Environmental History Reading List

I am teaching a graduate seminar this spring on methodologies of environmental history. As such, I have assigned the following books, with an emphasis on recent top books, but with some older work too. You should read along. I haven’t decided all the articles to go on top of this, but let’s just say you and the students will be busy:

Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing in the Age of the Atlantic

Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914

Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Elmore, Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future

Wintersteen, The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem

Karskens, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia

Barnett, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe

Zallen, American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865

Rector, Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit

Get to work!