Environmental Infrastructure in African History: Examining the Myth of Natural Resource Management in Namibia [Hardcover]

Argues that humans create environmental infrastructure that is constantly remade and re-imagined in the face of ongoing processes of change.This book offers a new approach for analyzing and narrating environmental change. Environmental change is conventionally understood as occurring in a linear fashion, moving from a state of more nature to a state of less nature and more culture. Emmanuel Kreike, however, argues that humans in collaboration with plants, animals, and other animate and inanimate forces  create environmental infrastructure that is constantly remade and reimagined in the face of ongoing processes of change.This book offers a new approach for analyzing and narrating environmental change. Environmental change is conventionally understood as occurring in a linear fashion, moving from a state of more nature to a state of less nature and more culture. Emmanuel Kreike, however, argues that humans in collaboration with plants, animals, and other animate and inanimate forces  create environmental infrastructure that is constantly remade and reimagined in the face of ongoing processes of change.Environmental Infrastructure in African History offers a new approach for analyzing and narrating environmental change. Environmental change conventionally is understood as occurring in a linear fashion, moving from a state of more nature to a state of less nature and more culture. In this model, non-Western and premodern societies live off natural resources, whereas more modern societies rely on artifact, or nature that is transformed and domesticated through science and technology into culture. In contrast, Emmanuel Kreike argues that both non-Western and premodern societies inhabit a dynamic middle ground between nature and culture. He asserts that humans in collaboration with plants, animals, and other animate and inanimate forces  create environmental infrastructure that constantly is remade and reimagined in the face of ongoing processes of change.1. The endlc$