The sobering political implications of a disaster—the Vajont landslide in Italy in 1963—and how it speaks directly to our present environmental crisis.On October 9, 1963, 2,000 people perished in the Belluno mountains, not far from Venice, engulfed by a wave of water and mud unleashed by a massive landslide that crashed into the basin at the foot of Mount Toc. Science, power, and memory are entangled in the vortex of the Vajont Dam disaster—a stark reminder that th...

Humans may live in the Anthropocene, but this does not affect all in the same way. How would the Anthropocene look if, instead of searching its traces in the geosphere, researchers would look for them in the organosphere, in the ecologies of humans in their entanglements with the environment? Looking at this embodied stratigraphy of power and toxicity, more than the Anthropocene, we will discover the Wasteocene. The imposition of wasting relationships on subaltern human and more-than-human...

Il 9 ottobre 1963 duemila persone rimasero uccise sulle montagne del Bellunese, travolte dall'onda di acqua e fango sollevata da una gigantesca frana precipitata nel bacino ai piedi del monte Toc. Il Vajont è stato uno dei disastri piú tragici della storia italiana recente. Nel 2008 l'Unesco lo ha incluso tra i cinque piú gravi disastri ambientali di natura antropica, definendolo «un classico esempio di quello che succede quando gli ingegneri e i geologi si rivelano incapaci di cogliere la...

When more than half of the Earth population lives in cities, and living conditions worldwide suffer from a steady increase in environmental issues, historical inquiry provides useful reflections and new perspectives on the present. Urban Narratives about Nature: Socio-Ecological Imaginaries between Science and Entertainment aims at generating specific historical knowledge concerning processes of production, circulation, and management of natural history narratives and the associat...

A frank and engaging exploration of the burgeoning academic field of environmental historyInspired by the pioneering work of preeminent environmental historian Donald Worster, the contributors to A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History reflect on the past and future of this discipline. Featuring wide-ranging essays by leading environmental historians from the United States, Europe, and China, the collection challenges scholars to rethink some ...

What can a pesticide pump, a jar full of sand, or an old calico print tell us about the Anthropocene—the age of humans? Just as paleontologists look to fossil remains to infer past conditions of life on earth, so might past and present-day objects offer clues to intertwined human and natural histories that shape our planetary futures. In this era of aggressive hydrocarbon extraction, extreme weather, and severe economic disparity, how might certain objects make visible the uneven interplay...

'Think globally, act locally' has become a call to environmentalist mobilization, proposing a closer connection between global concerns, local issues and individual responsibility. A History of Environmentalism explores this dialectic relationship, with ten contributors from a range of disciplines providing a history of environmentalism which frames global themes and narrates local stories.Each of the chapters in this volume addresses specific struggles in the history of e...

Focusing on extreme environments, from Umberto Nobile’s expedition to the Arctic to the commercialization of Mt Everest, this volume examines global environmental margins, how they are conceived and how perceptions have changed. Mountaintops and Arctic environments are the settings of social encounters, political strategies, individual enterprises, geopolitical tensions, decolonial practises, and scientific experiments.Concentrating on mountaineering and Arctic exploration between ...

Is Italy il bel paese—the beautiful country—where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity’s greed and nature’s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator’s vision of Italy. The fifteen essays in Nature and History in Modern Italy investigate that nation’s long experience in managing domesxadtixadcated rather than wild natures and offer insight into these confl...

Parece que hemos entrado en una nueva era geológica, el Antropoceno, caracterizada por la dominación humana de todo el planeta. Este libro propone una lectura diferente de nuestra crisis socioecológica; en lugar del Antropoceno, deberíamos hablar del Wasteoceno, es decir, una era marcada por la producción continua de personas, comunidades y lugares de desecho. En un viaje entre Nápoles y Agbogbloshie (Ghana), Marco Armiero conduce a los lectores a las entrañas del Wasteoceno, pero también ...

In the age of climate change, the possibility that dramatic environmental transformations might cause the dislocation of millions of people has become not only a matter for scientific speculation or science-fiction narratives, but the object of strategic planning and military analysis.Environmental History of Modern Migrations offers a worldwide perspective on the history of migrations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provides an opportunity to reflect on the g...

This exploration of the environmental practices of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime invites readers to consider the ecological connections of all political projects.“We might think we see a mountain while it was a war; a forest can actually be an engine; a monument to workers might reflect the violence of a colonial empire.”—extracted from Mussolini’s NatureIn this first environmental history of Italian fascism, Marco Armiero, Rob...