In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. In The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth”—the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system—exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions. Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the “global”—as in global population, global climate, and global economy—an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO’s Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.

The Stockholm Conference of 1972 drew the world’s attention to the global environmental crisis, but for people in Sweden the threat was nothing new. Anyone who read the papers or watched the television news was already familiar with the issues. Five years early, in the summer of 1967, the situation was very different. So what happened in between? This book explores the ‘environmental turn’ that took place in Sweden in the late-1960s. This radical change, the realisation that human beings were in the process of destroying their own environment, had major and far-reaching consequences. What was it that opened people’s eyes to the crisis? When did it happen? Who set the ball rolling? These are some of the questions the book addresses, shedding new light on the history of environmentalism.

Ambitious in its scope and scale, this environmental history of World War II ranges over rear bases and operational fronts from Bora Bora to New Guinea, providing a lucid analysis of resource exploitation, entangled wartime politics, and human perceptions of the vast Oceanic environment. Although the war’s physical impact proved significant and oftentimes enduring, this study shows that the tropical environment offered its own challenges: Unfamiliar tides left landing craft stranded; unseen microbes carrying endemic diseases disabled thousands of troops. Weather, terrain, plants, animals—all played an active role as enemy or ally. At the heart of Natives and Exotics is the author’s analysis of the changing visions and perceptions of the environment, not only among the millions of combatants, but also among the Islands’ peoples and their colonial administrations in wartime and beyond. Judith Bennett reveals how prewar notions of a paradisiacal Pacific set up millions of Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, and Japanese for grave disappointment when they encountered the reality. She shows that objects usually considered distinct from environmental concerns (souvenirs, cemeteries, war memorials) warrant further examination as the emotional quintessence of events in a particular place. Among native people, wartime experiences and resource utilization induced a shift in environmental perceptions just as the postwar colonial agenda demanded increased diversification of the resource base. Bennett’s ability to reappraise such human perceptions and productions with an environmental lens is one of the unique qualities of this study. Impeccably researched, Natives and Exotics is essential reading for those interested in environmental history, Pacific studies, and a different kind of war story that has surprising relevance for today’s concerns with global warming.

This history of GATT explains how trade was implicated in foreign policy and international relations and connected to global order.

Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of "ecological" ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California’s Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual, Inescapable Ecologies brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world.

A second edition of this book is now available. In a compact but comprehensive and clear narrative, this book explores the First World War from a genuinely global perspective. Putting a human face on the war, William Kelleher Storey brings to life individual decisions and experiences as well as environmental and technological factors such as food, geography, manpower, and weapons. Without neglecting traditional themes, the author's deft interweaving of the role of environment and technology enriches our understanding of the social, political, and military history of the war, not only in Europe, but throughout the world.

The untold history of how people came to conceive, to manage, and to dispute environmental crisis, The Environment is essential reading for anyone who wants to help protect the environment from the numerous threats it faces today.