-PDF Download- From Enslavement To Environmentalism EBOOK

From Enslavement to Environmentalism

Author: David McDermott Hughes

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-10-01

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0295800518

From Enslavement to Environmentalism takes a challenging ethnographic and historical look at the politics of eco-development in the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border zone. David Hughes argues that European colonization in southern Africa--essentially an unsuccessful effort to turn the region into another North America or Australia--has profoundly reshaped rural politics and culture and continues to do so, as neoliberal developers commoditize the lands of African peasants in the name of conservation and economic progress. Hughes builds his engaging analysis around a sort of natural experiment: in the past, whites colonized British Zimbabwe but avoided Portuguese Mozambique almost entirely. In Zimbabwe, chiefdoms that had historically focused on controlling people began to follow the English example of consolidating political power by dividing and controlling land. Meanwhile, in Mozambique, Portugal perpetuated traditional practices of recruiting and distributing forced labor as the primary means of securing power. The territory remained unmapped. For almost the entire twentieth century, a sharp disjuncture in the politics of land, leadership, labor, and resource use marked the border zone. In the late 1990s, as white South Africans began to establish timber plantations in Mozambique, that difference began to be effaced. Under the banner of environmentalism and economic progress, tourism firms were allowed to claim peasant farmland. The objectives of liberal conservationists and developers, though high-minded, led them to commoditize ancestral lands. Southern African policymakers supported this new form of colonization as a form of racial integration between white investors and black peasants, paving the way for an ironic and contentious situation in which ethnic tolerance, gentrification, and land-grabbing have gone hand in hand. From Enslavement to Environmentalism engages topics central to current debates in anthropology, resource politics, and development policy, and will be of interest to both regional specialists and generalists.

To Love the Wind and the Rain

Author: Dianne D. Glave

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2005-12-30

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0822972905

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"To Love the Wind and the Rain" is a groundbreaking and vivid analysis of the relationship between African Americans and the environment in U.S. history. It focuses on three major themes: African Americans in the rural environment, African Americans in the urban and suburban environments, and African Americans and the notion of environmental justice. Meticulously researched, the essays cover subjects including slavery, hunting, gardening, religion, the turpentine industry, outdoor recreation, women, and politics. "To Love the Wind and the Rain" will serve as an excellent foundation for future studies in African American environmental history.

The Nature of Slavery

Author: Katherine Johnston

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 019751460X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Following a story from the Caribbean to the colony of Georgia through debates over the abolition of the slave trade and finally to the antebellum South, The Nature of Slavery demonstrates the pervasiveness of a groundless theory about climate, labor, and bodily difference that ultimately contributed to notions of race.

Blood and Earth

Author: Kevin Bales

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2016-01-19

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0812995775

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

For readers of such crusading works of nonfiction as Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers and Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains comes a powerful and captivating examination of two entwined global crises: environmental destruction and human trafficking—and an inspiring, bold plan for how we can solve them. A leading expert on modern-day slavery, Kevin Bales has traveled to some of the world’s most dangerous places documenting and battling human trafficking. In the course of his reporting, Bales began to notice a pattern emerging: Where slavery existed, so did massive, unchecked environmental destruction. But why? Bales set off to find the answer in a fascinating and moving journey that took him into the lives of modern-day slaves and along a supply chain that leads directly to the cellphones in our pockets. What he discovered is that even as it destroys individuals, families, and communities, new forms of slavery that proliferate in the world’s lawless zones also pose a grave threat to the environment. Simply put, modern-day slavery is destroying the planet. The product of seven years of travel and research, Blood and Earth brings us dramatic stories from the world’s most beautiful and tragic places, the environmental and human-rights hotspots where this crisis is concentrated. But it also tells the stories of some of the most common products we all consume—from computers to shrimp to jewelry—whose origins are found in these same places. Blood and Earth calls on us to recognize the grievous harm we have done to one another, put an end to it, and recommit to repairing the world. This is a clear-eyed and inspiring book that suggests how we can begin the work of healing humanity and the planet we share. Praise for Blood and Earth “A heart-wrenching narrative . . . Weaving together interviews, history, and statistics, the author shines a light on how the poverty, chaos, wars, and government corruption create the perfect storm where slavery flourishes and environmental destruction follows. . . . A clear-eyed account of man’s inhumanity to man and Earth. Read it to get informed, and then take action.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “[An] exposé of the global economy’s ‘deadly dance’ between slavery and environmental disaster . . . Based on extensive travels through eastern Congo’s mineral mines, Bangladeshi fisheries, Ghanian gold mines, and Brazilian forests, Bales reveals the appalling truth in graphic detail. . . . Readers will be deeply disturbed to learn how the links connecting slavery, environmental issues, and modern convenience are forged.”—Publishers Weekly “This well-researched and vivid book studies the connection between slavery and environmental destruction, and what it will take to end both.”—Shelf Awareness (starred review) “This is a remarkable book, demonstrating once more the deep links between the ongoing degradation of the planet and the ongoing degradation of its most vulnerable people. It’s a bracing reminder that a mentality that allows throwaway people also allows a throwaway earth.”—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

Mapping Water in Dominica

Author: Mark W. Hauser

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2021-05-23

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0295748737

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/ 9780295748733 Dominica, a place once described as “Nature’s Island,” was rich in biodiversity and seemingly abundant water, but in the eighteenth century a brief, failed attempt by colonial administrators to replace cultivation of varied plant species with sugarcane caused widespread ecological and social disruption. Illustrating how deeply intertwined plantation slavery was with the environmental devastation it caused, Mapping Water in Dominica situates the social lives of eighteenth-century enslaved laborers in the natural history of two Dominican enclaves. Mark Hauser draws on archaeological and archival history from Dominica to reconstruct the changing ways that enslaved people interacted with water and exposes crucial pieces of Dominica’s colonial history that have been omitted from official documents. The archaeological record—which preserves traces of slave households, waterways, boiling houses, mills, and vessels for storing water—reveals changes in political authority and in how social relations were mediated through the environment. Plantation monoculture, which depended on both slavery and an abundant supply of water, worked through the environment to create predicaments around scarcity, mobility, and belonging whose resolution was a matter of life and death. In following the vestiges of these struggles, this investigation documents a valuable example of an environmental challenge centered around insufficient water. Mapping Water in Dominica is available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Northwestern University Libraries.

Scars on the Land

Author: David Silkenat

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2022-04-08

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780197564226

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom. Scars on the Land is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash. Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.

Atlantic Environments and the American South

Author: Thomas Blake Earle

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2020-03-01

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0820356476

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

There is clear overlap in interests and influences for the fields of Atlantic, environmental, and southern history, but scholarship in them has often advanced on parallel tracks. This anthology places itself at the intersection, pushing for a new confluence. Editors Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson provide a lucid introduction to this collection of essays that brings these disciplines together. With this volume, historians explore crucial insights into a self-consciously Atlantic environmental history of the American South, touching on such topics as ideas about slavery, gender, climate, “colonial ecological revolution,” manipulation of the landscape, infrastructure, resources, and exploitation. By centering this project on a region, the American South—defined as the southeastern reaches of North America and the Caribbean— the authors interrogate how European colonizers, Native Americans, and Africans interacted in and with the (sub)tropics, a place foreign to Europeans. Challenging the concepts of “Atlantic” and “southern” and their intersection with “environments” is a discipline-defining strategy at the leading edge of emerging scholarship. Taken collectively, this book should encourage more readers to reimagine this region, its time periods, climate(s), and ecocultural networks.

Scars on the Land

Author: David Silkenat

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780197564257

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause

Author: Roger G. Kennedy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2003-03-06

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0190288426

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Thomas Jefferson advocated a republic of small farmers--free and independent yeomen. And yet as president he presided over a massive expansion of the slaveholding plantation system, particularly with the Louisiana Purchase, squeezing the yeomanry to the fringes and to less desirable farmland. Now Roger G. Kennedy conducts an eye-opening examination of the gap between Jefferson's stated aspirations and what actually happened. Kennedy reveals how the Louisiana Purchase had a major impact on land use and the growth of slavery. He examines the great financial interests (such as the powerful land companies that speculated in new territories and the British textile interests) that beat down slavery's many opponents in the South itself (Native Americans, African Americans, Appalachian farmers, and conscientious opponents of slavery). He describes how slaveholders' cash crops--first tobacco, then cotton--sickened the soil and how the planters moved from one desolated tract to the next. Soon the dominant culture of the entire region--from Maryland to Florida, from Carolina to Texas--was that of owners and slaves producing staple crops for international markets. The earth itself was impoverished, in many places beyond redemption. None of this, Kennedy argues, was inevitable. He focuses on the character, ideas, and ambitions of Thomas Jefferson to show how he and other Southerners struggled with the moral dilemmas presented by the presence of Indian farmers on land they coveted, by the enslavement of their workforce, by the betrayal of their stated hopes, and by the manifest damage being done to the earth itself. Jefferson emerges as a tragic figure in a tragic period. Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2003.