Bailes, Kendall E., ed. Environmental History: Critical Issues in Comparative Perspective. Lanham, MD: University of America Press, 1985.
This volume stems from one of the first major US conferences on environmental history, which took place 1–3 January 1982 at the University of California’s Irvine campus and brought together over 100 scholars active in the field. It includes a wealth of material, from Clarence J. Glacken’s reflections on culture and environment in Western civilization during the nineteenth century, to Robert H. Claxton’s account of the treatment of climate as a theme in environmental history. US environmental movements are examined with reference to themes such as gender, engineering, and postwar politics. Roderick Nash contributes an early version of his “Rounding out the American Revolution” thesis, and the extension of environmental ethics. Further essays concern Navajo ecology, Native American worldviews, non-Western perspectives hailing from Eastern Europe, Japan, and the former USSR, US environmental policy, urban environmental history, the impact of Western expansion on world ecosystems, and the interplay between science and environmental history. Donald Worster’s essay on the prospects for the internationalization of environmental history concludes the volume.
This book has been made available courtesy of Rowman & Littlefield, and the American Society for Environmental History, on the Environment & Society Portal for nonprofit educational purposes only.
- Coates, Peter. Review of Environmental History: Critical Issues in Comparative Perspective, edited by Kendall E. Bailes. The Public Historian 8, no. 1 (Winter, 1986): 93–5. doi:10.2307/3377085.