Environmental Infrastructure in African History

Examining the Myth of Natural Resource Management in Namibia

Emmanuel Kreike

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781107001510
• eBook ISBN: 9781107330726
• Topic: History
• Index: History

Environmental Infrastructure in African History offers a new approach for analyzing and narrating environmental change. Environmental change conventionally is understood as occurring in a linear fashion, moving from a state of more nature to a state of less nature and more culture. In this model, non-Western and pre-modern societies live off natural resources, whereas more modern societies rely on artifact, or nature that is transformed and domesticated through science and technology into culture. In contrast, Emmanuel Kreike argues that both non-Western and pre-modern societies inhabit a dynamic middle ground between nature and culture. He asserts that humans - in collaboration with plants, animals, and other animate and inanimate forces - create environmental infrastructure that constantly is remade and re-imagined in the face of ongoing processes of change.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 The Ends of Nature and Culture
• 2 Architects of Nature
• 3 Dark Earths
• 4 Water and Woodland Harvesting
• 5 Browsing and Burning Regimes
• 6 Valuing Environmental Infrastructure and the Myth of Natural Resource Management
• 7 Science and the Failure to Conquer Nature
• Conclusion
• Index