English Environmental History

On April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco region, igniting fires that burned half the city. The disaster in all its elements - earthquake, fires, and recovery - profoundly disrupted the urban order and challenged San Francisco's perceived permanence. The crisis temporarily broke down spatial divisions of class and race and highlighted the contested terrain of urban nature in an era of widespread class conflict, simmering ethnic tensions, and controversial reform efforts.

An epic struggle over land, water, and power is erupting in the American West and the halls of Washington, DC. It began when a 4,000-square-mile area of Arizona desert called Black Mesa was divided between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To the outside world, it was a land struggle between two fractious Indian tribes; to political insiders and energy corporations, it was a divide-and-conquer play for the 21 billion tons of coal beneath Black Mesa. Today, that coal powers cheap electricity for Los Angeles, a new water aqueduct into Phoenix, and the neon dazzle of Las Vegas.

In the dramatic narratives that comprise The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. Revisiting historical icons so familiar that schoolchildren learn to take them for granted, he makes surprising connections that enable readers to see old stories in a new light.

In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes listeners on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing listeners to see the everyday world in a completely new way.

For centuries, the West has produced stories about the future in which humans use advanced science and technology to transform the Earth. Michael Rawson uses a wide range of works that include Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, the science fiction novels of Jules Verne, and even the speculations of think tanks like the RAND Corporation to reveal the environmental paradox at the heart of these narratives: the single-minded expectation of unlimited growth on a finite planet.

Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an "impossible but inevitable city". How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis.

A climate defined by wet and dry seasons, a mostly mountainous terrain, a biota prone to disturbances, a human geography characterized by a diversity of peoples all of whom rely on burning in one form or another: Mexico has ideal circumstances for fire, and those fires provide a unique perspective on its complex history. Narrating Mexico's evolution of fire through five eras, historian Stephen J. Pyne describes the pre-human, pre-Hispanic, colonial, industrializing (1880-1980), and contemporary (1980-2015) fire biography of this diverse and dynamic country.

For over 200 years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences.

When most Americans think of environmentalism, they think of the political left, of vegans dressed in organic-hemp fabric, lofting protest signs. In reality, writes Jacob Darwin Hamblin, the movement - and its dire predictions - owe more to the Pentagon than the counterculture.

Nature on the brink? Maybe not. With so much bad news in the world, we forget how much environmental progress has been made. In a narrative that reaches from Native American tribal practices to public health and commercial hunting, Wild at Heart shows how western attitudes towards nature have changed dramatically in the last five hundred years. Humans can learn from the past, and our choices today will determine whether nature survives.

The story of how one small nation responded to global climate issues by radically rethinking public policy for future generations.

China’s meteoric rise to economic powerhouse might be charted with dams. Every river in the country has been tapped to power exploding cities and factories - every river but one. Running through one of the richest natural areas in the world, the Nujiang’s raging waters were on the verge of being dammed when a 2004 government moratorium halted construction. Might the Chinese dragon bow to the "Angry River"? Would Beijing put local people and their land ahead of power and profit? Could this remote region actually become a model for sustainable growth? Ed Grumbine traveled to the far corners of China’s Yunnan province to find out.

At noon on October 27, 1924, a factory worker was admitted to a hospital in New York City, suffering from hallucinations and convulsions. Before breakfast the next day, he was dead. Alice Hamilton was determined to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. By the time of the accident, Hamilton had pioneered the field of industrial medicine in the United States. She specialized in workplace safety years before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created. But this time, she was up against a formidable new foe: America’s relentless push for progress, regardless of the cost.

To listen to most pundits and political writers, evolution, stem cells, and climate change are the only scientific issues worth mentioning and the only people who are anti-science are conservatives. Now for the first time, science writers Dr. Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell have drawn open the curtain on the left’s fear of science. As Science Left Behind reveals, vague inclinations about the wholesomeness of all things natural, the unhealthiness of the unnatural, and many other seductive fallacies have led to an epidemic of misinformation.

What did 19th-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the 19th-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary challenges caused by rapid urban and industrial growth.

Deep in the heart of the Amazon, the city of Rondon do Pará, Brazil, lived for decades in the shadow of land barons, or fazendeiros, who maintained control of the region through unscrupulous land grabs and egregious human rights violations. They razed and burned the jungle, expelled small-scale farmers and Indigenous tribes from their lands, and treated their farmhands as slaves—all with impunity.

Empire of Water explores the history of New York City’s water system - from the late 19th century to the early 21st century - focusing on the geographical, environmental, and political repercussions of the city’s search for more water. By tracing the evolution of the city’s water conservation efforts and watershed management regime, Soll reveals the tremendous shifts in environmental practices and consciousness that occurred during the 20th century.

In the fall of 1973, the Greek oil shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, husband of President John F. Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and arguably the richest man in the world, proposed to build an oil refinery on the New Hampshire coast, in the town of Durham. But three women vehemently opposed the project. Small Town, Big Oil is the story of how the residents of Durham, led by three women, out-organized, out-witted, and out-maneuvered the governor, media, and Onassis cartel to hand the powerful Greek billionaire the most humiliating defeat of his business career.

Mals, Italy, has long been known as the breadbasket of the Tyrol. But recently the tiny town became known for something else entirely. A Precautionary Tale tells us why, introducing readers to an unlikely group of activists and a forward-thinking mayor who came together to ban pesticides in Mals by a referendum vote, making it the first place on Earth to accomplish such a feat, and a model for other towns and regions to follow. For hundreds of years, the people of Mals had cherished their traditional foodways and kept their local agriculture organic. Their town had become a mecca for tourists drawn by the alpine landscape, the rural and historic character of the villages, and the fine breads, wines, cheeses, herbs, vegetables, and the other traditional foods they produced.

A scientist takes on the distortions and outright lies foisted on the public! Robert G. Williscroft firmly establishes that the sky is not falling. By using scientific research and solid reasoning, he explains some of the most disturbing problems facing our nation including global warming, the safety of nuclear power, the politics of education, and the oxymoron of government efficiency. With a clear message, he discerns what is true from what is merely Chicken Little gibberish.