ABSTRACT

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History presents a cutting-edge overview of the dynamic and ever-expanding field of environmental history. It addresses recent transformations in the field and responses to shifting scholarly, political, and environmental landscapes.

The handbook fully and critically engages with recent exciting changes, contextualizes them within longer-term shifts in the field, and charts potential new directions for study. It focuses on five key areas:

  • Theories and concepts related to changing considerations of social justice, including postcolonial, antiracist, and feminist approaches, and the field’s growing emphasis on multiple human voices and agencies.
  • The roles of non-humans and the more-than-human in the telling of environmental histories, from animals and plants to insects as vectors of disease and the influences of water and ice, the changing theoretical approaches and the influence of concepts in related areas such as animal and discard studies.
  • How changes in theories and concepts are shaping methods in environmental history and shifting approaches to traditional sources like archives and oral histories as well as experiments by practitioners with new methods and sources.
  • Responses to a range of current complex problems, such as climate change, and how environmental historians can best help mitigate and resolve these problems.
  • Diverse ways in which environmental historians disseminate their research within and beyond academia, including new modes of research dissemination, teaching, and engagements with stakeholders and the policy arena.

This is an important resource for environmental historians, researchers and students in the related fields of political ecology, environmental studies, natural resources management and environmental planning.

Chapters 9, 10 and 26 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

Framing environmental history today and for the future

part I|61 pages

New Methods, Innovative Approaches

part II|108 pages

Non-Human Agencies

chapter 5|12 pages

The tangled bank

chapter 6|15 pages

Multispecies cultures and environmental change

The animal (agency) turn

chapter 8|18 pages

The non-human in agriculture

Technologies of agriculture and non-human aspects of farming

chapter 11|14 pages

Hazards and disasters

Locusts, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, droughts

part III|59 pages

Engaging with the Planetary and the Anthropocene

chapter 13|13 pages

Extinction in environmental history

Historicising problems of classification and intentionality

chapter 14|12 pages

Temporality and environmental history in the Anthropocene

Timing Climates, Modelling Futures

part IV|89 pages

Power, Flows, and Knowledges

chapter 17|13 pages

Toxicity, racial capitalism, and colonial mining

Lessons from Cyanide and Gold Mining in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia)

chapter 21|15 pages

Urban environmental governance

Historical and political ecological perspectives from South Asia

part V|94 pages

Practices and Actions for Current Socio-Ecological Crises

chapter 22|15 pages

Pedagogy for the depressed

Empowerment and hope in the face of the apocalypse

chapter 23|16 pages

Activist environmental history

On war machines and guerrilla strategies

chapter 24|17 pages

Communicating environmental history

Reaching diverse audiences through online forums

chapter 25|14 pages

Environmental history in museums

Past practice and future opportunities