Overview

As uncontrolled development forces crises in the natural world, deeply ingrained human connections with the earth are changing. Oral history's proven ability to explore issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality make it a uniquely effective methodology for bringing in new perspectives to our understanding of environments. This book brings together interviews with a global range of activists, farmers, water system managers, victims of catastrophe, tribal trustees, wilderness rangers, reindeer herders, and foresters, among others whose life experience gives them special insights into human-environmental interaction and adaption. Commentary by oral historians examines how these stories can be used to better understand our relationship with the natural world. Oral History and the Environment takes what could seem broad and impersonal forces such as climate change and environmentalismLand crystalizes their meaning through personal stories. It overturns narrow historical frameworks bounded artificially by national borders and instead portrays the issues facing our common ecosystems.

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9780190684969

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Sloan and Cave have assembled an admirably global set of oral histories ranging from taiga to tropics and from oil spills to afforestation projects. This book brings to life perspectives and voices that rarely appear in the written record and reveal an intimately human side of environmental history as experienced by everyday people. Environmental history and oral history make good partners and this book is a shining example of how to realize their combined potential. --J.R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun and The Great Acceleration This book gets at the shared activist roots of environmental and oral history and demonstrates the fruitfulness of their cross-pollination. The various perspectives and ways of knowing illustrate how oral history and environmental history have been able to broaden each other's frameworks at the disciplinary and methodological levels. -- Mary A. Larson, former president, Oral History Association

Sloan and Cave have assembled an admirably global set of oral histories ranging from taiga to tropics and from oil spills to afforestation projects. This book brings to life perspectives and voices that rarely appear in the written record and reveal an intimately human side of environmental history as experienced by everyday people. Environmental history and oral history make good partners and this book is a shining example of how to realize their combined potential. * J.R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun and The Great Acceleration * This book gets at the shared activist roots of environmental and oral history and demonstrates the fruitfulness of their cross-pollination. The various perspectives and ways of knowing illustrate how oral history and environmental history have been able to broaden each other's frameworks at the disciplinary and methodological levels. * Mary A. Larson, former president, Oral History Association *

Author Information

Stephen M. Sloan is the Director of the Institute for Oral History and Associate Professor of History at Baylor University. Mark Cave is Senior Historian with the Historic New Orleans Collection. Sloan and Cave are the editors of Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis, winner of the Oral History Association book prize.

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