Books by John F. Richards
“It deals with a 300- to 350-year period. So again, part of my admiration for it is the size of the canvas on which he paints. Secondly, it provides both a kaleidoscopic and encyclopaedic sense of the scale of environmental change going on in the world in the pre-industrial period. It’s easy for us to imagine that strong and disruptive environmental changes are mainly a consequence of industrialisation, and there is some underlying truth to that. But Richards helps us understand that even before steam engines, humankind was capable of powerful and enduring alterations, species extinctions that will last for the eternity of time, and broad-scale deforestation.” Read more...
The best books on Environmental History
John R McNeill, Historian
Interviews where books by John F. Richards were recommended
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1
The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
by W. Jeffrey Bolster -
2
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
by Kate Brown -
3
Ecological Imperialism
by Alfred Crosby -
4
The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World
by John F. Richards -
5
The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938
by Myrna I. Santiago
The best books on Environmental History, recommended by John R McNeill
The best books on Environmental History, recommended by John R McNeill
Environmental history is the study of the relationship between society and the natural world—both in terms of human impacts on the environment, and the constraints placed upon cultures by the landscapes they live in. Here, John R. McNeill, a pioneer of the field, recommends five of the best environmental history books with ambition, engaging prose, and heft.
