Environmental History - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Cultivating Success in Uganda

Thu, 23 Aug 2007

Cultivating Success in Uganda (2007)
Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies

By Grace Carswell

Kigezi, a district in southwestern Uganda, is exceptional in many ways. In contrast to many other parts of the colonial world, this district did not adopt cash crops. Soil conservation practices were successfully adopted, and the region maintained a remarkably developed and individualized land market from the early colonial period.

Grace Carswell presents a comprehensive study of livelihoods in Kigezi. Following the lead of groundbreaking studies by Tiffen, Fairhead, and Leach, her case study confirms recent research suggesting that the usual assumptions about population pressure, environment, and long-term land-use change need to be questioned. Her findings are particularly exciting for all those involved in the ongoing key debates in natural resource management, development studies, and environmental history.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Cultivating+Success+in+Uganda.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Imagining Serengeti

Fri, 15 Jun 2007

Imagining Serengeti (2007)
A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present

By Jan Bender Shetler

Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists. With prose that is elegant in its simplicity and analysis that is forceful and compelling, Jan Bender Shetler brings the landscape memory of the Serengeti to life. She demonstrates how the social identities of western Serengeti peoples are embedded in specific spaces and in their collective memories of those spaces. Using a new methodology to analyze precolonial oral traditions, Shetler identifies core spatial images and reevaluates them in their historical context through the use of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, and archival evidence. Imagining Serengeti is a lively environmental history that will ensure that we never look at images of the African landscape in quite the same way.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Imagining+Serengeti.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Resurrecting the Granary of Rome

Fri, 15 Jun 2007

Resurrecting the Granary of Rome (2007)
Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa

By Diana K. Davis

Tales of deforestation and desertification in North Africa have been told from the Roman period to the present. Such stories of environmental decline in the Maghreb are still recounted by experts and are widely accepted without question today. International organizations such as the United Nations frequently invoke these inaccurate stories to justify environmental conservation and development projects in the arid and semiarid lands in North Africa and around the Mediterranean basin. Recent research in arid lands ecology and new paleoecological evidence, however, do not support many claims of deforestation, overgrazing, and desertification in this region.

Diana K. Davis’s pioneering analysis reveals the critical influence of French scientists and administrators who established much of the purported scientific basis of these stories during the colonial period in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, illustrating the key role of environmental narratives in imperial expansion. The processes set in place by the use of this narrative not only systematically disadvantaged the majority of North Africans but also led to profound changes in the landscape, some of which produced the land degradation that continues to plague the Maghreb today.

Resurrecting the Granary of Rome exposes many of the political, economic, and ideological goals of the French colonial project in these arid lands and the resulting definition of desertification that continues to inform global environmental and development projects. The first book on the environmental history of the Maghreb, this volume reframes much conventional thinking about the North African environment. Davis’s book is essential reading for those interested in global environmental history.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Resurrecting+the+Granary+of+Rome.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Triumph of the Expert

Thu, 15 Feb 2007

Triumph of the Expert (2007)
Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism

By Joseph Morgan Hodge

The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire.

Triumph of the Expert is a history of British colonial doctrine and its contribution to the emergence of rural development and environmental policies in the late colonial and postcolonial period. Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practices emerged out of the strategic engagement between science and the state at the climax of the British Empire. Hodge looks intently at the structural constraints, bureaucratic fissures, and contradictory imperatives that beset and ultimately overwhelmed the late colonial development mission in sub-Saharan Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.

Triumph of the Expert seeks to understand the quandaries that led up to the important transformation in British imperial thought and practice and the intellectual and administrative legacies it left behind.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Triumph+of+the+Expert.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Inventing Pollution

Wed, 15 Feb 2006

Inventing Pollution (2006)
Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800

By Peter Thorsheim

Britain's supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal. This coal not only powered steam engines in factories, ships, and railway locomotives but also warmed homes and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain's cities and towns became filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke.

In this far-reaching study, Peter Thorsheim explains that, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution. To them, pollution meant miasma: invisible gases generated by decomposing plant and animal matter. Far from viewing coal smoke as pollution, most people considered smoke to be a valuable disinfectant, for its carbon and sulfur were thought capable of rendering miasma harmless.

Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Inventing+Pollution.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

How Green Were the Nazis?

Thu, 15 Dec 2005

How Green Were the Nazis? (2005)
Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich

Edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller

The Nazis created nature preserves, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature. How Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich is the first book to examine the Third Reich's environmental policies and to offer an in-depth exploration of the intersections between brown ideologies and green practices.

Environmentalists and conservationists in Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazi regime with open arms and hoped that it would bring about legal and institutional changes. However, environmentalists soon realized that the rhetorical attention they received from the regime did not always translate into action. By the late 1930s, nature and the environment had become less pressing concerns as Nazi Germany prepared for and executed a global conflagration.

Based on prodigious archival research, and written by some of the most important scholars in the field of twentieth-century German history, How Green Were the Nazis? examines the overlap between Nazi ideology and conservationist agendas. This landmark book underscores the fact that the "green" policies of the Nazis were more than a mere episode or aberration in environmental history.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/How+Green+Were+the+Nazis%3F.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Imperial Gullies

Sat, 01 Jan 2005

Imperial Gullies (2005)
Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho

By Kate B. Showers

Once the grain basket for South Africa, much of Lesotho has become a scarred and degraded landscape. The nation’s spectacular erosion and gullying have concerned environmentalists and conservationists for more than half a century. In Imperial Gullies: Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho, Kate B. Showers documents the truth behind this devastation.

Showers reconstructs the history of the landscape, beginning with a history of the soil. She concludes that Lesotho’s distinctive erosion chasms, called dongas—often cited as an example of destructive land-use practices by African farmers—actually were caused by colonial and postcolonial interventions. The residents of Lesotho emerge as victims of a failed technology. Their efforts to mitigate or resist implementation of destructive soil conservation engineering works were thwarted, and they were blamed for the consequences of policies promoted by international soil conservationists since the 1930s.

Imperial Gullies calls for an observational, experimental, and, most important, a fully consultative and participatory approach to address Lesotho’s serious contemporary problems of soil erosion. The first book to bring to center stage the historical practice of colonial soil science—and a cautionary tale of western science in unfamiliar terrain—it will interest a broad, interdisciplinary audience in African and environmental studies, social sciences, and history.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Imperial+Gullies.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Highland Sanctuary

Tue, 08 Jun 2004

Highland Sanctuary (2004)
Environmental History in Tanzania's Usambara Mountains

By Christopher A. Conte

For more than a century, the world has recognized the extraordinary biological diversity of the forests of Tanzania’s Usambara Mountains. As international attention has focused on forest conservation, farmers, foresters, biologists, and the Tanzanian state have realized that only complex negotiations will save these treasured, but rapidly disappearing, landscapes.

Highland Sanctuary unravels the complex interactions among agriculture, herding, forestry, the colonial state, and the landscape itself. In his examination of the region’s history of ecological transformation, Christopher Conte demonstrates how these forces have combined to create an ever-changing mosaic of forest and field. His study illuminates the debate over conservation, arguing that contingency and chance, the stuff of human history, have shaped forests in ways that rival the power of nature. In Highland Sanctuary, the forest becomes part of human history, rather than something outside of it.

Highland Sanctuary cuts through a legacy of contention and ill will to inform contemporary conservation initiatives. Professor Conte explains how ecological changes take divergent paths in similar environments, in this case on mountains that harbor unique flora and fauna, and how these mountain environments achieve international importance as centers of biodiversity.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Highland+Sanctuary.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Inventing Global Ecology

Tue, 27 Apr 2004

Inventing Global Ecology (2004)
Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947–1997

By Michael L. Lewis

Blue jeans, MTV, Coca-Cola, and… ecology? We don't often think of conservation sciences as a U.S. export, but in the second half of the twentieth century an astounding array of scientists and ideas flowed out from the United States into the world, preaching the gospel of conservation-oriented ecology.

Inventing Global Ecology grapples with how we should understand the development of global ecology in the twentieth century—a science that is held responsible for, literally, saving the world. Is the spread of ecology throughout the globe a subtle form of cultural imperialism, as some claim? Or is it a manifestation of an increasingly globalized world, where ideas, people, and things move about with greater freedom than ever before?

Using India as the case study, Professor Michael Lewis considers the development of conservation policies and conservation sciences since the end of World War II and the role of United States scientists, ideas, and institutions in this process. Was India subject to a subtle form of Americanization, or did Indian ecologists develop their own agenda, their own science, and their own way of understanding (and saving) the natural world? Does nationality even matter when doing ecology?

This readable narrative will carry you through the first fifty years of independent India, from the meadows of the Himalayan Mountains to the rainforests of southern India, from Gandhi and Nehru to Project Tiger. Of equal interest to the general reader, to scientists, and to scholars of history and globalization, Inventing Global Ecology combines ethnographic fieldwork and oral history conducted in India and the United States, as well as traditional archival research.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Inventing+Global+Ecology.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Social History and African Environments

Mon, 01 Sep 2003

Social History and African Environments (2003)
West African Strategies

Edited by William Beinart and JoAnn McGregor

The explosion of interest in African environmental history has stimulated research and writing on a wide range of issues facing many African nations.

This collection represents some of the finest studies to date. The general topics include African environmental ideas and practices; colonial science, the state and African responses; and settlers and Africans' culture and nature. The contributors are Emmanuel Kreike, Karen Middleton, Innocent Pikirayi, Terence Ranger, JoAnn McGregor, Helen Tilley, Grace Garswell, John McCracken, Ingrid Yngstrom, David Bunn, Sandra Swart, Robert J. Gordon, and Jane Carruthers.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Social+History+and+African+Environments.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.