Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change [Hardcover]

This exciting new reader in environmental history provides a framework for understanding the relations between ecosystems and world-systems over time. Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier have brought together a group of the prominent social scientists, historians, and geographical scientists to provide a historical overview of the ecological dimension of global economic processes. Readers are challenged to integrate studies of the Earth-system with studies of the world-system, and to reconceptualize the relations between human beings and their environment, as well as the challenges of global sustainability.Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist and professor of human ecology at Lund University. J. R. McNeill is professor of history, director of graduate studies, and Cinco Hermanos Chair of Environmental and International Affairs at Georgetown University. Joan Martinez-Alier is professor of ecological economics in the Department of Economics and Economic History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

The contributors toRethinking Environmental Historyargue for a truly global, historical, and transdisciplinary approach to environmental history, even when analyzing the most localized instances of degradation. They show how and why environmental degradations have been uneven throughout history-and in the process employ, critique, and extend world-systems analysis. Thomas D. Hall, Lester M. Jones Professor of Sociology, DePauw University, and editor of A World-Systems Reader

This book offers new perspectives on global environmental problems at a time when many of these issues are discussed and taught in a historical and political-economic vacuum. It is coherent in theme, interdisciplinary in scope, historically innovative, and geographically far-reaching. A 'world-system' perspective provides a thread for a multifaceted view of distributive aspects of our interlinked economic and environmental histories.Rethinking Environmental Histlƒ>