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"Ecology -- History"
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Ecology : a very short introduction
\"Understanding how our living environment works is essentially a study of ecological systems. Ecology is the science of how organisms interact with each other and with their environment, and how such interactions create self-organising communities and ecosystems. This science touches us all. The food we eat, the water we drink, the natural resources we use, our physical and mental health, and much of our cultural heritage are to a large degree products of ecological interactions of organisms and their environment. This Very Short Introduction celebrates the centrality of ecology in our lives. Jaboury Ghazoul explores how ecology has evolved rapidly from natural history to become a predictive science that explains how the natural world works, and which guides environmental policy and management decisions. Drawing on a range of examples, he shows how ecological science can be applied to management and conservation, including the extent to which theory has shaped practice. Ecological science has also shaped social and cultural perspectives on the environment, a process that influences politics of the environment. Ghazoul concludes by considering the future of ecology, particularly in the light of current and future environmental challenges.\"--www.bookdepository.com.
Book
Ariel's Ecology
What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, Ariel's Ecology explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert's examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings' interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare's Tempest and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws to Spivak's theories of subalternity. In Allewaert's interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara's dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with \"perfect knowledge of the ground.\"
eBook
A companion to global environmental history
The Companion to Global Environmental History offers multiple points of entry into the history and historiography of this dynamic and fast-growing field, to provide an essential road map to past developments, current controversies, and future developments for specialists and newcomers alike.
* Combines temporal, geographic, thematic and contextual approaches from prehistory to the present day
* Explores environmental thought and action around the world, to give readers a cultural, intellectual and political context for engagement with the environment in modern times
* Brings together environmental historians from around the world, including scholars from South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and China
eBook
The Ancient Mediterranean Environment between Science and History
The product of a collaboration between scientists, historians and archaeologists, this book breaks new ground in the study of the long-term interaction between environmental factors, including climate, and human beings.
eBook
An environmental history of ancient Greece and Rome
Lively and accessible account of the relationship between man and nature in Graeco-Roman antiquity. Describes the ways in which the Greeks and Romans intervened in the environment and thus traces the history of tension between the exploitation of resources and the protection of nature.
eBook
Promises of the Political
The possibility of a new emancipatory and democratizing politics, explored through the lens of recent urban insurgencies.
In Promises of the Political, Erik Swyngedouw explores whether progressive and emancipatory politics is still possible in a post-political era. Activists and scholars have developed the concept of post-politicization to describe the process by which “the political” is replaced by techno-managerial governance. If the political domain has been systematically narrowed into a managerial apparatus in which consensual governance prevails, where can we find any possibility of a new democratic politics? Swyngedouw examines this question through the lens of recent urban insurgencies. In Zuccotti Park, Paternoster Square, Taksim Square, Tahrir Square, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, he argues, insurgents have gathered to choreograph new configurations of the democratic.
Swyngedouw grounds his argument in urban and ecological processes, struggles, and conflicts through which post-politicization has become institutionally entrenched. He casts “the city” and “nature” as emblematic of the construction of post-democratic modes of governance. He describes the disappearance of the urban polis into the politics of neoliberal planetary urbanization; and he argues that the political-managerial framing of “nature” and the environment contributes to the formation of depoliticized governance—most notably in the impotent politics of climate change. Finally, he explores the possibilities for a reassertion of the political, considering whether—after the squares are cleared, the tents folded, and everyday life resumes—the urban uprisings of the last several years signal a return of the political.
eBook