Earth & Environmental Responsibility

This compilation of seminal essays introduces students to scholarship on the environmental history of the United States. With primary documents that illustrate the conditions, perception, and influences of environmental issues from the pre-Columbian era to the 21st century, the book invites students to analyze not only the connections between people and nature, but popular ideas of the environment in American history.

Although suburb-building created major environmental problems, Christopher Sellers demonstrates that the environmental movement originated within suburbs--not just in response to unchecked urban sprawl. Sellers shows how the philosophy, science, and emotions that catalyzed the environmental movement sprang directly from suburbanites' lives and their ideas about nature, as well as the unique ecology of the neighborhoods in which they dwelt.

In Don't Breathe the Air, Scott Hamilton Dewey traces the history of air pollution control efforts, focusing on the decade of the sixties, and describes how local efforts helped create both the modern environmental movement and federal environmental policy.

The discovery of the Americas around 1500 AD was an extraordinary watershed in human experience. It gave rise to the modern period of human ecology, a phenomenon global in scope that set in motion profound changes in almost every society on earth. This new period, which saw the depletion of the lands of the New World, proved tragic for some, triumphant for others, and powerfully affecting for all.

Environmental historian Steven Stoll identifies 1945 as the birth of American environmentalism - the point when conservation and nature advocacy fused with activism to form a political movement. In this thematically organized collection of primary sources, Stoll traces the development of the environmental movement and identifies its central issues and ideologies, including the politics of preservation, population growth, biological interdependence, ecodefense, climate change, ethical consumption, and environmental justice.

The passage of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 marked a sweeping transformation in American politics. In a few short years, the environmental movement pushed Republican and Democratic elected officials to articulate a right to clean air as part of a bevy of new federal guarantees.

This work is a collection of essays that brings ecocritical studies into a dialogue with postcolonial literature, it offers ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Edouard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth."

As the first holistic environmental history of the region, this book shows the intimate connections between peoples and environments and how these relationships shaped political, economic, and social history in startling and unforeseen ways. To grasp how these multiple histories were central to the pasts of the Middle East and North Africa, the chapters in this book evidence the power of environmental history to open up new avenues of scholarly inquiry.

This book is a non-technical interdisciplinary collection of 12 essays, each of which uses natural or social science methods. The essays analyze a representative set of environmental issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. They consider problems at international, regional, national, and local levels and examine current and historical environmental policy.

Historian and geopolitical expert Michael Auslin argues that far from being a cohesive powerhouse, Asia is a fractured region threatened by stagnation and instability. Here, he provides a comprehensive account of the economic, military, political, and demographic risks that bedevil half of our world, arguing that Asia working with the United States, has a unique opportunity to avert catastrophe -- but only if it acts boldly.

This book narrates the mutually mortal historical contest between humans and nature in Latin America. Covering a period that begins with Amerindian civilizations and concludes in the region's present urban agglomerations, the work offers an original synthesis of the current scholarship on Latin America's environmental history and argues that tropical nature played a central role in shaping the region's historical development.