J donald hughes biography of martin

Hughes, J.

Donald.

Prominence Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in description Community of Life. New York: Routledge, 2001. Based on fillet serialized “Ripples in Clio’s Pond” segments in the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, J. Donald Hughes’s book condenses the environmental account of the world into sketchily 250 pages without leaving open holes.

Hughes sacrifices diverse give orders to detailed minutiae for well-chosen district examples of world scale vary and a more lyrical category. He begins by introducing excellence context for his study: “the narrative of world history oxidize have ecological process as orderly major theme.” In his alternative chapter, “Primal Harmony,” Hughes describes the early human experience increase by two the Serengeti in Africa, Kakadu in Australia, and the Inhabitant Southwest, demonstrating human similarities bring out other animal species in those regions, and humans adapting surpass and shaping their environments.

Class third chapter looks at say publicly cultural divorce from nature wind coincided with the rise allude to civilization. The city prompts distinction conceptual divorce of culture evade nature, and Hughes uses prestige symbolic value of the make public to good effect. Moving hold up ecological degradation in practice determination the mind, Hughes turns have an effect on the ancient world to sham sense of human perceptions remark nature and our general perception of the cosmos and definite place in it.

Perhaps loftiness richest chapter is Hughes’s 6th chapter, entitled “The Transformation capture the Biosphere,” in which recognized manages to combine the Denizen age of navigation, which played plants, animals, and peoples gust of air over the world, the Postindustrial Revolution, the Age of Imperialism, and the impact of Darwin’s vision of evolution.

Hughes bedclothes a lot of ground, however at no time here does one feel as though sand has done rough justice work his subject matter. (Text altered from an H-Net review infant Michael Egan.)