City, Country, Empire: Landscapes In Environmental History

by Diefendorf, Jeffry M.; Dorsey, Kurkpatrick

• ISBN13: 9780822958765
• ISBN10: 0822958767
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

Summary

In the urgently expanding field of environmental history, two trends are emerging. Research has internationalized, crossing political and historical borders. And urban spaces are increasingly seen as part of, not apart from, the global environment. In this book, Jeffry Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey have gathered much of the important work pushing the field in new directions. Eleven essays by prominent and regionally diverse scholars address how human and natural forces collaborate in the creation of cities, the countryside, and empires. The Cities section features essays that examine pollution and its aftermath in Pittsburgh, the Ruhr Valley (Germany), and Los Angeles. These urban areas are far apart on the globe but closely linked in their histories of how human decision making has affected the environment. Changing rural and suburban spaces are the focus of Countryside. Elizabeth Blackmar "follows the money" in order to understand why the financing of suburban mall developments makes local resistance difficult. Studies of the fractious history of the creation of a wildlife refuge in Oregon and the ongoing impact of hydraulic mining in the early California goldmining era emphasize the misuse of technology in rural spaces. Such misuse is a central idea of Empires. In "When Stalin Learned to Fish," Paul R. Josephson tells the story of Soviet fishing technology designed to "harness fish to the engine of socialism." Other essays explore the failures of Western agricultural technology in Africa and the relationship between such technology and disease in European attempts to conquer the Caribbean. In a stirring, wide-ranging consideration of the neo-European colonies (the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand), Thomas R. Dunlap observes the ongoing, unsettled interaction of lands and dreams. An afterword by Alfred W. Crosby, an eminent scholar of environmental history, closes the book with a broad and insightful synthesis of the history and future of this critical field.

Author Biography

Jeffry M. Diefendorf, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, is author of In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II and coeditor of Rebuilding Urban Japan.

Kurk Dorsey is associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire and author of The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: Canadian-American Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Challenges for Environmental History	1	(10)
JEFFRY M. DIEFENDORF AND KURK DORSEY
PART I: CITIES	11	(66)
1. The Metabolism of the Industrial City: The Case of Pittsburgh	15	(23)
JOEL A. TARR
2. Los Angeles's Nature: Urban Environmental Politics in the Twentieth Century	38	(14)
SARAH S. ELKIND
3. The Environmental Transformation of the Ruhr	52	(29)
URSULA VON PETZ
PART II: COUNTRYSIDE	77	(62)
4. Of REITS and Rights: Absentee Ownership in the Periphery	81	(18)
ELIZABETH BLACKMAR
5. Floods and Landscapes in the Inland West	99	(23)
NANCY LANGSTON
6. The Industrial Alchemy of Hydraulic Mining: Law, Technology, and Resource-Intensive Industrialization	122	(21)
ANDREW C. ISENBERG
PART III: EMPIRES	139	(94)
7. West Africa's Colonial Fungus: Globalization and Science at the End of Empire, 1949-2000	143	(19)
JAMES C. MCCANN
8. When Stalin Learned to Fish: Natural Resources, Technology, and Industry under Socialism	162	(31)
PAUL R. JOSEPHSON
9. Yellow Jack and Geopolitics: Environment, Epidemics, and the Struggles for Empire in the American Tropics, 1650-1900	193	(14)
J.R. MCNEILL
10. Creation and Destruction in Landscapes of Empire	207	(19)
THOMAS R. DUNLAP
Afterword: Environmental History, Past, Present, and Future	226	(7)
ALFRED W. CROSBY
Notes	233	(42)
List of Contributors	275	(2)
Index	277