Going as far back as the thirteenth century, Britons mined and burned coal. Britain’s supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal, which powered industry, warmed homes, and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain’s cities and towns filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke. Yet, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution. Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment. Even as coal production in Britain has plummeted in recent decades, it has surged in other countries. This reissue of Thorsheim’s far-reaching study includes a new preface that reveals the book’s relevance to the contentious national and international debates—which aren’t going away anytime soon—around coal, air pollution more generally, and the grave threat of human-induced climate change.

Demographically, nineteenth-century London, or what Victorians called the “new Rome,” first equaled, then superseded its ancient ancestor. By the mid-eighteenth century, the British capital had already developed into a global city. Sustained by its enormous empire, between 1800 and the First World War London ballooned in population and land area. Nothing so vast had previously existed anywhere. A Mighty Capital under Threat investigates the environmental history of one of the world’s global cities and the largest city in the United Kingdom. Contributors cover the feeding of London, waste management, movement between the city’s numerous districts, and the making and shaping of the environmental sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A Companion to American Environmental History gatherstogether a comprehensive collection of over 30 essays that examinethe evolving and diverse field of American environmental history. Provides a complete historiography of American environmentalhistory Brings the field up-to-date to reflect the latest trends andencourages new directions for the field Includes the work of path-breaking environmental historians,from the founders of the field, to contributions frominnovative young scholars Takes stock of the discipline through five topically themedparts, with essays ranging from American Indian EnvironmentalRelations to Cities and Suburbs

The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History draws on a wealth of new scholarship to offer diverse perspectives on the state of the field.

The trajectories of pollution in global capitalism, from the toxic waste of early tanneries to the poisonous effects of pesticides in the twentieth century. Through the centuries, the march of economic progress has been accompanied by the spread of industrial pollution. As our capacities for production and our aptitude for consumption have increased, so have their byproducts--chemical contamination from fertilizers and pesticides, diesel emissions, oil spills, a vast "plastic continent" found floating in the ocean. The Contamination of the Earth offers a social and political history of industrial pollution, mapping its trajectories over three centuries, from the toxic wastes of early tanneries to the fossil fuel energy regime of the twentieth century.

The Anthropocene, in which humankind has become a geological force, is a major scientific proposal; but it also means that the conceptions of the natural and social worlds on which sociology, political science, history, law, economics and philosophy rest are called into question. The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis captures some of the radical new thinking prompted by the arrival of the Anthropocene and opens up the social sciences and humanities to the profound meaning of the new geological epoch, the ‘Age of Humans’. Drawing on the expertise of world-recognised scholars and thought-provoking intellectuals, the book explores the challenges and difficult questions posed by the convergence of geological and human history to the foundational ideas of modern social science. If in the Anthropocene humans have become a force of nature, changing the functioning of the Earth system as volcanism and glacial cycles do, then it means the end of the idea of nature as no more than the inert backdrop to the drama of human affairs. It means the end of the ‘social-only’ understanding of human history and agency. These pillars of modernity are now destabilised. The scale and pace of the shifts occurring on Earth are beyond human experience and expose the anachronisms of ‘Holocene thinking’. The book explores what kinds of narratives are emerging around the scientific idea of the new geological epoch, and what it means for the ‘politics of unsustainability’.

This pathfinding guide concentrates the regulation of pollution in Scotland, including the common law controls. It includes sections on nuisance (including statutory nuisance), noise, air pollution (including climate change), waste, contaminated land and water pollution, planning and control of pollution, and nature conservation. The author also assesses the contribution of European environmental law on the law within Scotland.