Page 213 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

98 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Toward a Synthesis and James Lovelock from the 1970s onward.The names
In the eras of agrarianization and industrialization, the mentioned are but a few among many authors whose
anthroposphere gave rise to social regimes that were only works contribute to our understanding of the history and
indirectly related to the natural environment.The money dynamics of the anthroposphere.
regime and the time regime may serve as illustrations.
Johan Goudsblom
Both exemplify how people turned their attention away
from the natural environment, and from ecological issues,
toward a more purely social aspect of the anthropo- Further Reading
sphere, represented by the clock and the calendar or the Baccini, P., & Brunner, P. H. (1991). Metabolism of the anthroposphere.
purse and the bank account. Those regimes thus sup- Berlin, Germany: Springer Verlag.
Bailes, K. E. (1998). Science and Russian culture in an age of revolutions:
ported the illusion that the anthroposphere is autono-
V. I. Vernadsky and his scientific school, 1863–1945. Bloomington:
mous. That illusion was furthered by the concomitant Indiana University Press.
intellectual tendency to separate the social sciences from Crosby,A.W. (1986). Ecological imperialism.The biological expansion of
Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
the natural sciences and to cultivate discrete and seem- Christian, D. (2004). Maps of time: An introduction to big history. Berke-
ingly autonomous social-science disciplines, such as psy- ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
De Vries, B., & Goudsblom, J. (Eds.). (2002). Mappae Mundi: Humans
chology and sociology.
and their habitats in a long-term socio-ecological perspective. Amster-
Today there is a growing awareness that as the anthro- dam: Amsterdam University Press.
posphere encroaches upon ever larger portions of the Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs and steel.The fates of human societies.
New York: Random House.
biosphere, it absorbs more and more nonhuman ele- Elias, N. (1991). The symbol theory. London: Sage.
ments.The notion of ecological interdependence is gain- Elvin, M. (2004). The retreat of the elephants. An enviornmental history
of China. New Haven: Yale University Press.
ing ground. A classical theme in the social sciences has
Goudsblom, J. (1992). Fire and civilization. London: Allen Lane.
been the interweaving of planned actions and unplanned Goudsblom, J., Jones, E. L., & Mennell, S. J. (1996). The course of human
consequences.All human activities have unintended con- history: Economic growth, social process, and civilization. Armonk,
NY: M. E. Sharpe.
sequences; recognition of that fact is now being combined Margulis, L., Matthews, C., & Haselton, A. (2000). Environmental evo-
with the insight that the anthroposphere (itself the prod- lution: Effects of the origin and evolution of life on planet Earth. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
uct of unplanned evolutionary processes) has become an
McNeill, J. R. (2000). Something new under the sun:An environmental his-
agent in the evolution of the biosphere. Human life has tory of the twentieth century. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
become a formidable coevolutionary force. Sociocultural McNeill, J. R., & McNeill,W. H. (2003). The human web.A bird’s-eye view
of world history. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
processes are channeling and steering the course of bio- McNeill, W. H. (1976). Plagues and peoples. Garden City, NY:
logical evolution. Doubleday.
Samson, P. R., & Pitt, D. (Eds.). (1999). The biosphere and noosphere
Without using the word anthroposphere, the world his-
reader: Global environment, society and change. London: Routledge.
torians William and John McNeill, the ecological histo- Sieferle, R. (2001). The subterranean forest. Energy systems and the indus-
rian Alfred Crosby, the biologist Jared Diamond, and trial revolution. Cambidge UK: The White Horse Press.
Simmons, I. G. (1996). Changing the face of the earth: Culture, environ-
several others have shown that it is possible to write ment, history (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
about the history of the anthroposphere. Further theo- Smil,V. (1997). Cycles of life: Civilization and the biosphere. New York:
Scientific American Library.
retical inspiration can be drawn from the traditions of
Trudgill, S. T. (2001). The terrestrial biosphere: Environmental change,
sociology and anthropology inaugurated by Auguste ecosystem science, attitudes and values. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Comte and Herbert Spencer and continued by such Prentice Hall.
Turner, B. L. II, Clark,W. C., Kates, R.W., Richards, J. F., Mathews, J.T.,
scholars as Norbert Elias and Marvin Harris, in combi- & Meyer, W. B. (Eds.). (1990). The earth as transformed by human
nation with the geological and biological study of the action: Global and regional changes in the biosphere over the past 300
years. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
biosphere as launched by Vladimir Vernadsky in the early
Vernadsky,V. I. (1998). The biosphere. New York: Copernicus. (Original
twentieth century and taken up again by Lynn Margulis work published in Russian in 1926).