We are delighted to inform you that we will be present at the Association of American Geographers’ Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, April 5-9, 2017. Please stop by our booth #418 to browse the latest selection of books at discounted prices & pick up some free journal samples.
If you are unable to attend, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. For the next 30 days, receive a 25% discount on all Geography and Environmental Studies titles found on our website. At checkout use discount code AAG17. Browse our newly released Geography and Environmental Studies 2017/2018 Catalog or visit our website, now with new enhanced subject searching features for a complete listing of all published and forthcoming titles.
Here is a preview of some of our newest releases on display:
Environment in History: International Perspectives Series
Published in association with the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), and the Rachel Carson Center (RCC).
The relationship between human society and the natural world is being studied with increased urgency and interest. Investigating this relationship from historical, cultural, and political perspectives, the monographs and collected volumes in this series showcase high-quality research in environmental history and cognate disciplines in the social and natural sciences. The series strives to bridge both national and disciplinary divides, with a particular emphasis on European, transnational, and comparative research.
Volume 11
INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
Conservation and Globalization in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer
Pollution, resource depletion, habitat management, and climate change are all issues that necessarily transcend national boundaries. Accordingly, they and other environmental concerns have been a particular focus for international organizations from before the First World War to the present day. This volume is the first to comprehensively explore the environmental activities of professional communities, NGOs, regional bodies, the United Nations, and other international organizations during the twentieth century. It follows their efforts to shape debates about environmental degradation, develop binding intergovernmental commitments, and—following the seminal 1972 Conference on the Human Environment—implement and enforce actual international policies.
Volume 10
IN THE NAME OF THE GREAT WORK
Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature and its Impact in Eastern Europe
Edited by Doubravka Olšáková
Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” Intended to increase agricultural yields dramatically, this utopian impulse quickly spread to the newly communist states of Eastern Europe, captivating political elites and war-fatigued publics alike. By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation”—which relied upon ideologically corrupted and pseudoscientific theories—had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.
Read Introduction: The Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature and the East European Experience
Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology Series
Interest in environmental anthropology and ethnobiological knowledge has grown steadily in recent years, reflecting national and international concern about the environment and developing research priorities. `Studies in Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology’ is an international series based at the University of Kent at Canterbury. It is a vehicle for publishing up-to-date monographs and edited works on particular issues, themes, places or peoples which focus on the interrelationship between society, culture and the environment.
Volume 22 Forthcoming
INDIGENEITY AND THE SACRED
Indigenous Revival and the Conservation of Sacred Natural Sites in the Americas
Edited by Fausto Sarmiento and Sarah Hitchner
This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of rurality, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management schemes. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reformed as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.
Volume 21 Paperback Original
TREES, KNOTS, AND OUTRIGGERS
Environmental Knowledge in the Northeast Kula Ring
Frederick H. Damon
Trees, Knots and Outriggers (Kaynen Muyuw) is the culmination of twenty-five years of work by Frederick H. Damon and his attention to cultural adaptations to the environment in Melanesia. Damon details the intricacies of indigenous knowledge and practice in his sweeping synthesis of symbolic and structuralist anthropology with recent developments in historical ecology. This book is a long conversation between the author’s many Papua New Guinea informants, teachers and friends, and scientists in Australia, Europe and the United States, in which a spirit of adventure and discovery is palpable.
Read Introduction
Related Link: This book is accompanied by a large online repository of images: https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/Trees_Knots__Outriggers/
Volume 20 New in Paperback
BEYOND THE LENS OF CONSERVATION
Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another
Eva Keller
“This book will make a great addition to undergraduate courses on Anthropology of the Environment and/or Development or Political Ecology. Keller’s highly readable style, in turn, will satisfy both those new to the subject and scholars already familiar with the topics of conservation practice in Madagascar. It could even become an important resource for those conservation experts who are trying – and (as the study shows) failing – to establish connections between distant places and people.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
The study investigates how the Malagasy farmers living at the edge of the park perceive the conservation enterprise and what people in Switzerland see when looking towards Madagascar through the lens of the zoo exhibit. It crystallizes that the stories told in either place have almost nothing in common: one focuses on power and history, the other on morality and progress. Thus, instead of building a bridge, Nature conservation widens the gap between people in the North and the South.
Read Introduction
Volume 19 New in Paperback
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
An Appraisal from the Gulf Region
Edited by Paul Sillitoe
With growing evidence of unsustainable use of the world’s resources, such as hydrocarbon reserves, and related environmental pollution, as in alarming climate change predictions, sustainable development is arguably the prominent issue of the 21st century. This volume gives a wide ranging introduction focusing on the arid Gulf region, where the challenges of sustainable development are starkly evident. The Gulf relies on non-renewable oil and gas exports to supply the world’s insatiable CO2 emitting energy demands, and has built unsustainable conurbations with water supplies dependent on energy hungry desalination plants and deep aquifers pumped beyond natural replenishment rates. Sustainable Development has an interdisciplinary focus, bringing together university faculty and government personnel from the Gulf, Europe, and North America — including social and natural scientists, environmentalists and economists, architects and planners — to discuss topics such as sustainable natural resource use and urbanization, industrial and technological development, economy and politics, history and geography.
Read Introduction: Sustainable Development in the Gulf: Some Introductory Remarks
NEW
Paperback Original
CONTEXTUALIZING DISASTER
Edited by Gregory V. Button and Mark Schuller
NEW SERIES: Volume 1, Catastrophes in Context
Contextualizing Disaster offers a comparative analysis of six recent “highly visible” disasters and several slow-burning, “hidden,” crises that include typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, chemical spills, and the unfolding consequences of rising seas and climate change. The book argues that, while disasters are increasingly represented by the media as unique, exceptional, newsworthy events, it is a mistake to think of disasters as isolated or discrete occurrences. Rather, building on insights developed by political ecologists, this book makes a compelling argument for understanding disasters as transnational and global phenomena.
Read Introduction
Paperback Original
WHEN THINGS BECOME PROPERTY
Land Reform, Authority and Value in Postsocialist Europe and Asia
Thomas Sikor, Stefan Dorondel, Johannes Stahl and Phuc Xuan To
Volume 3, Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy
Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments.
New in Paperback
NIMBY IS BEAUTIFUL
Cases of Local Activism and Environmental Innovation around the World
Edited by Carol Hager and Mary Alice Haddad
NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) protests are often criticized as parochial and short-lived, generating no lasting influence on broader processes related to environmental politics. This volume offers a different perspective. Drawing on cases from around the globe, it demonstrates that NIMBY protests, although always arising from a local concern in a particular community, often result in broader political, social, and technological change. Chapters include cases from Europe, North America, and Asia, engaging with the full political spectrum from established democracies to non-democratic countries. Regardless of political setting, NIMBY movements can have a positive and proactive role in generating innovative solutions to local as well as transnational environmental issues. Furthermore, those solutions are now serving as models for communities and countries around the world.
Read Introduction: A New Look at NIMBY
‘CITY OF THE FUTURE’
Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana
Mateusz Laszczkowski
Volume 14, Integration and Conflict Studies
Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city’s longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic – allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.
Read Introduction: Pathways into the ‘City of the Future’
SUSTAINING RUSSIA’S ARCTIC CITIES
Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change
Edited by Robert Orttung
NEW SERIES: Volume 2, Studies in the Circumpolar North
Urban areas in Arctic Russia are experiencing unprecedented social and ecological change. This collection outlines the key challenges that city managers will face in navigating this shifting political, economic, social, and environmental terrain. In particular, the volume examines how energy production drives a boom-bust cycle in the Arctic economy, explores how migrants from Muslim cultures are reshaping the social fabric of northern cities, and provides a detailed analysis of climate change and its impact on urban and industrial infrastructure.
Read Chapter 1. Russia’s Arctic Cities: Recent Evolution and Drivers of Change
LIFE AS A HUNT
Thresholds of Identities and Illusions on an African Landscape
Stuart A. Marks
The “extensive wilderness” of Zambia’s central Luangwa Valley is the homeland of the Valley Bisa whose cultural practices have enriched this environment for centuries. Beginning with the intrusions of warlords and later British colonials, successive generations have experienced the callousness and challenges of colonialism. Their homeland, a slender corridor surrounded by three national parks and an escarpment, is a microcosm of the political, economic and cultural battlefields surrounding most African protected areas today. The story of the Valley Bisa diverges from the myths that conservationists, administrators, and philanthropists, tell about Africa’s environmental and wildlife crises.
Read Introduction: On Poaching an Elephant: Calling the Shots and Following the Ricochets
THE FOREST PEOPLE WITHOUT A FOREST
Development Paradoxes, Belonging and Participation of the Baka in East Cameroon
Glory M. Lueong
Development interventions often generate contradictions around questions of who benefits from development and which communities are targeted for intervention. This book examines how the Baka, who live in Eastern Cameroon, assert forms of belonging in order to participate in development interventions, and how community life is shaped and reshaped through these interventions. Often referred to as ‘forest people’, the Baka have witnessed many recent development interventions that include competing and contradictory policies such as ‘civilize’, assimilate and integrate the Baka into ‘full citizenship’, conserve the forest and wildlife resources, and preserve indigenous cultures at the verge of extinction.
Read Introduction
LIVING ON THIN ICE
The Gwich’in Natives of Alaska
Steven C. Dinero
The Gwich’in Natives of Arctic Village, Alaska, have experienced intense social and economic changes for more than a century. In the late 20th century, new transportation and communication technologies introduced radically new value systems; while some of these changes may be seen as socially beneficial, others suggest a weakening of what was once a strong and vibrant Native community. Using quantitative and qualitative data gathered since the turn of the millennium, this volume offers an interdisciplinary evaluation of the developments that have occurred in the community over the past several decades.
Read Introduction
FORTHCOMING
WOLF CONFLICTS
A Sociological Study
Ketil Skogen, Olve Krange, and Helene Figari
NEW SERIES: Volume 1, Interspecies Encounters
Wolf populations have recently made a comeback in Northern Europe and North America. These large carnivores can cause predictable conflicts by preying on livestock, and competing with hunters for game. But their arrivals often become deeply embedded in more general societal tensions, which arise alongside processes of social change that put considerable pressure on rural communities and on the rural working class in particular. Based on research and case studies conducted in Norway, Wolf Conflicts discusses various aspects of this complex picture, including conflicts over land use and conservation, and more general patterns of hegemony and resistance in modern societies.
UNDERSTANDING CONFLICTS ABOUT WILDLIFE
A Biosocial Approach
Edited by Catherine M. Hill, Amanda D. Webber and Nancy E. C. Priston
Volume 9, Studies of the Biosocial Society
Conflicts about wildlife are usually portrayed and understood as resulting from the negative impacts of wildlife on human livelihoods or property. However, a greater depth of analysis reveals that many instances of human-wildlife conflict are often better understood as people-people conflict, wherein there is a clash of values between different human groups. Understanding Conflicts About Wildlife unites academics and practitioners from across the globe to develop a holistic view of these interactions. It considers the political and social dimensions of ‘human-wildlife conflicts’ alongside effective methodological approaches, and will be of value to academics, conservationists and policy makers.
BERGHAHN JOURNALS
Environment and Society
Environment and Society publishes critical reviews of the latest research literature on environmental studies, including subjects of theoretical, methodological, substantive, and applied significance. Articles also survey the literature regionally and thematically and reflect the work of anthropologists, geographers, environmental scientists, and human ecologists from all parts of the world in order to internationalize the conversations within environmental anthropology, environmental geography, and other environmentally oriented social sciences.
Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology
Focaal is a peer-reviewed journal advocating an approach that rests in the simultaneity of ethnography, processual analysis, local insights, and global vision. It is at the heart of debates on the ongoing conjunction of anthropology and history, as well as the incorporation of local research settings in the wider spatial networks of coercion, imagination, and exchange that are often glossed as “globalization” or “empire.”
Nature and Culture (NC) is a forum for the international community of scholars and practitioners to present, discuss, and evaluate critical issues and themes related to the historical and contemporary relationships that societies, civilizations, empires, regions, and nation-states have with nature. The journal contains a serious interpolation of theory, methodology, criticism, and concrete observation forming the basis of this discussion.
Due to the dramatic changes in global affairs related to regional integration, studies can no longer be limited to the analysis of economic competitiveness and political power in global geopolitics. Regions and Cohesion is a needed platform for academics and practitioners alike to disseminate both empirical research and normative analysis of topics related to human and environmental security, social cohesion, and governance.
Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies
Transfers is a peer-reviewed journal publishing cutting-edge research on the processes, structures, and consequences of the movement of people, resources, and commodities. Intellectually rigorous, broadly ranging, and conceptually innovative, the journal combines the empiricism of traditional mobility history with more recent methodological approaches from the social sciences and the humanities.