New Books In Environmental Studies

One of the most disturbing insights made by practitioners of “Big History” is that the distinction between geologic time and human time has collapsed in our era. The forces that drove geologic time–plate tectonics, the orientation of the Earth’s axis relative to the sun, volcanic activity–were distinct from the forces that drove human time–evolution, technological change, population growth. To be sure, they interacted. But the causal arrow always went from geologic change to human change. As Anthony Penna rightly points out in The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), the causal arrow now goes in both directions. Not only do we adapt to the environment, but the environment is adapting to us, and mightily. We are ushering in a new geological period sometimes called the Anthropocene–the era defined by human activity. It’s important to point out that this is not the first time biology has shaped geology: we have good evidence, for

I don’t know how many young boys develop a fascination with the world from having a map of the world hung above their beds, but this certainly fits in with the experiences of both Charles Emmerson and myself. Charles’ interest in the Arctic was born from a childhood of staring at those strange names fringing the Arctic Ocean – Novaya Zemlya, Svalbad, Murmansk and Baffin Bay. Look at the far North from a pole-centric map and the whole geography of the Arctic starts to make sense. Charles’ book, The Future History of the Arctic (Vintage Books, 2010) takes in the entire history and geography of the Arctic in a broad sweep – from the Norwegian explorers and the Alaskan purchase to the past and future hardships of Iceland and the Soviet dreams of expansion and riches. Now, of course, climate change is altering the very geography of the place. But how? The best word that I have for the book is ‘fascinating’. It is a rich subject and this is an excellent guide to a place tha

In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show the world that China had arrived. So they outfitted a small army (50,000 men) with artillery pieces and rocket launchers (over 10,000 of them) and proceeded to make war on the heavens. The idea was to “seed” clouds with silver iodide before they got to Beijing and rained on the Chinese parade. Or maybe the idea was to frighten the rain gods. Who knows? In any case, none of it worked: the massive, loud, and surely expensive operation had, according to most experts, no measurable effect on the weather around the Chinese capital. You might say you can’t blame them for trying. But according to James Rodger Fleming, you can. In his incisive new book Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia UP, 2010), Fleming shows that although people have always dreamed of controlli

If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you will discover is that “traditional” societies usually had an adversarial relationship with “nature.” They fought the wild tooth and nail in a never-ending effort to bring it under human control. It never really occurred to them that this effort at pacification–and the wanton destruction it brought–was wrong. On the contrary, it was man’s right. As the Hebrew Bible says, God gave man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Nature was ours, to do with as we pleased. John Muir was among the first people to take a different and more “modern” view. He, like others of the Romantic movement, felt that nature and divinity were intertwined. We should no more destroy a wilderness than we should take the Lord’s name in vain, for both the