Suggested Introductory Reading for Environmental History

  • Amato, Joseph: Dust: A History of the Small and Invisible (2000)
  • Bate, Jonathan: The Song of the Earth
  • Beinart, William & Lotte Hughes: Environment and Empire (2009)
  • Beinart, William & Peter Coates: Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (1995)
  • Coates, Peter: “Clio’s New Greenhouse” (1996)
  • Coates, Peter: Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (1998)
  • Cole, Luke & Sheila Foster: From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (2001)
  • Crosby, Alfred: Ecological imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1993)
  • Cronon, William: Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1995)
  • Davis, Devra: When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution (2002)
  • Dunlap, Thomas: Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (1999)
  • Garner, Robert: Environmental Politics (2000)
  • Griffiths, Tom & Libby Robin (eds): Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (1997)
  • Grove, Richard: Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (1995)
  • Guha, Ramachandra: Environmentalism: A Global History (2000)
  • Hay, Peter: A Companion to Environmental Thought (2002)
  • Hughes, Donald: What is Environmental History(1998)
  • Hunter, Robert: The Greenpeace to Amchitka: An Environmental Odyssey (2004)
  • Krech, Shepard: The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (1999)
  • Lowenthal, David: “Environmental History: From Genesis to Apocalypse” (2001)
  • Nash, Roderick: Wilderness and the American Mind (2001)
  • Nicholson, Max: The New Environmental Age (1987)
  • Markham, Adam: A Brief History of Pollution (1994)
  • Marsh, George Perkins & David Lowenthal: Man and Nature (2003)
  • McNeill, John:Something New Under the Sun (2000)
  • McCormick, John: The Global Environmental Movement (1995)
  • Mackenzie, John: The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism (1988)
  • Merchant, Carolyn: The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (2002)
  • Merchant, Carolyn: The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980)
  • Mulligan, Martin (ed.): Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era (2003)
  • Pepper, David: Modern Environmentalism(1996)
  • Porter, Roy: “‘In England’s Green and Pleasant Land’: The Enlightenment and the Environment” in Culture, landscape, and the environment: the Linacre lectures (1997)
  • Powers, Rory:Rising Tide: The History and Future of the Environmental Movement (2002)
  • Scalan, John & J.F.M. Clark: Aesthetic Fatigue: Modernity and the Language of Waste (2013)
  • Smout, TC: Exploring Environmental History: Selected Essays (2009)
  • Spowers, Rory: Rising Tides: A History of the Environmental Revolution and Visions for an Ecological Age (2002)
  • Richards, John: The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (2003)
  • Thomas, Keith: Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (1983)
  • Weart, Spencer: The Discovery of Global Warming (2003)
  • White, Lynn: “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967)
  • Winter, James:Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment (1999)
  • Worster, Donald: “Appendix: Doing Environmental History” in The Ends of the Earth(1988)
  • Worster, Donald: Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1994)
  • Worster, Donald: “The Two Cultures Revisited: Environmental History and the Environmental Sciences” (1996)

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