Genealogies of Environmentalism

The Lost Works of Clarence Glacken

Clarence Glacken, Adam Romero, Michael Watts, S. Ravi Rajan

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780813939070
• eBook ISBN: 9780813939094
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Clarence Glacken wrote one of the most important books on environmental issues published in the twentieth century. His magnum opus, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, first published in 1967, details the ways in which perceptions of the natural environment have profoundly influenced human enterprise over the centuries while, conversely, permitting humans to radically alter the Earth. Although Glacken did not publish a comparable book before his death in 1989, he did write a follow-up collection of essays—lost works now compiled at last in Genealogies of Environmentalism.

This new volume comprises all of Glacken's unpublished writings to follow Traces and covers a broad temporal and geographic canvas, spanning the globe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Each essay offers a brief intellectual biography of an important environmental thinker and addresses questions such as how many people the Earth can hold, what resources can sustain such populations, and where land for growth is located. This collection—carefully edited and annotated, and organized chronologically—will prove both a classic text and a springboard for further discussions on the history of environmental thought.

Index

Acosta, José de, 29

adaptation, concept of, 51, 55, 59, 66, 140, 147, 151, 168, 174

afforestation, 193. See also deforestation

Agassiz, Louis, 54

age of discovery, 37, 46, 92, 103, 110, 156. See also Humboldt, Alexander von

Age of Reason, 1, 3, 12

agriculture: agricultural peoples, 10; agricultural revolution, 186; lands, 179, 189; shifting cultivation in, 29, 178; study of, 133, 135

Albert the Great, 68

Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 4

Alsberg, Carl S., 170–71

animal kingdom, 64, 73, 81–82; spiritual, 62

animals, 8–12, 16–17, 37–38, 48–49, 52, 55–57, 63–64, 66–70, 73, 85–86, 150 (see also under individual names); geographic distribution of, 56

Ansichten der Natur (Humboldt), 47–48

anthropogenic environmental change, 139–41

Anthropogeographie (Ratzel), 103, 106

anthropopsychism, as “man-Soulism,” 60

apes, 48, 75–76, 78–79, 85; Anthropoid, 86 (see also chimpanzees); humans and, 52

Argyll, Duke of (George John Douglas

Campbell), 54, 58–62

Aristotle, 35, 73, 180, 183

artificial: fertilizers, 109, 115, 124; selection, 57, 63

Aspects of Nature (Humboldt), 26

Bacon, Francis, 53–54

Ballod, Carl (Kãrlis Balodis), 114–18, 122, 126; on population growth, 116

Banks, Joseph, 37, 62

barbarism, 88, 94, 100

Barrow, John,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Progress, Population, and Nature from the Age of Reason to the Mid-Nineteenth Century
• The Aesthetic and Subjective Appreciation of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt
• Darwin and His Contemporaries
• In the Wake of Marsh
• Key Trends in Nineteenth-Century Environmentalism
• The Malthusian Shadow over the Twentieth Century
• A Selected Bibliography of Clarence Glacken’s Works
• Index