Caroline Ford
Natural Interests
I would hope that a reader browsing in a bookstore would first look at the range of subjects explored in the book’s seven chapters and look more closely at one or two chapters that align most with his or her interests in order to get a sense of the wide range of sources and materials on which the book relies. I would also like for the reader to look at some of the illustrations. Chapter 1 contains lithographs from a journal published in the 1820s depicting “Regeneration of the Sweet Bounties of Nature in all Cantons of France” and “Mexicans contemplating the rich productions of Upper Mexico.” Chapter 3 on the disastrous floods of the nineteenth century, culminating in the great flood of 1910, when most of Paris was under water, indicates the range of pictorial representations of flooding, from block prints dating from the 1840s to the first officially commissioned photographs of the 1856 flood by the Prussian photographer E.D. Balthus and postcards of the flooded streets of France’s capital in 1910.
I hope that the book will encourage historians and readers to think about the myriad ways in which the environment has been conceived and imagined through time as well as the different moments in which it has been contested. I also hope that it will inspire historians to use a more varied range of sources in writing about the environment.
Editor: Judi Pajo
Natural Interests
Caroline Ford Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France Harvard University Press 296 pages, 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches ISBN 9780674045903
Available here →February 22, 2017
20170222-ford-caroline-on-natural-interests-contest-environment-france-3-1
The wide angle
The rest of this thread
Caroline Ford
Caroline Ford is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, having previously taught at the University of British Columbia and Harvard University. She is the author of two other books, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton University Press, 1993) and Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2005). She is currently working on a new book-length project, “The Paris Housing Crisis and the Environmental Revolution in French Architecture.”
Pull this thread
pulls againstpulls alongside
Environmental concern did not arrive late in France, and environmentalism has no single political valence.
Against EA · Japanese colonial nostalgia for Korean folk culture turned it into the emblem of nationality for post-liberation Korea. On: The colonial relation is adequately described as domination and erasure of the colonized
Against CS · Turtles are as endangered as primates, and their apparent invulnerability is exactly what makes them easy to take. On: There is a nature independent of human action that environmental thought can appeal to
Against MO · West Africans controlled the terms of early modern trade on their own coast, including the trade in enslaved people. On: The colonial relation is adequately described as domination and erasure of the colonized
Against BM · De-extinction is a failure to learn what drove species extinct, and it threatens the wildness it claims to save. On: There is a nature independent of human action that environmental thought can appeal to
Alongside BS · African restitution claims began in 1965 and were defeated by European museum directors, so today's debate happened forty years ago. On: The colonial relation is adequately described as domination and erasure of the colonized
Alongside HR · When people talk about animals they disclose their assumptions about each other. On: There is a nature independent of human action that environmental thought can appeal to
Alongside GO · The tropics are an invention of the temperate zone, and the pineapple's circuit falsifies the ranking they carry. On: The colonial relation is adequately described as domination and erasure of the colonized
Alongside JI · Conservation is one of the routes by which capitalist worldviews became environmental, not a defense of nature against capitalism. On: There is a nature independent of human action that environmental thought can appeal to
Know something the rest of us don't?
Most threads on Rorotoko begin with our invitation. Any thread can begin with a proposal: you write it with the same prompts every thread answers, and we review it.
Propose a thread →