Description:
Introducing students to the place of population in environmental thinking
For centuries, thinking about the earth's increasing human population has been tied to environmental ideas and political action. This highly teachable collection of contextualized primary sources allows students to follow European and North American discussions about intertwined and evolving concepts of population, resources, and the natural environment from early contexts in the sixteenth century through to the present day.
Edited and introduced by Robert J. Mayhew, a noted biographer of Thomas Robert Malthus--whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), excerpted here, is an influential and controversial take on the topic--this volume explores themes including evolution, eugenics, war, social justice, birth control, environmental Armageddon, and climate change. Other responses to the idea of new "population bombs" are represented here by radical feminist work, by Indigenous views of the population-environment nexus, and by intersectional race-gender approaches. By learning the patterns of this discourse, students will be better able to critically evaluate historical conversations and contemporary debates.
Brief description: Paul Sutter is series editor for the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. He is professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published five books, including Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (Georgia, 2015) and Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Washington, 2005).
Review Quotes:
"Mayhew's documentary reader is ambitious in scale and scope, with inclusive materials dating from the sixteenth century to the present."
-- "AAG Review of Books"