I’ve been reading and writing environmental history since I was trapped indoors on a rainy afternoon nearly 40 years ago and by chance pulled Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange off a bookshelf. I read it in one gulp (it’s a short book and the rain lingered) and I’ve never been the same since. I regard the environmental as the most fundamental sort of history, because it places humankind and our history in its full context. I love to learn about how humans and their environments affect one another and to read histories that treat both together—because in reality they have always been, and always will be, intertwined.
I wrote...
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World
This is the kind of environmental history that describes changes to the world’s forests, fields, soils, lakes, rivers, water quality, air quality, wildlife, and cities—and tries to explain why those changes happened. It argues that the middle of the twentieth century marked a turning point in global environmental history because the scale, scope, and pace of environmental change accelerated markedly. The key reasons for that acceleration lay in the world’s energy system with fossil fuels at its center, in a sudden surge in population growth, in a relentlessly competitive international system, and in the resistance of economic management to ecological thinking. Even though the Timesof London listed it among the best science books ever written, it’s a history book.
This book explores the history of two communities that during the Cold War devoted themselves to the production of nuclear weapons: Richland, Washington and Ozersk in Russia’s southern Urals. She calls this a “tandem history” because even though the towns existed in very different countries, the U.S. and the USSR, seeing them side-by-side reveals how much they had in common as a result of nuclear secrecy, accidents, and the privileges that came with working inside the jewel in the crown of a military-industrial complex. Brown is a skilled author and she inserts herself into her stories with travelogue segments that in the hands of a lesser writer might seem self-indulgent but in hers add texture to the historical fabric.
While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union.
In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society, while…
This is one of the classic books in environmental history. It expands upon his earlier work, The Columbian Exchange, and shows how European imperialism succeeded sooner and more fully in those parts of the world that were ecologically suited to the crops and weeds, domestic and wild animals, and disease-causing microbes that Europeans brought with them. Plants, animals, microbes, and human-operated as an unconscious team, helping one another get established in the temperate zones of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand—to the great misfortune of the Indigenous populations of these lands.
People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world - North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain; in many cases they were a matter of firearms against spears. But as Alfred W. Crosby maintains in this highly original and fascinating book, the Europeans' displacement and replacement of the native peoples in the temperate zones was more a matter of biology than of military conquest. European organisms had certain decisive advantages over their New World and Australian counterparts. The spread of European…
Since the sea covers more than 70% of the globe, environmental historians ought to pay attention to it too, and Bolster does so like no other. He is himself a sailor and writes with an easy familiarity about storms and swells, codfish, and currents. The story here is about overfishing in the North Atlantic, beginning in European waters in medieval times, but moving quickly to the seas between Cape Cod and Newfoundland in the 17th to early 20th centuries. A wonderful blend of conventional historians’ sources with insights from marine biology.
Since the Viking ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic has shaped the lives of people who depend upon it for survival. And just as surely, people have shaped the Atlantic. In his innovative account of this interdependency, W. Jeffrey Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer, takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the world.
While overfishing is often thought of as a contemporary problem, Bolster reveals that humans were transforming the sea long before factory trawlers turned fishing from a handliner's art into an industrial enterprise. The western Atlantic's…
Sometimes environmental history is written with passion and outrage, and this is one such case. Brazil’s Atlantic forest is 90% gone now, and Dean explains how, why, and when that happened. He regards it as a tragedy, and his sorrow and anger enliven his writing. You probably know the ongoing story of the shrinking Amazon rainforest. Forest history is a major category within environmental history, and this is one of the best. The impact of Brazil’s leaf-cutter ants, which Dean explains, defies belief.
Warren Dean chronicles the chaotic path to what could be one of the greatest natural disasters of modern times: the disappearance of the Atlantic Forest. A quarter the size of the Amazon Forest, and the most densely populated region in Brazil, the Atlantic Forest is now the most endangered in the world. It contains a great diversity of life forms, some of them found nowhere else, as well as the country's largest cities, plantations, mines, and industries. Continual clearing is ravaging most of the forested remnants. Dean opens his story with the hunter-gatherers of twelve thousand years ago and takes…
This is the story of the world’s biggest freshwater lake from its origin up to today. Most of it focuses on the last two centuries, when Lake Superior changed fast under the impact of deforestation, mining, and industrialization around its shorelines. In the last 50 years or so, environmental regulation in the U.S. and Canada has substantially improved Lake Superior’s water quality, although new threats connected to climate change will require new conservation efforts. Langston lives on the shores of Lake Superior, and writes about it with intimate knowledge and boundless affection.
A compelling exploration of Lake Superior's conservation recovery and what it can teach us in the face of climate change
Lake Superior, the largest lake in the world, has had a remarkable history, including resource extraction and industrial exploitation that caused nearly irreversible degradation. But in the past fifty years it has experienced a remarkable recovery and rebirth. In this important book, leading environmental historian Nancy Langston offers a rich portrait of the lake's environmental and social history, asking what lessons we should take from the conservation recovery as this extraordinary lake faces new environmental threats.
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
