of Tanzanian history, understandably preoccupied through the first quarter-century of the country's post-colonial history with the impact of imperialism and capitalism on East Africa, tended to overlook the initiatives taken by rural societies to transform themselves.

Yet there is good reason for historians to think about the causes of change and innovation in the rural communities of Tanzania, because farming and pastoral people have constantly changed as they adjusted to shifting environmental conditions.

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