Nature and Power A Global History of the Environment [Paperback]

Nature and Power explores the interaction between humanity and the natural environment from prehistoric times to the present.Nature and Power explores the interaction between humanity and the natural environment from prehistoric times to the present. It explores human attempts to control nature as well as the efforts of societies and states to regulate people's use of nature and natural resourcesNature and Power explores the interaction between humanity and the natural environment from prehistoric times to the present. It explores human attempts to control nature as well as the efforts of societies and states to regulate people's use of nature and natural resourcesNature and Power traces the expanding scope of environmental action over the course of history: from initiatives undertaken by individual villages and cities, environmental policy has become a global concern. Efforts to steer human use of nature and natural resources have become complicated, as Nature and Power shows, by particularities of culture and by the vagaries of human nature itself. Environmental history, the author argues, is ultimately the history of human hopes and fears.1. Thinking about environmental history; 2. The ecology of subsistence and tacit knowledge - primeval symbioses between humans and nature; 3. Water, forests, and power; 4. Colonialism as a watershed in environmental history; 5. At the limits of nature; 6. In the labyrinth of globalization; Conclusion. Joachim Radkau's Nature and Power offers the best overview of world environmental history available in the English language. Radkau has an independent cast of mind and an uncanny ability to focus on the 'hot' topics in the global environmental field. His perspective is always fresh and insightful, even when he is taking the reader down well-trodden paths.
- Mark Cioc, University of California, Santa Cruz Americans may have invented the field of environmental history, but today some of the most ambitious work is coming frolc%