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9780415731584

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Reviews

'Cameron Muir has produced a brilliant, far-reaching book that combines environmental and agricultural approaches to urgent questions about food politics and land management. This is a terrific work of historically textured, geographically immersed story-telling that also has a strong conceptual payoff in debunking resilient myths about what it would take to feed the world. Muir's conclusions will reverberate across disciplines and national borders.'–Rob Nixon, University of Wisconsin, USA 'In his gripping account of the failures of European agriculture on the western plains of New South Wales, Cameron Muir challenges our assumptions about the social and environmental outcomes of agricultural progress. How can global food security be maintained, given that modern farming technologies can ‘break’ places? Muir’s perceptive and fresh analysis alerts us to why the lessons of the past are so crucial for the future management of our environments.' –Kate Darian-Smith, University of Melbourne, Australia 'This book is remarkable in the way it builds – from an incredibly wide range of sources – an ecological history of what the unbridled quest for agricultural rewards may do to poorly understood lands, especially drylands. In all, this is an enthralling and very important book that deserves to be read by a wide audience of agriculturalists, sociologists, farmers, conservationists and ecologists among others.' –P.S. Lake, Monash University, Australia

'Cameron Muir has produced a brilliant, far-reaching book that combines environmental and agricultural approaches to urgent questions about food politics and land management. This is a terrific work of historically textured, geographically immersed story-telling that also has a strong conceptual payoff in debunking resilient myths about what it would take to feed the world. Muir's conclusions will reverberate across disciplines and national borders.'-Rob Nixon, University of Wisconsin, USA 'In his gripping account of the failures of European agriculture on the western plains of New South Wales, Cameron Muir challenges our assumptions about the social and environmental outcomes of agricultural progress. How can global food security be maintained, given that modern farming technologies can 'break' places? Muir's perceptive and fresh analysis alerts us to why the lessons of the past are so crucial for the future management of our environments.' -Kate Darian-Smith, University of Melbourne, Australia

In his gripping account of the failures of European agriculture on the western plains of New South Wales, Cameron Muir challenges our assumptions about the social and environmental outcomes of agricultural progress. How can global food security be maintained, given that modern farming technologies can 'break' places? Muir's perceptive and fresh analysis alerts us to why the lessons of the past are so crucial for the future management of our environments. -Kate Darian-Smith, University of Melbourne, Australia Cameron Muir has produced a brilliant, far-reaching book that combines environmental and agricultural approaches to urgent questions about food politics and land management. This is a terrific work of historically textured, geographically immersed story-telling that also has a strong conceptual payoff in debunking resilient myths about what it would take to feed the world. Muir's conclusions will reverberate across disciplines and national borders. -Rob Nixon, University of Wisconsin, USA

Author Information

Cameron Muir is Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia. From 2013 to 2014, he was Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, and a visiting scholar at The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), part of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, USA.

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