The Vortex
eBook - ePub

The Vortex

An Environmental History of the Modern World

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Vortex

An Environmental History of the Modern World

About this book

Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises—climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes—means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we've forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure, must be considered collectively if we are to stay afloat in what Uekötter describes as a vortex: a powerful metaphor for the flow of history, capturing the momentum and the many crosscurrents that swept people and environments along. His book invites us to look at environmental challenges from multiple perspectives, including all the twists and turns that have helped to create the mess we find ourselves in. Uekötter has written a world history for an age where things are falling apart: where we know what lies ahead and are equipped with the right tools—technological and otherwise—and plenty of experience to deal with environmental challenges, but somehow fail to get our affairs in order.

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Yes, you can access The Vortex by Frank Uekötter in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Environmental Science. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction: A New History for a Young Century
  8. Part I: Essentials
  9. Part II: Appropriations
  10. Part III: Irreversible
  11. Part IV: Technology Takes Command
  12. Part V: Ruptures
  13. Part VI: The Final Reserves
  14. Part VII: The Age of Catastrophe
  15. Part VIII: The Great Entrenchment
  16. Coda: The Pandemic
  17. Appendix: Making Choices
  18. Notes
  19. Index