Environmental History: A Concise Introduction (New Perspectives on the Past) - Softcover

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Ian Simmons is Professor of Geography at the University of Durham. His long-term research work is on the human impact on the environment of Mesolithic England. His books include The Ecology of Natural Resources, Biogeography, Changing the Face of the Earth (Blackwell, 1996) and Earth, Air and Water.

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Environmental change is as old as the environment itself. The realization that human beings themselves are responsible for an increasingly large part of this change is more recent. The concern that elements of the change may be lethal for a variety of species, including perhaps the human species, is more recent still. Yet as Ian Simmons shows, the notion of a "natural" environment undisturbed by human intervention is largely mythical.

Awareness of the human responsibility for changes in nature has focused the minds of scholars and researchers in a wide variety of human fields, and produced a rich body of literature in such disciplines as geography, climatology, biology, archaeology and history. In this book, Ian Simmons provides an introduction to the field as a whole and to the long history of the mutual interactions between nature and human culture.

The author explains the concepts and approaches deployed by different disciplines, and shows how each relates to and depends on the other. He describes how the ecological relationships between human cultures and their surroundings may be characterized over time (for example by their exploitation of energy) and, deploying a variety of examples, shows the different intensities of change that can be produced. Ian Simmons concludes by considering modes of "environmental knowing" - scientific, humane and cultural - and by examining the different perspectives that may be derived from considering culture as outside nature or human beings as part of nature.