Global Ecology in Historical Perspective

Global Ecology in Historical Perspective PDF

Author: Kazunobu Ikeya

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-03-10

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 9811965579

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This book primarily examines human-animal and human-plant interactions in Asian forests (Southeast Asia and Japan) and inland waters (China). For comparison, cases from the Americas (whales in the Arctic, sea turtles in the Caribbean, and plants in the Amazon) and Central Asia are also included. The relationship between plants, animals, and humans in Asia is quite unique from a global perspective. For example, "satoyama" in Japan means ecotone area, or the boundary between a village and a forest. There, as the number of inhabitants declines, bears, wild boars, and other animals increasingly ravage crops, sometimes attacking humans as well. By showing the regional nature of human-animal and human-plant interactions in Asia, this book provides for the first time a framework for understanding the world's animal and plant-human relationships. It is assumed that the relationships between humans and animals and plants during this period were diverse, including hunting, taming, semi-domestication, and full domestication. At the same time, for regions outside of Asia, the extent to which these diverse relationships were adapted and how diversity was formed is explained from the perspective of historical ecology. Customers can expect to derive perspectives on the coexistence of human-animal and plant-animal relationships from this book in the near future. The conservation of rare species, diverse habitats, and biodiversity is a central theme in considering the relationship between modern civilization and the global environment. In post-industrial Japan, one focus has been the protection of iconic animals such as storks, crested ibis, dugongs, and sea turtles, while damage to crops and humans by deer, wild boars, monkeys, bears, and other common animals has become an important social issue. How can the world's 7.7 billion-plus people live in harmony with other species? We would like to get some hints on how to solve the problems we are facing.

Civilizing Nature

Civilizing Nature PDF

Author: Bernhard Gissibl

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0857455273

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National parks are one of the most important and successful institutions in global environmentalism. Since their first designation in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s they have become a global phenomenon. The development of these ecological and political systems cannot be understood as a simple reaction to mounting environmental problems, nor can it be explained by the spread of environmental sensibilities. Shifting the focus from the usual emphasis on national parks in the United States, this volume adopts an historical and transnational perspective on the global geography of protected areas and its changes over time. It focuses especially on the actors, networks, mechanisms, arenas, and institutions responsible for the global spread of the national park and the associated utilization and mobilization of asymmetrical relationships of power and knowledge, contributing to scholarly discussions of globalization and the emergence of global environmental institutions and governance.

Advances in Historical Ecology

Advances in Historical Ecology PDF

Author: William L. Balée

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012-09-18

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 9780231533577

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Ecology is an attempt to understand the reciprocal relationship between living and nonliving elements of the earth. For years, however, the discipline either neglected the human element entirely or presumed its effect on natural ecosystems to be invariably negative. Among social scientists, notably in geography and anthropology, efforts to address this human-environment interaction have been criticized as deterministic and mechanistic. Bridging the divide between social and natural sciences, the contributors to this book use a more holistic perspective to explore the relationships between humans and their environment. Exploring short- and long-term local and global change, eighteen specialists in anthropology, geography, history, ethnobiology, and related disciplines present new perspectives on historical ecology. A broad theoretical background on the material factors central to the field is presented, such as anthropogenic fire, soils, and pathogens. A series of regional applications of this knowledge base investigates landscape transformations over time in South America, the Mississippi Delta, the Great Basin, Thailand, and India. The contributors focus on traditional societies where lands are most at risk from the incursions of complex, state-level societies. This book lays the groundwork for a more meaningful understanding of humankind's interaction with its biosphere. Scholars and environmental policymakers alike will appreciate this new critical vocabulary for grasping biocultural phenomena.

Ecologically Unequal Exchange

Ecologically Unequal Exchange PDF

Author: R. Scott Frey

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-07-04

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 3319897403

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At a time of societal urgency surrounding ecological crises from depleted fisheries to mineral extraction and potential pathways towards environmental and ecological justice, this book re-examines ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) from a historical and comparative perspective. The theory of ecologically unequal exchange posits that core or northern consumption and capital accumulation is based on peripheral or southern environmental degradation and extraction. In other words, structures of social and environmental inequality between the Global North and Global South are founded in the extraction of materials from, as well as displacement of waste to, the South. This volume represents a set of tightly interlinked papers with the aim to assess ecologically unequal exchange and to move it forward. Chapters are organised into three main sections: theoretical foundations and critical reflections on ecologically unequal exchange; empirical research on mining, deforestation, fisheries, and the like; and strategies for responding to the adverse consequences associated with unequal ecological exchange. Scholars as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate students will benefit from the spirited re-evaluation and extension of ecologically unequal exchange theory, research, and praxis.

Issues and Concepts in Historical Ecology

Issues and Concepts in Historical Ecology PDF

Author: Carole L. Crumley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1108420982

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This book presents a practical, holistic research framework to help us both understand our past and build an appealing human future.

Global Ecology in Human Perspective

Global Ecology in Human Perspective PDF

Author: Charles H. Southwick

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780195104080

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A textbook covering the study of human ecology and global ecology: ecological principles relevant to global concerns, the meaning of global change, human impact on the environment, population growth and regulation, world health, interactions of economics and ecology, and prospects of human future. The central theme of the book deals with the ways humans are altering the earth and how, in turn, these changes affect human life.

Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire

Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire PDF

Author: Corey Ross

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 0199590419

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Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire provides the first wide-ranging environmental history of the heyday of European imperialism, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the colonial era. It focuses on the ecological dimensions of the explosive growth of tropical commodity production, global trade, and modern resource management strategies that still visibly shape our world today, and how they were related to broader social, cultural, and political developments in Europe's colonies. Covering the overseas empires of all the major European powers, Corey Ross argues that tropical environments were not merely a stage on which conquest and subjugation took place, but were an essential part of the colonial project, profoundly shaping the imperial enterprise even as they were shaped by it. The story he tells is not only about the complexities of human experience, but also about people's relationship with the ecosystems in which they were themselves embedded: the soil, water, plants, and animals that were likewise a part of Europe's empire. Although it shows that imperial conquest rarely represented the signal ecological trauma that some accounts suggest, it nonetheless demonstrates that modern imperialism marked a decisive and largely negative milestone for the natural environment. By relating the expansion of modern empire, global trade, and mass consumption to the momentous ecological shifts that they entailed, this book provides a historical perspective on the vital nexus of social, political, and environmental issues that we face in the twenty-first-century world.

Ecology Against Capitalism

Ecology Against Capitalism PDF

Author: John Bellamy Foster

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2002-02

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1583670564

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In recent years John Bellamy Foster has emerged as a leading theorist of the Marxist perspective on ecology. His seminal book Marx's Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2000) discusses the place of ecological issues within the intellectual history of Marxism and on the philosophical foundations of a Marxist ecology, and has become a major point of reference in ecological debates. This historical and philosophical focus is now supplemented by more directly political engagement in his new book, Ecology against Capitalism. In a broad-ranging treatment of contemporary ecological politics, Foster deals with such issues as pollution, sustainable development, technological responses to environmental crisis, population growth, soil fertility, the preservation of ancient forests, and the "new economy" of the Internet age. Foster's introduction sets out the unifying themes of these essays enabling the reader to draw from them a consolidated approach to a rapidly-expanding field of debate which is of critical importance in our times. Within these debates on the politics of ecology, Foster's work develops an important and distinctive perspective. Where many of these debates assume a basic divergence of "red" and "green" issues, and are concerned with the exact terms of a trade-off between them, Foster argues that Marxismproperly understoodalready provides the framework within which ecological questions are best approached. This perspective is advanced here in accessible and concrete form, taking account of the major positions in contemporary ecological debate.