New perspectives on how envirotech can help us engage with the
surrounding world in ways that are more sustainable for humanity--and
the planet.
Today's scientists, policymakers, and citizens are all confronted by
numerous dilemmas at the nexus of technology and the environment. Every
day seems to bring new worries about the dangers posed by carcinogens,
"superbugs," energy crises, invasive species, genetically modified
organisms, groundwater contamination, failing infrastructure, and other
troubling issues.
In Technology and the Environment in History, Sara B. Pritchard and
Carl A. Zimring adopt an analytical approach to explore current research
at the intersection of environmental history and the history of
technology--an emerging field known as envirotech. Technology and the
Environment in History They discuss the important topics, historical
processes, and scholarly concerns that have emerged from recent work in
thinking about envirotech. Each chapter focuses on a different urgent
topic:
- Food and Food Systems: How humans have manipulated organisms and
ecosystems to produce nutrients for societies throughout history.
- Industrialization: How environmental processes have constrained
industrialization and required shifts in the relationships between human
and nonhuman nature.
- Discards: What we can learn from the multifaceted forms, complex
histories, and unexpected possibilities of waste.
- Disasters: How disaster, which the authors argue is common in the
industrialized world, exposes the fallacy of tidy divisions among
nature, technology, and society.
- Body: How bodies reveal the porous boundaries among technology, the
environment, and the human.
- Sensescapes: How environmental and technological change have reshaped
humans' (and potentially nonhumans') sensory experiences over time.
Using five concepts to understand the historical relationships between
technology and the environment--porosity, systems, hybridity,
biopolitics, and environmental justice--Pritchard and Zimring propose a
chronology of key processes, moments, and periodization in the history
of technology and the environment. Ultimately, they assert,
envirotechnical perspectives help us engage with the surrounding world
in ways that are, we hope, more sustainable and just for both humanity
and the planet. Aimed at students and scholars new to environmental
history, the history of technology, and their nexus, this impressive
synthesis looks outward and forward--identifying promising areas in more
formative stages of intellectual development and current synergies with
related areas that have emerged in the past few years, including
environmental anthropology, discard studies, and posthumanism.
