By Peter Thorsheim
Preface by Peter Thorsheim
“Anybody interested in the story of how an industrial society learned to manage its interactions with the physical environment would benefit from reading Inventing Pollution.”
Business History Review
“The chapters devoted to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries set a new standard for our understanding of how, in technological, legislative, and local regulatory terms, the behemoth of nineteenth-century smoke fog came gradually to be tamed, only to be replaced by new collective fears of invisible emissions from new industrial processes.”
Journal of British Studies
“Inventing Pollution is a valuable reminder that air pollution was causing environmental, medical, and political controversies long before it became a focus for protests and regulations in the 1960s. By tracing the many responses to ‘smoke pollution’ in the first industrial nation over the past two centuries, Peter Thorsheim has established himself as a leading environmental historian … His book will be of wide interest on both sides of the Atlantic.”
William Cronon, author of Changes in the Land and Nature’s Metropolis
“Drawing on an impressive range of source materials, including some excellent photographs, cartoons, and advertisements, this concise and clearly-written study explores public understandings of air pollution in Britain over the past two centuries.”
Journal of Social History
Going as far back as the thirteenth century, Britons mined and burned coal. Britain’s supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal, which powered industry, warmed homes, and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain’s cities and towns filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke. Yet, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution.
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.
Even as coal production in Britain has plummeted in recent decades, it has surged in other countries. This reissue of Thorsheim’s far-reaching study includes a new preface that reveals the book’s relevance to the contentious national and international debates—which aren’t going away anytime soon—around coal, air pollution more generally, and the grave threat of human-induced climate change.
Peter Thorsheim is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. More info →
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Release date: April 2018
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36 illus.
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320 pages
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How Green Were the Nazis?
Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich
Edited by Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, 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
European History · History | Historical Geography · Environmental Policy · Germany
Nature and History in Modern Italy
Edited by Marco Armiero and Marcus Hall
·
Foreword by Donald Worster
Is Italy il bel paese—the beautiful country—where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity’s greed and nature’s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator’s vision of Italy.
Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa
Edited by Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III
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Afterword by Timothy Mitchell
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse.
World and Comparative History · African History · Environmental Policy · History | Historical Geography · Global Issues · African Studies · Middle East · Northern Africa
From Mastery to Mystery
A Phenomenological Foundation for an Environmental Ethic
By Bryan E. Bannon
From Mastery to Mystery is an original and provocative contribution to the burgeoningfield of ecophenomenology. Informed by current debates in environmental philosophy, Bannon critiques the conception of nature as u200a“substance” that he finds tacitly assumed by the major environmental theorists.