Environmental History Seminar Reading List
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To discuss something other than politics (well, not really since what is more political than our understanding of the past), I am teaching a graduate seminar in Environmental History. Here is the reading list. Read along if you want!
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing in the Age of the Atlantic
Chad Montrie, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States
Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan
Marsha Weisiger, Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country
John McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914
John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States
Mark Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society
Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest
Couple of notes–I wouldn’t assign a book that was more than $30, eliminating a lot of good options but making this easier to decide. You may also note that there is nothing on modern environmentalism. That’s not really intentional but perhaps is indicative of how boring and stale the discussions of a lot of that is, in my view.