Rethinking Environmental History

World-System History and Global Environmental Change

Edited by Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, Joan Martinez-Alier

Not available to order

Publication date:

18 January 2007

Length of book:

420 pages

Publisher

AltaMira Press

ISBN-13: 9780759113978

This exciting new reader in environmental history provides a framework for understanding the relations between ecosystems and world-systems over time. Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier have brought together a group of the prominent social scientists, historians, and geographical scientists to provide a historical overview of the ecological dimension of global economic processes. Readers are challenged to integrate studies of the Earth-system with studies of the world-system, and to reconceptualize the relations between human beings and their environment, as well as the challenges of global sustainability.
This book offers new perspectives on global environmental problems at a time when many of these issues are discussed and taught in a historical and political-economic vacuum. It is coherent in theme, interdisciplinary in scope, historically innovative, and geographically far-reaching. A 'world-system' perspective provides a thread for a multifaceted view of distributive aspects of our interlinked economic and environmental histories. Rethinking Environmental History offers carefully crafted studiesand provocative essays by some of the most respected scholars (and best writers!) on the topic. This volume brings much-needed depth to the scholarship of globalization and environment, and inauguates a new phase of inquiry in political ecology, environmental history, and environmental sciences in general..