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"Environmentalism History Sources."
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The East India Company and the natural world
\"The East India Company and the Natural World is the first work to explore the deep and lasting impacts of the largest colonial trading company, the British East India Company on the natural environment. The EIC both contributed to and recorded environmental change during the first era of globalization. From the small island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, to peninsula India and outposts in South and Southeast Asia, the Company presence profoundly altered the environment by introducing plants and animals, felling forests, and redirecting rivers. The threats of famine and disease encouraged experiments with agriculture and the recording of the virtues of medicinal plants. The EIC records of the weather, the soils, and the flora provide modern climate scientists with invaluable data. The contributors - drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines - use the lens of the Company to illuminate the relationship between colonial capital and the changing environment between 1600 and 1857.\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Environmental Debate
This unique collection of primary documents examines the evolution of concern about environmental degradation, pollution, and resource conservation in America from the Colonial period the present.
eBook
Old Wine in New Bottles: The Technological Promise of Biorefinery In Historical Perspective
Biorefineries are often lauded as revolutionary, sustainable new sources of power. This article critically examines biorefineries from historical and environmentalist perspectives, highlighting flaws such narratives. It proposes an alternative to the biorefinery paradigm that draws on critical environmentalist scholarship, French political ecology and the German tradition of sanfte Chemie (soft chemistry). History, the article argues, is crucial for identifying technological dead ends.
Journal Article
Foucault in the forest: Questioning environmentality in Amazonia
In this article, I analyze the encounter between the Field Museum of Natural History and Amazonian Ecuador's Cofán people to question the concept of \"environmentality\": the idea that environmentalist programs and movements operate as forms of governmentality in Michel Foucault's sense. I argue that, although the Field Museum's community conservation projects constitute a regulatory rationale and technique, they do not transform Cofán subjectivity according to plan. By exploring Cofán people's critical consciousness of environmentalist interventions, I aim to cast doubt on the governmentality paradigm's utility for analyzing the complexities of cultural difference, intercultural encounter, and directed change.
Journal Article
Beyond the Lynn White Thesis: Congregational Effects on Environmental Concern
An extensive literature has explored the effects of religion on opinions about environmental protection and action on environmental issues, but has largely concerned itself with the effects of theology as inspired by the Lynn White thesis. However, religion is multifaceted and any complete study should also incorporate the social dimensions of religious experience. In this article, we employ a unique data set to demonstrate the varied informational effects of church membership on environmental attitudes. We find that social sources of information in the church shape the dimensions of religious belief and exert much stronger effects on attitudes on the environment than do doctrinal or religiosity measures.
Journal Article
Convergence and Divergence in Renewable Energy Policy among US States from 1998 to 2011
Actors at the state level in the United States are attentive to the actions of others in their broader political context when enacting policies. For all that is known about the diffusion of policies in a political context, less is understood about why some states ultimately end up with policies that are similar in structure, but vastly different in content. Do the forces that drive states to policy action also shape the content of the enacted policies? Examining the case of renewable energy policy among US states over a fourteen-year period, this paper addresses this question using event history analysis and an original longitudinal data set of state political and economic characteristics. State's energy economy, the presence of Democratic politicians, and environmental movement organizations are found to be important for determining the kind of policy a state ultimately enacts, while regional policy adoption explains why some states choose to enact largely symbolic renewable energy policies. Policy adoption should be conceptualized as a multifaceted process, with different factors acting as the impetus for action and others shaping the content of the policy. Understanding the nuanced roles of state characteristics and policy diffusion in the policy adoption process requires avoiding binary outcomes of passage or inaction in favor of simultaneously examining both policy action and policy content.
Journal Article
China's water warriors
Today opponents of large-scale dam projects in China, rather than being greeted with indifference or repression, are part of the hydropower policymaking process itself. What accounts for this dramatic change in this critical policy area surrounding China's insatiable quest for energy? InChina's Water Warriors, Andrew C. Mertha argues that as China has become increasingly market driven, decentralized, and politically heterogeneous, the control and management of water has transformed from an unquestioned economic imperative to a lightning rod of bureaucratic infighting, societal opposition, and open protest.
Although bargaining has always been present in Chinese politics, more recently the media, nongovernmental organizations, and other activists-actors hitherto denied a seat at the table-have emerged as serious players in the policy-making process. Drawing from extensive field research in some of the most remote parts of Southwest China,China's Water Warriorscontains rich narratives of the widespread opposition to dams in Pubugou and Dujiangyan in Sichuan province and the Nu River Project in Yunnan province.
Mertha concludes that the impact and occasional success of such grassroots movements and policy activism signal a marked change in China's domestic politics. He questions democratization as the only, or even the most illuminating, indicator of political liberalization in China, instead offering an informed and hopeful picture of a growing pluralization of the Chinese policy process as exemplified by hydropower politics.
For the 2010 paperback edition, Mertha tests his conclusions against events in China since 2008, including the Olympics, the devastating 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, and the Uighar and Tibetan protests of 2008 and 2009.
eBook
Social and River Networks for the Trees: Wounaan's Riverine Rhizomic Cosmos and Arboreal Conservation
The effects of environmental conservation and development are of significant anthropological interest. Recent focus on the politics of knowledge and translation has shown the importance of cosmology in conservation encounters. I examine how Wounaan indigenous peoples and extralocal conservation practitioners \"translate\" eastern Panama based on their own cosmologies. Specifically, I explore how Wounaan's social and river-networked rhizomic cosmos is overlooked in the practice of forest-focused conservation. This results from Panama's environmental history, in which actors simplified early representations of a complex landscape to one characterized by forests, as well as a Western bias toward forests with scant attention paid to cosmology. Finally, I note how Wounaan negotiate this cultural disconnect by emphasizing their ties to forests. In so doing, they buttress the arboreal bias, in turn reinforcing power relations, but also giving themselves political leverage in conservation activities. These results inform recent discussion about politics and scientific praxis in conservation. /// Los efectos de la conservación ambiental y el desarrollo son de interés antropológico significativo. Énfasis reciente en la política del conocimiento y de la traducción ha demostrado la importancia de la cosmología en la conservación. Se examina como los indígenas Wounaan y los practicantes de conservación extra-locales traducen Panamá oriental basados en sus cosmologías. Específicamente se explora como la práctica de conservación enfocada en bosques ignora el cosmos de redes sociales y fluviales de los Wounaan. Esto es resultado de la historia ambiental de Panamá en la que los actores simplificaron un paisaje complejo, así como un sesgo occidental por bosques en conservación con escasa atención a la cosmología. Se nota como Wounaan negocian esta desconexión cultural enfatizando los bosques. En este proceso refuerzan el sesgo arbóreo y relaciones de poder, ayudándoles obtener reconocimiento político en conservación. Estos resultados reportan sobre la política y la practica científica en la conservación.
Journal Article
Confronting a Trinity of Institutional Barriers: Denial, Cover-Up, and Secrecy
Discourses of government and the nuclear industry erase previous fear and knowledge about the damages and injuries from nuclear weapons that impact indigenous communities. This cover‐up enables nuclear states and nuclear industries to promote nuclear energy as a viable response to climate change. Many people, including environmentalists, consider nuclear energy to be the only viable energy source for the future global economy in that it does not contribute to climate change. It is difficult for us to consider the full scope of the risks that accompany decisions to embrace nuclear energy as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, however, because lessons learned about radiation remain secret or silenced.
Journal Article