Reviews
An excellent book. Examining works at the intersection of environmental history and the history of technology, Pritchard and Zimring bring readers unfamiliar with the wide range of scholarly work in this area up to speed in a concise manner.
Pritchard and Zimring demonstrate how technological and environmental history enrich each other, deploying the concepts of permeability, hybridity, and systems to investigate agriculture, industrialization, waste, disasters, and sensescapes. In their brilliant synthesis, human beings are both natural and technological creatures navigating the porous and often perilous boundaries of unstable landscapes.
Global in their vision, Pritchard and Zimring abandon geographical and chronological conventions to reveal systems that reshaped environments while placing burdens on marginalized communities. This remarkable book is essential for everyone who wishes to better understand the complex, porous relationship between environment, technology, and society.
An excellent and timely addition to the growing literature on envirotech. The book's overview of relevant scholarship at the intersection of the history of technology and environmental history will be useful to scholars and students alike, while its combination of vital and understudied topics makes for provocative reading and study. Here's to Sara Pritchard and Carl Zimring for this fine work.
Sara Pritchard and Carl Zimring have brought together two field—environmental history and the history of technolog—to chart the historiography of envirotech history. They show how both nature and technology have shaped the world we live in and the humans we have become. An excellent and extremely useful synthesis.
For both students and scholars, this book is a most welcome contribution to the discussion that will dominate the coming century: the relationship between environment and technology. The authors provide a well-grounded yet fresh outlook, adopting a thematic and analytic approach that allows them to tell a story that transcends traditional divides.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Technology and the Environment in History
1. Food and Food Systems
2. Industrialization
3. Discards
4. Disasters
5. Body
6. Sensescapes
Conclusion. An Envirotechnical World
Appen
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Technology and the Environment in History
1. Food and Food Systems
2. Industrialization
3. Discards
4. Disasters
5. Body
6. Sensescapes
Conclusion. An Envirotechnical World
Appendix. Teaching Resources
Notes
Bibliography
Index