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Ordering the Myriad Things

From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China

By Nicholas K. Menzies. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

China’s vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories

Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands

By Jonathan Padwe. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

In the hill country of northeast Cambodia, just a few kilometers from the Vietnam border, sits the village of Tang Kadon. This community of hill rice farmers of the Jarai ethnic minority group survived aerial...

The Snow Leopard and the Goat

Politics of Conservation in the Western Himalayas

By Shafqat Hussain. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Following the downgrading of the snow leopard’s status from “endangered” to “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2017, debate has renewed about the actual number of snow leopards in the wild...

Roses from Kenya

Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers

By Megan A. Styles. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Kenya supplies more than 35 percent of the fresh-cut roses and other flowers sold annually in the European Union. This industry—which employs at least 90,000 workers, most of whom are women—is lucrative but enduringly controversial....

Working with the Ancestors

Mana and Place in the Marquesas Islands

By Emily C. Donaldson. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Throughout the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, forest spirits share space with ancestral ruins and active agricultural plots, affecting land use and heritage preservation. As Marquesans continue their efforts to establish UNESCO World Heritage status,...

Living with Oil and Coal

Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India

By Dolly Kikon. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

The nineteenth-century discovery of oil in the eastern Himalayan foothills, together with the establishment of tea plantations and other extractive industries, continues to have a profound impact on life in the region. In the Indian...

Caring for Glaciers

Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas

By Karine Gagné. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Regional geopolitical processes have turned the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in northwest India, into a strategic border area with an increasing military presence that has decentered the traditional agropastoralist economy. This in turn has led...

Organic Sovereignties

Struggles over Farming in an Age of Free Trade

By Guntra A. Aistara

This first sustained ethnographic study of organic agriculture outside the United States traces its meanings, practices, and politics in two nations typically considered worlds apart: Latvia and Costa Rica. Situated on the frontiers of the...

The Nature of Whiteness

Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe

By Yuka Suzuki

The Nature of Whiteness explores the intertwining of race and nature in postindependence Zimbabwe. Nature and environment have played prominent roles in white Zimbabwean identity, and when the political tide turned against white farmers after...

Forests Are Gold

Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam

By Pamela D. McElwee

Forests Are Gold examines the management of Vietnam's forests in the tumultuous twentieth century—from French colonialism to the recent transition to market-oriented economics—as the country united, prospered, and transformed people and landscapes. Forest policy has...

Conjuring Property

Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon

By Jeremy M. Campbell

Winner of the 2017 James M. Blaut Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers
Honorable Mention for the 2016 Book Prize from the Association for Political and Legal...

Andean Waterways

Resource Politics in Highland Peru

By Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Andean Waterways explores the politics of natural resource use in the Peruvian Andes in the context of climate change and neoliberal expansion. It does so through careful ethnographic analysis of the constitution of waterways, illustrating...