A History of Environmentalism

A History of Environmentalism: Local Struggles, Global Histories , edited by and Lise Sedrez, has just been published by Bloomsbury press.

"Under ash-grey skies, before oil-coloured black seas, in a city shaken by hurricanes or drowning in waste, in messianic world conferences to negotiate CO2 emissions in exchange of development and wealth: wherever we are, nature has never been so close, so present and so significant. Two great social historians, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, once said that environmental issues would be the greatest challenge of the twenty-first century. Hobsbawm and Thompson, however, looked to the new millennium from their twentieth-century viewpoint, suggesting the idea that the environment is a realm of the future rather than that of the past. Predictions or prophecies, dreams or nightmares are not the usual bread-and-butter of historical work. There are other more common oracular sources in this arena of predicting the future. Climate scientists and economists, engineers and biologists, a former candidate to the White House and Nobel Prize winner and Hollywood stars all offer prognoses for the future condition of nature. Yet we believe that to understand this planet and our relationship with it, history does help. This book offers a collection of stories from planet Earth—nine meaningful histories of struggles and resistances in different places, each fought in the name of Nature. Together it is these people who are building a global history of environmentalism and, in this process, transforming the relations between humans and the environment on a planetary scale."

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