This book unravels the profound implications of biodiversity offsetting for nature-society relationships and its links to environmental and social inequality. Drawing on people’s resistance against its implementation in several urban and rural places across England, it explores how the production of equivalent natures, the core promise of offsetting, reframes socionatures both discursively and materially transforming places and livelihoods. The book draws on theories and concepts from human geography, political ecology, and Marxist political economy, and aims to shift the trajectory of the current literature on the interplay between offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberal reconstruction of conservation and planning policies in the era following the 2008 financial crash. By shedding light on offsetting’s contested geographies, it offers a fundamental retheorization of offsetting capable of demonstrating how offsetting, and more broadly revanchist neoliberal policies, are increasingly used to support capitalist urban growth producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes. Nature Swapped and Nature Lost brings forward an understanding of environmental politics as class politics and sees environmental justice as inextricably linked to social justice. It effectively challenges the dystopia of offsetting’s ahistorical and asocial non-places and proposes a radically different pathway for gaining social control over the production of nature by linking struggles for the right to the city with struggles for the right to nature for all.

Yanni (art history, Rutgers U.) examines the relationship between architecture and science in the 19th century by considering the physical placement and display of natural artifacts in Victorian natural history museums. She begins by discussing the problem of classification, the social history of collecting, as well as architectural competitions an

'Nature' is a deceptively simple and ahistorical term, suggestingintrinsic, unchanging reality. Yet nature has a history too, bothin terms of human attitudes and human impacts. Coates outlines themajor understandings of 'nature' in the western world sinceclassical times, from nature as higher authority to its more recentmeaning of threatened physical space and life forms. Unlike many others, this book places the history of attitudes tonature within the story of human-induced changes in the materialenvironment. And few others take a supranational perspective, orcross the divides between historical eras. A distinctive unifying theme is Coates's interest in how 'green'writers over the last thirty years have interpreted our pastdealings with nature, specifically their efforts to diagnose theroots of contemporary ecological problems and their search forancestors. He concludes with a discussion of the future of naturein the context of developments such as the 'new' ecology, globalwarming, advances in genetic engineering and research on animalbehaviour. Assuming no previous knowledge, Nature provides the reader with anaccessible synthesis and introduction to some of environmentalhistory's central features and debates, confirming its status asone of the most enthralling current pursuits within historicalstudies. This will be essential reading for second-year undergraduates andabove in cultural history and environmental history, as well as tothe general reader interested in environmental issues.

The black smoke billowing from burning oil wells during the Gulf War of 1990-91 directed media and public attention towards war's devastating environmental impact. Yet even before the first bomb is dropped, preparation for warfare materially and imaginatively reshapes rural landscapes and environments. This volume is the first to explore the comparative histories and geographies of militarized landscapes. Moving beyond the narrow definition of militarized landscapes as theatres of war, it treats them as simultaneously material and cultural sites that have been partially or fully mobilized to achieve military aims. Ranging from the Korean DMZ to nuclear testing sites in the American West, and from Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain, Militarized Landscapes focuses on these often secretive, hidden, dangerous and invariably controversial sites that occupy huge swathes of national territories.