Books & Profiles

Contextualizing Disaster presents “highly visible” disasters as well as “slow and hidden” disasters, and how different parties involved in recovery processes contextualize them.

The Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective takes an anthropological approach to Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast. It portrays a historically globalized region which has adapated creatively to major transformations and still remains a major actor within global networks.

The Environment and Sustainable Development in the New Central Europe highlights creative solutions being implemented in Central and East Central Europe to overcome environmental problems and ensure sustainable development.

A history of German agricultural technologies and the environmental problems they have given rise to since the nineteenth century.

The 2015 edition examines what we think we know about environmental damage and the hidden threats to sustainability we need to recognize.

This volume brings together a range of studies of cycling and cyclists, examining some of the diversity of practices and their representation.

Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins hundreds of millions of years ago and spans the globe. Coal is a captivating narrative about an ordinary substance with an extraordinary impact on human civilization.

This volume focuses on environmental knowledge production in the United States by taking as starting points the impact of natural catastrophes and of public debates on climate change and environmental threats.

Vaclav Smil shows why energy transitions are inherently complex and prolonged affairs, and how ignoring this raises unrealistic expectations that the United States and other global economies can be weaned quickly from a primary dependency on fossil fuels.

Beginning in the pre-modern world, the Volga and Mississippi Rivers both served as critical trade routes connecting cultures in an extensive exchange network, while also sustaining populations through their surrounding wetlands and bottomlands. In modern times, “Mother Volga” and the “Father of Waters” became integral parts of national identity, contributing to a sense of Russian and American exceptionalism. Rivers, Memory, and Nation-Building discusses their histories, through which we derive a more nuanced view of human interaction with the environment, which adds another lens to our understanding of the past.