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.
• Offers a new way to analyze and describe environmental change • Includes a new vocabulary to describe environmental change • Provides an overview of the shortcomings of environmental history and other fields that study environmental change
Contents
1. The ends of nature and culture; 2. Architects of nature; 3. Dark earths: field and farm environmental infrastructure; 4. Water and woodland harvesting: village environmental infrastructure; 5. Browse and burn: bush savanna as environmental infrastructure; 6. Valuing environmental infrastructure and the myth of natural resources management; 7. Science and the failure to conquer nature: environing and the modern west; Conclusion.
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