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Making Livable Worlds

Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice

By Hilda Lloréns

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pummeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple...

Urban Cascadia and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice

By Nik Janos, Corina McKendry

In Portland’s harbor, environmental justice groups challenge the EPA for a more thorough cleanup of the Willamette River. Near Olympia, the Puyallup assert their tribal sovereignty and treaty rights to fish. Seattle housing activists demand...

Misreading the Bengal Delta

Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal​ Bangladesh

By Camelia Dewan. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749624

Perilously close to sea level and vulnerable to floods, erosion, and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for climate change adaptation. Yet, to what extent...

Temples in the Cliffside

Buddhist Art in Sichuan

By Sonya S. Lee

At sixty-two meters the Leshan Buddha in southwest China is the world’s tallest premodern statue. Carved out of a riverside cliff in the eighth century, it has evolved from a religious center to a UNESCO...

Wetlands in a Dry Land

More-Than-Human Histories of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin

By Emily O'Gorman. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

In the name of agriculture, urban growth, and disease control, humans have drained, filled, or otherwise destroyed nearly 87 percent of the world’s wetlands over the past three centuries. Unintended consequences include biodiversity loss, poor...

Timber and Forestry in Qing China 

Sustaining the Market

By Meng Zhang

In the Qing period (1644–1912), China's population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation, akin to the...

Consuming Ivory

Mercantile Legacies of East Africa and New England

By Alexandra Celia Kelly. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

The economic prosperity of two nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New England towns rested on factories that manufactured piano keys, billiard balls, combs, and other items made of ivory imported from East Africa. Yet while towns like...

Mapping Water in Dominica

Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism

By Mark W. Hauser

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748733

Dominica, a place once described as “Nature’s Island,” was rich in biodiversity and seemingly abundant water, but in the eighteenth century a brief, failed attempt by colonial administrators to replace cultivation...

Herring and People of the North Pacific

Sustaining a Keystone Species

By Thomas F. Thornton and Madonna L. Moss

Herring are vital to the productivity and health of marine systems, and socio-ecologically Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is one of the most important fish species in the Northern Hemisphere. Human dependence on herring has evolved...

Exile from the Grasslands

Tibetan Herders and Chinese Development Projects

By Jarmila Ptáčková

At the beginning of the new millennium, the Chinese government launched the Great Opening of the West, a development strategy targeted at remote areas inhabited mainly by indigenous ethnic groups. Intended to modernize infrastructure and...

Mountains of Blame

Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands

By Will Smith. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Swidden agriculture has long been considered the primary cause of deforestation throughout Southeast Asia, and the Philippine government has used this belief to exclude the indigenous people of Palawan Island from their ancestral lands and...

Greening East Asia

The Rise of the Eco-developmental State

By Ashley Esarey, Mary Alice Haddad, Joanna I. Lewis, Stevan Harrell

East Asia hosts a fifth of the world’s population and consumes over half the world’s coal, a quarter of its petroleum products, and a tenth of its natural gas. It also produces a third of...

Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian

The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India

By James Staples. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu...

Bringing Whales Ashore

Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan

By Jakobina K. Arch. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Japan today defends its controversial whaling expeditions by invoking tradition—but what was the historical reality? In examining the techniques and impacts of whaling during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), Jakobina Arch shows that the organized, shore-based...

Cultivating Nature

The Conservation of a Valencian Working Landscape

By Sarah R. Hamilton. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Winner of the 2019 Turku Book Award from the European Society for Environmental History

The Albufera Natural Park, an area ten kilometers south of Valencia that is widely regarded as the birthplace of paella, has long...

Building Reuse

Sustainability, Preservation, and the Value of Design

By Kathryn Rogers Merlino

The construction and operation of buildings is responsible for 41 percent of all primary energy use and 48 percent of all carbon emissions, and the impact of the demolition and removal of an older building...

Gardens of Gold

Place-Making in Papua New Guinea

By Jamon Alex Halvaksz. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Since the start of colonial gold mining in the early 1920s, the Biangai villagers of Elauru and Winima in Papua New Guinea have moved away from planting yams and other subsistence foods to instead cultivating...

Anticipating Future Environments

Climate Change, Adaptive Restoration, and the Columbia River Basin

By Shana Lee Hirsch

Drought. Wildfire. Extreme flooding. How does climate change affect the daily work of scientists? Ecological restoration is often premised on the idea of returning a region to an earlier, healthier state. Yet the effects of...

Seeds of Control

Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea

By David Fedman. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government...

Shifting Livelihoods

Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia

By Daniel Tubb. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the...