Tropical Forests In Prehistory History And Modernity

Author : Patrick Roberts
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192550551
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Tropical Forests in Prehistory, History, and Modernity written by Patrick Roberts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In popular discourse, tropical forests are synonymous with 'nature' and 'wilderness'; battlegrounds between apparently pristine floral, faunal, and human communities, and the unrelenting industrial and urban powers of the modern world. It is rarely publicly understood that the extent of human adaptation to, and alteration of, tropical forest environments extends across archaeological, historical, and anthropological timescales. This book is the first attempt to bring together evidence for the nature of human interactions with tropical forests on a global scale, from the emergence of hominins in the tropical forests of Africa to modern conservation issues. Following a review of the natural history and variability of tropical forest ecosystems, this book takes a tour of human, and human ancestor, occupation and use of tropical forest environments through time. Far from being pristine, primordial ecosystems, this book illustrates how our species has inhabited and modified tropical forests from the earliest stages of its evolution. While agricultural strategies and vast urban networks emerged in tropical forests long prior to the arrival of European colonial powers and later industrialization, this should not be taken as justification for the massive deforestation and biodiversity threats imposed on tropical forest ecosystems in the 21st century. Rather, such a long-term perspective highlights the ongoing challenges of sustainability faced by forager, agricultural, and urban societies in these environments, setting the stage for more integrated approaches to conservation and policy-making, and the protection of millennia of ecological and cultural heritage bound up in these habitats.

Author : Patrick Roberts
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780191917264
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Tropical Forests in Human Prehistory, History, and Modernity written by Patrick Roberts and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text brings together evidence for the nature of human interactions with tropical forests on a global scale. Following a review of the natural history and variability of tropical forest ecosystems, the book takes a tour of human, and human ancestor, occupation and use of tropical forest environments through time.

Author : Patrick Roberts
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 154160010X
Total Pages : 389 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Jungle written by Patrick Roberts and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A bold, ambitious and truly wonderful history of the world"—Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees From the age of dinosaurs to the first human cities, a groundbreaking new history of the planet that tropical forests made. To many of us, tropical forests are the domain of movies and novels. These dense, primordial wildernesses are beautiful to picture, but irrelevant to our lives. Jungle tells a different story. Archaeologist Patrick Roberts argues that tropical forests have shaped nearly every aspect of life on earth. They made the planet habitable, enabled the rise of dinosaurs and mammals, and spread flowering plants around the globe. New evidence also shows that humans evolved in jungles, developing agriculture and infrastructure unlike anything found elsewhere. Humanity’s fate is tied to the fate of tropical forests, and by understanding how earlier societies managed these habitats, we can learn to live more sustainably and equitably today. Blending cutting-edge research and incisive social commentary, Jungle is a bold new vision of who we are and where we come from.

Author : Patrick Roberts
Publisher : Penguin Group
ISBN 13 : 9780241990780
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Jungle written by Patrick Roberts and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jungle is a new and ambitious history of the world, telling the remarkable story of the world's tropical forests from the arrival of the first plants millions of years ago to the role of tropical forests in the evolution of the world's atmosphere, the dinosaurs, the first mammals and even our own species and ancestors. Highlighting provocative new evidence garnered from cutting-edge research, Dr Roberts shows, for example, that our view of humans as 'savannah specialists' is wildly wrong, and that the 'Anthropocene' began not with the Industrial Revolution, but potentially as early as 6,000 years ago in the tropics. We see that the relationship between humankind and 'jungles' is deep-rooted, that we are all connected to their destruction, and that we must all act to save them. Urgent, clear-sighted and original, Jungle challenges the way we think about the world - and ourselves.

Author : D. S. Hammond
Publisher : CABI
ISBN 13 : 9781845930929
Total Pages : 552 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Tropical Forests of the Guiana Shield written by D. S. Hammond and published by CABI. This book was released on 2005 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Guiana Shield is an ancient geological formation located in the northern part of South America, covering an area of one million square kilometres. Despite its hostile environment, it is home to many unusual and highly specialized plants and animals, which constitute a rich area of biodiversity. Chapters in this book include hydrology, nutrient cycling, forest phenology, insect-plant interactions, forest microclimate, plant distributions, forest dynamics and conservation and management of flora and fauna. It provides a comprehensive and detailed review of the ecology, biology and natural history of the forests of the area.

Author : Michael Williams
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226899055
Total Pages : 562 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Deforesting the Earth written by Michael Williams and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Anyone who doubts the power of history to inform the present should read this closely argued and sweeping survey. This is rich, timely, and sobering historical fare written in a measured, non-sensationalist style by a master of his craft. One only hopes (almost certainly vainly) that today’s policymakers take its lessons to heart.”—Brian Fagan, Los Angeles Times Published in 2002, Deforesting the Earth was a landmark study of the history and geography of deforestation. Now available as an abridgment, this edition retains the breadth of the original while rendering its arguments accessible to a general readership. Deforestation—the thinning, changing, and wholesale clearing of forests for fuel, shelter, and agriculture—is among the most important ways humans have transformed the environment. Surveying ten thousand years to trace human-induced deforestation’s effect on economies, societies, and landscapes around the world, Deforesting the Earth is the preeminent history of this process and its consequences. Beginning with the return of the forests after the ice age to Europe, North America, and the tropics, Michael Williams traces the impact of human-set fires for gathering and hunting, land clearing for agriculture, and other activities from the Paleolithic age through the classical world and the medieval period. He then focuses on forest clearing both within Europe and by European imperialists and industrialists abroad, from the 1500s to the early 1900s, in such places as the New World, India, and Latin America, and considers indigenous clearing in India, China, and Japan. Finally, he covers the current alarming escalation of deforestation, with our ever-increasing human population placing a potentially unsupportable burden on the world’s forests.

Author : Bernard K. Maloney
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9401718008
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Human Activities and the Tropical Rainforest written by Bernard K. Maloney and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arising initially from a conference, the papers published here have been integrated into book form to provide information on human activities and the tropical rainforest in the past and present, and on the possible future of the rainforest, in a unique way. Other books have considered some, but not all, of these themes; however, none has stressed the continuity of change over time and its possible outcome for the people of the forest as well as for the forest itself. Because of the approach taken, this book should appeal across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Indeed a prime aim has been to suggest that rainforest, because of its complexity and the complexity of people-rainforest relationships throughout time, deserves study from a broad perspective. This book poses more questions than answers about the rainforest and it is hoped that it will encourage readers to think about the rainforest in a wider way than hitherto. This book is aimed at geographers (physical and human), social anthropologists, archaeologists, pedologists, foresters and tropical botanists and will be of value to graduates of various disciplines setting out to research the rainforest.

Author : Noboru Ishikawa
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 9811375135
Total Pages : 660 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Anthropogenic Tropical Forests written by Noboru Ishikawa and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-06 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The studies in this volume provide an ethnography of a plantation frontier in central Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on the expertise of both natural scientists and social scientists, the key focus is the process of commodification of nature that has turned the local landscape into anthropogenic tropical forests. Analysing the transformation of the space of mixed landscapes and multiethnic communities—driven by trade in forest products, logging and the cultivation of oil palm—the contributors explore the changing nature of the environment, multispecies interactions, and the metabolism between capitalism and nature. The project involved the collaboration of researchers specialising in anthropology, geography, Southeast Asian history, global history, area studies, political ecology, environmental economics, plant ecology, animal ecology, forest ecology, hydrology, ichthyology, geomorphology and life-cycle assessment. Collectively, the transdisciplinary research addresses a number of vital questions. How are material cycles and food webs altered as a result of large-scale land-use change? How have new commodity chains emerged while older ones have disappeared? What changes are associated with such shifts? What are the relationships among these three elements—commodity chains, material cycles and food webs? Attempts to answer these questions led the team to go beyond the dichotomy of society and nature as well as human and non-human. Rather, the research highlights complex relational entanglements of the two worlds, abruptly and forcibly connected by human-induced changes in an emergent and compelling resource frontier in maritime Southeast Asia. Chapters ‘Commodification of Nature on the Plantation Frontier’ and ‘Into a New Epoch: The Plantationocene’ are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Author : Robert A. Voeks
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022654785X
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Ethnobotany of Eden written by Robert A. Voeks and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-06-27 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mysterious and pristine forests of the tropics, a wealth of ethnobotanical panaceas and shamanic knowledge promises cures for everything from cancer and AIDS to the common cold. To access such miracles, we need only to discover and protect these medicinal treasures before they succumb to the corrosive forces of the modern world. A compelling biocultural story, certainly, and a popular perspective on the lands and peoples of equatorial latitudes—but true? Only in part. In The Ethnobotany of Eden, geographer Robert A. Voeks unravels the long lianas of history and occasional strands of truth that gave rise to this irresistible jungle medicine narrative. By exploring the interconnected worlds of anthropology, botany, and geography, Voeks shows that well-intentioned scientists and environmentalists originally crafted the jungle narrative with the primary goal of saving the world’s tropical rainforests from destruction. It was a strategy deployed to address a pressing environmental problem, one that appeared at a propitious point in history just as the Western world was taking a more globalized view of environmental issues. And yet, although supported by science and its practitioners, the story was also underpinned by a persuasive mix of myth, sentimentality, and nostalgia for a long-lost tropical Eden. Resurrecting the fascinating history of plant prospecting in the tropics, from the colonial era to the present day, The Ethnobotany of Eden rewrites with modern science the degradation narrative we’ve built up around tropical forests, revealing the entangled origins of our fables of forest cures.

Author : William Balée
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817317864
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Cultural Forests of the Amazon written by William Balée and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award. Cultural Forests of the Amazon is a comprehensive and diverse account of how indigenous people transformed landscapes and managed resources in the most extensive region of tropical forests in the world. Until recently, most scholars and scientists, as well as the general public, thought indigenous people had a minimal impact on Amazon forests, once considered to be total wildernesses. William Balée’s research, conducted over a span of three decades, shows a more complicated truth. In Cultural Forests of the Amazon, he argues that indigenous people, past and present, have time and time again profoundly transformed nature into culture. Moreover, they have done so using their traditional knowledge and technology developed over thousands of years. Balée demonstrates the inestimable value of indigenous knowledge in providing guideposts for a potentially less destructive future for environments and biota in the Amazon. He shows that we can no longer think about species and landscape diversity in any tropical forest without taking into account the intricacies of human history and the impact of all forms of knowledge and technology. Balée describes the development of his historical ecology approach in Amazonia, along with important material on little-known forest dwellers and their habitats, current thinking in Amazonian historical ecology, and a narrative of his own dialogue with the Amazon and its people.