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"Nye, David E., 1946-"
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The Environmental Humanities
A concise overview of this multidisciplinary field, presenting key concepts, central issues, and current research, along with concrete examples and case studies.
The emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline early in the twenty-first century reflects the growing conviction that environmental problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. This book offers a concise overview of this new multidisciplinary field, presenting concepts, issues, current research, concrete examples, and case studies. Robert Emmett and David Nye show how humanists, by offering constructive knowledge as well as negative critique, can improve our understanding of such environmental problems as global warming, species extinction, and over-consumption of the earth's resources. They trace the genealogy of environmental humanities from European, Australian, and American initiatives, also showing its cross-pollination by postcolonial and feminist theories.
Emmett and Nye consider a concept of place not synonymous with localism, the risks of ecotourism, and the cultivation of wild areas. They discuss the decoupling of energy use and progress, and point to OECD countries for examples of sustainable development. They explain the potential for science to do both good and harm, examine dark visions of planetary collapse, and describe more positive possibilities—alternative practices, including localization and degrowth. Finally, they examine the theoretical impact of new materialism, feminism, postcolonial criticism, animal studies, and queer ecology on the environmental humanities.
eBook
American Illuminations
How Americans adapted European royal illuminations for patriotic celebrations, spectacular expositions, and intensely bright commercial lighting to create the world's most dazzling and glamorous cities.
Illuminated fêtes and civic celebrations began in Renaissance Italy and spread through the courts of Europe. Their fireworks, torches, lamps, and special effects glorified the monarch, marked the birth of a prince, or celebrated military victory. Nineteenth-century Americans rejected such monarchial pomp and adapted spectacular lighting to their democratic, commercial culture. In American Illuminations, David Nye explains how they experimented with gas and electric light to create illuminated cityscapes far brighter and more dynamic than those of Europe, and how these illuminations became symbols of modernity and the conquest of nature.
Americans used gaslight and electricity in parades, expositions, advertising, elections, and political spectacles. In the 1880s, cities erected powerful arc lights on towers to create artificial moonlight. By the 1890s they adopted more intensive, commercial lighting that defined distinct zones of light and glamorized the city's White Ways, skyscrapers, bridges, department stores, theaters, and dance halls. Poor and blighted areas disappeared into the shadows. American illuminations also became integral parts of national political campaigns, presidential inaugurations, and victory celebrations after the Spanish-American War and World War I.
eBook
America's Assembly Line
The assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin's little tramp trying to keep up with a factory conveyor belt.) In America's Assembly Line, David Nye examines the industrial innovation that made the United States productive and wealthy in the twentieth century.The assembly line -- developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the mass production of Model Ts -- first created and then served an expanding mass market. It inspired fiction, paintings, photographs, comedy, cafeteria layouts, and cookie-cutter suburban housing. It also transformed industrial labor and provoked strikes and union drives. During World War II and the Cold War, it was often seen as a bastion of liberty and capitalism. By 1980, Japan had reinvented the assembly line as a system of \"lean manufacturing\"; American industry reluctantly adopted this new approach. Nye describes this evolution and the new global landscape of increasingly automated factories, with fewer industrial jobs in America and questionable working conditions in developing countries. A century after Ford's pioneering innovation, the assembly line continues to evolve toward more sustainable manufacturing.
eBook
The anti-landscape
There have always been some uninhabitable places, but in the last century human beings have produced many more of them. These anti-landscapes have proliferated to include the sandy wastes of what was once the Aral Sea, severely polluted irrigated lands, open pit mines, blighted nuclear zones, coastal areas inundated by rising seas, and many others. The Anti-Landscape examines the emergence of such sites, how they have been understood, and how some of them have been recovered for habitation. The anti-landscape refers both to artistic and literary representations and to specific places that no longer sustain life. This history includes T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and Cormac McCarthy's The Road as well as air pollution, recycled railway lines, photography and landfills. It links theories of aesthetics, politics, tourism, history, geography, and literature into the new synthesis of the environmental humanities. The Anti-Landscape provides an interdisciplinary appraoch that moves beyond the false duality of nature vs. culture, and beyond diagnosis and complaint to the recuparation of damaged sites into our complex heritage. -- cover verso.
BOOK
Palazzos of power : central stations of the Philadelphia Electric Company, 1900-1930
\"\"Majestic,\" \"endangered\", and \"understudied\" - terms typically applied to endangered species - apply equally, if paradoxically, to one of the greatest sources of pollution in twentieth-century America: coal-fired metropolitan power plants. Nowhere is the building type more spectacularly present or more pressingly at risk than in Philadelphia, home to the mothballed central stations of the Philadelphia Electric Company. Monuments to the city's industrial might and suburban spread, they housed rows of ponderous boilers, turbines, and switchgear, as well as elaborate coal- and ash-handling systems. But it was these machines' neoclassical enclosures that commanded public attention. Designed to convey \"solidity and immensity\" in an age of deep public skepticism, they now stand vacant and decaying - a \"blight\" in the eyes of city planners and a beacon to urban explorers. Combining scholarly research, period illustrations, and contemporary photographs, Palazzos of Power sets Philadelphia's central stations in historical context, explains the mechanisms they housed, and records their spaces and surroundings. The book will appeal to scholarly and lay audiences\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Technology Matters
Discusses in nontechnical language ten central questions about technology that illuminate what technology is and why it matters.
eBook