the 25 chapters of The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History provide outstanding examples of the penetration of an 'environmental approach' into the mainstream historical discussion ... Turner's chapter on the history of parks, wilderness, and protected areas in the United States is a lucid and brave argument on the nature protection-local people dichotomy in the context of environmental history. The ... Read moreanti-imperialist and anti-elitist perspective of the essay, together with its criticism of Americentrism, is a refreshing addition to the conservation literature.
Zsolt Pinke, Conservation Biology
this collection has the potential to become an exceptionally influential contribution to the literature. New scholars in the field ... would do well to read it to get a sense of the pulse of the field, and a sense of where, should these scholars have their way, the field might go in the next decade or so.
Ted Binnema, Environmental History
The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History is a job well done ... One can hardly complain about the fresh insights brought here to climate history; animals; disease; grasslands; forests; tropics; science; technology; synthetic chemicals; national parks, wilderness, and protected areas; cultural landscapes; capitalism; private property; work; consumption; law; cities; race and ethnicity; women and gender; borders; and international relations. The authors tasked to write these essays are equally impressive and diverse.
Martin V. Melosi, Journal of American History
An enormously valuable teaching and research resource for the practitioner of environmental history: many chapters will serve nicely as the first assignment for students working at advanced undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels within the broad thematic and topical areas of individual chapter coverage...Yet this Handbook will be equally valuable as a showcase of what the field has to offer other historians. It will demonstrate with vigour and verve that environmental history, rather than existing out there, somewhere on the margins, sealed off from other fields within historical studies, is actually quite near here, ready, willing and ripe for cross-pollination, and, actually not that strange after all, subject to all the usual trends and turns that shape and reshape historical studies.
Peter Coates, Reviews in History
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