The Arctic—warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet—is a source of striking imagery of amplified environmental change in our time, and has come to serve as a spatial setting for climate crisis discourse. The recent alterations in the Arctic environment have also been perceived by some observers as an opportunity to expand economic exploitation. Heightened geopolitical interest in the region and its resources, contradicted by calls for the protection of fragile Far North ecosystems, has rendered the Arctic an arena for negotiating human interactions with nature, and for reflecting upon the planetary risks and possibilities associated with the advent and expansion of the Anthropocene—the proposed new epoch in Earth history in which humankind is said to have gained geological agency and become the dominant force over the Earth system. With the Arctic serving as a nexus of crosscutting analytical themes spanning contemporary history (the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century until 2015), this dissertation examines defining characteristics of the Anthropocene and how the concept, which emerged from the Earth system science community, impacts ideas and assumptions in historiography, social sciences and the environmental humanities, including the fields of environmental history, crisis management and security studies, political geography, and science and technology studies (STS). The primary areas of empirical analysis and theoretical investigation encompass constructivist perspectives and temporal conceptions of environmental and climate crisis; the role of science and expertise in performing politics and shaping social discourse; the geopolitical significance of telecoupling—a concept that reflects the interconnectedness of the Anthropocene and supports stakeholder claims across wide spatial scales; and implications of the recent transformation in humankind’s long duration relationship with the natural world. Several dissertation themes were observed in practice at the international science community of Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard, where global change is made visible through a concentration of scientific activity. Ny-Ålesund is furthermore a place of geopolitics, where extra-regional states attempt to enhance their legitimacy as Arctic stakeholders through the performance of scientific research undertakings, participation in governance institutions, and by establishing a physical presence in the Far North. This dissertation concludes that this small and remote community represents an Anthropocene node of global environmental change, Earth system science, emergent global governance, geopolitics, and stakeholder construction in an increasingly telecoupled world. / <p>QC 20151211</p>

Despite being a country synonymous with fishing and having very strong maritime traditions, the clear origins and development of specialist fishing communities prior to the mechanisation era in Iceland, particularly the Vestfirðir region, remain unclear. Further to this, the details of their chronological development are often erratic if not unknown. Historical records often recollect periods of success or failure, largely driven by economic narrative, however, the context, factors and responses to these changes have never been fully explored. Compounding this absence of information is the tendency for narratives to be accounting for Iceland as a whole, without giving allowance to any regional differences. By adopting an interdisciplinary methodology, underpinned by the application of geoarchaeology (the interpretation of the cultural record contained within soils and sediments), the chronological developments and historical narrative can begin to be established. The result of this research is a clearer understanding of the environmental history of fishing communities in the Vestfirðir region spanning over eight centuries, displaying evidence of a resilient and responsive society. As a result of this research, a clear distinction can now be made between sites which served maritime and terrestrial purposes based on the interpretation of the cultural material. The findings have produced a narrative detailing how a society has responded to wider environmental and social pressures driven by changes within Iceland and throughout Europe. The sites surveyed display unique variance in their characteristics of adaptation, reflecting a society which maintained a high degree of resilience and flexibility which essentially provides the foundation for one of the most successful fishing grounds in the world today.

The thesis is an attempt to write the environmental history of the Modern Turkey from the second half of the 19th century to today. The central research focus and aim of the thesis is to explore the role of the modernity project at the transformation of the environment of Turkey during the republican period. For this, water and soil resources are taken to the core of the research, as both water and soil have the potential to highlight the transformative impacts of modernity project in most detail. Because of this, the conceptual framework of environmental history has been examined to outline its characteristics within the environmental sciences. Next, the development of the modern though has been scrutinized by the means of the transforming relation between human and nature, and through the development of human culture and society. For this, the shift from biological evolution to cultural evolution and its outcomes have been summarized. Finally, and the emerge of modernity and the development of the market society has been highlighted to define the relation between nature and human in according to the supply and demand relation in society. An institutional analysis is adopted to analyze the social, political and ideological forces that influenced the environmental impacts of the modernity project of Turkey. The impact of modernity project is analyzed through the relation between the increasing demand for natural resources, and the organization of supply processes within the modernization of Turkey.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2009. / Title from screen (viewed on August 27, 2009). Department of History, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Philip V. Scarpino. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 165-173).

O Vale do Paraíba passou por um conjunto de transformações espaciais guiadas pelo cultivo do café para exportação ao longo do século XIX. A história ambiental sugere que a natureza seja integrada à análise histórica elaborada por estudiosos do passado. Neste sentido, busca-se compreender a dinâmica de interação entre sociedade e ambiente natural através das técnicas utilizadas no cultivo do café no Vale do Paraíba fluminense no século XIX, com o objetivo de analisar os elementos que condicionaram o processo de estruturação desse cultivo no Vale, assim como o impacto dele resultante àquele ambiente natural. Procura-se ainda investigar de que maneira indivíduos daquela sociedade se posicionaram frente às técnicas utilizadas e perceberam as dinâmicas promovidas pela cultura cafeeira ao ambiente natural. / Throughout the nineteenth century, the Paraiba Valley passed through a set of spatial changes driven by the exporting coffee cultivation. The environmental history suggests that nature must be integrated into the historical analysis developed by scholars in the past. Therein lies the search of understanding the interaction dynamics between society and natural environment through the techniques used in the coffee growing in the Paraiba Valley during the nineteenth century, aiming to analyze the factors that influenced the design process of this crop there, as well as its impact to that natural environment. The following research also intends to understand the way people from that society noticed and took their position on farming techniques that used to be applied and about the environmental interections driven by coffee cultivation.

The field of environmental ethics has been in discussion and debate the past 40 years over how to best expand the circle of moral consideration away from a privileged human perspective to encompass the rest of the non-human world in order to change minds and social practices to address environmental degradation and destruction. One of the main methods is devoted to arguing for the intrinsic value of non-human lives and places as the means to do this. I argue that this method of environmental ethics because it, at best, is a lazy framework for moral deliberation that ignores the entangled sociopolitical and environmental complexity of a situation by reducing the answer to a single set of predetermined values and interests which (re)produces and reinforces social and environmental injustice. An environmental pragmatist approach geared towards addressing environmental injustice is a better way of addressing both environmental degradation and social inequalities.

Two volcanic eruptions in 1809 and 1815 shrouded the earth in sulfur dioxide and triggered a series of weather and climate anomalies manifesting themselves between 1810 and 1819, a period that scientists have termed the “Cold Decade.” People who lived during the Cold Decade appreciated its anomalies through direct experience, and they employed a number of cognitive and analytical tools to try to construct the environmental worlds in which they lived. Environmental consciousness in the early 19th century commonly operated on two interrelated layers. The first was local, encompassing what people saw and experienced around them in their day-to-day lives, communities and localities, including the weather above them and outside their windows and the environmental characteristics they knew and felt they understood. The second was a broader layer, less known and often less knowable, encompassing the world outside of the local which included climate, the region, the planet, the heavens and the cosmos. Many people during the Cold Decade tried to explore and conquer that broader layer—to pull it closer, to define it, in some cases to tame or harness it—and people’s efforts to do this, while different depending on who they were and their life situations, had real-world consequences not merely in the Cold Decade itself but in the modernizing world that subsequently emerged. This dissertation examines Cold Decade environmental consciousness in five groups of people, most in the United States but some in Europe and other parts of the world: weather watchers, who kept detailed records on weather phenomena and used this data to discern patterns and theories of climate and weather prediction; diarists, ordinary people who recorded and remarked upon weather and climate phenomena in their journals, and who explored the broader layer by knowing weather and climate through personal experience; doctors, who leveraged weather and climate knowledge for the benefit of their patients; arguers, who conducted an intellectual debate about whether the Earth’s climate was growing warmer or colder; and travelers, people who sought to understand the broader layer through travel and geography.

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo realizar uma análise das descrições das paisagens fluminenses realizadas por Alberto Ribeiro Lamego, ao longo dos anos 40 do século XX, a partir de novos referenciais teóricos, destacando-se o princípio da complexidade proposto por Edgar Morin. O trabalho avalia a contribuição das quatro obras que compõem Os Setores da Evolução Fluminense (O Homem e o Brejo, O Homem e a Restinga, O Homem e a Serra e o Homem e a Guanabara). / This work aims to undertake a review of descriptions of Rio de Janeiro landscapes performed by Alberto Ribeiro Lamego, over the 40 years of the twentieth century, from new theoretical benchmarks, highlighting to the principle of complexity proposed by Edgar Morin. The study evaluates the contribution of the four books that comprise Os Setores da Evolução Fluminense (O Homem e o Brejo, O Homem e a Restinga, O Homem e a Serra e o Homem e a Guanabara).

O Vale do Paraíba passou por um conjunto de transformações espaciais guiadas pelo cultivo do café para exportação ao longo do século XIX. A história ambiental sugere que a natureza seja integrada à análise histórica elaborada por estudiosos do passado. Neste sentido, busca-se compreender a dinâmica de interação entre sociedade e ambiente natural através das técnicas utilizadas no cultivo do café no Vale do Paraíba fluminense no século XIX, com o objetivo de analisar os elementos que condicionaram o processo de estruturação desse cultivo no Vale, assim como o impacto dele resultante àquele ambiente natural. Procura-se ainda investigar de que maneira indivíduos daquela sociedade se posicionaram frente às técnicas utilizadas e perceberam as dinâmicas promovidas pela cultura cafeeira ao ambiente natural. / Throughout the nineteenth century, the Paraiba Valley passed through a set of spatial changes driven by the exporting coffee cultivation. The environmental history suggests that nature must be integrated into the historical analysis developed by scholars in the past. Therein lies the search of understanding the interaction dynamics between society and natural environment through the techniques used in the coffee growing in the Paraiba Valley during the nineteenth century, aiming to analyze the factors that influenced the design process of this crop there, as well as its impact to that natural environment. The following research also intends to understand the way people from that society noticed and took their position on farming techniques that used to be applied and about the environmental interections driven by coffee cultivation.

Este trabalho visa contribuir com os estudos de História Ambiental e de Geografia ao abordar a interação entre os aspectos culturais e a natureza da Lagoa de Araruama e da Serra de Sapiatiba, localizado no Estado do Rio de Janeiro. A pesquisa propõe uma análise das paisagens simbólicas do município de São Pedro da Aldeia (RJ) por intermédio do 3 nível da História Ambiental. Além de caracterizar estas áreas como paisagens simbólicas inseridas na Região dos Lagos numa Área de Proteção Ambiental (APA de Sapiatiba), destaca-se a importância do capital imaterial e da história ambiental na conservação da diversidade de um pequeno fragmento de Mata Atlântica e também da natureza das águas em um importante trecho da maior lagoa hipersalina do mundo. Portanto, nosso objetivo neste estudo é desvendar a História Ambiental da Lagoa de Araruama e da Serra de Sapiatiba no município de São Pedro da Aldeia (RJ), a partir da análise da transformação da paisagem. / This work aims to contribute to the study of Geography and Environmental History in addressing the interaction between cultural aspects and the nature of Araruama Lake and the Sierra of Sapiatiba, located in the State of Rio de Janeiro. The research proposes an analysis of the symbolic landscapes of São Pedro da Aldeia (RJ) through the 3rd level of environmental history. In addition to characterizing these areas as symbolic landscapes included in the Lakes Region on Environmental Protection Area (APA Sapiatiba) highlights the importance of intangible capital and environmental history in the conservation of the diversity of a small fragment of Atlantic Forest and also the nature of the waters in an important part of the largest hypersaline lagoon in the world. Therefore, our objective in this study is to unveil the Environmental History of Araruama Lake and the Sierra of Sapiatiba in São Pedro da Aldeia (RJ), from the analysis of the transformation of the landscape.