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from the editor
THE ESSAYS in this issue are diverse, both in terms of the topics and in terms of the geographic regions they examine.
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William Rollins's "Reflections on a Spare Tire: SUVs and Postmodern Environmental Consciousness" uses advertising as a starting point for examining the popularity of sports utility vehicles in the United States and other industrial nations. The SUV, he argues, reveals a quintessentially postmodern paradox: On the one hand, it promises freedom from the tyranny of asphalt and an unprecedented access to the inner recesses of the natural world; but on the other hand, it is a gas-guzzling beast that has rightfully become one of the most visible icons of the global warming problem. |
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Theodore Binnema and Melanie Niemi's "'Let the Line Be Drawn Now': Wilderness, Conservation, and the Exclusion of Aboriginal People from Banff National Park in Canada" takes a fresh look at the "wilderness debate" by showing that sportsmen were the driving force behind the exclusion of aboriginal peoples from Canadian national parks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and suggesting that similar motives may have guided exclusionist policies in the United States as well. |
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Those who have read one or more of the books in the Rivers of America series will especially enjoy reading Nicolaas Mink's "A Narrative for Nature's Nation: Constance Lindsay Skinner and the Making of Rivers of America." Mink not only examines in detail Skinner's editorial role in the selection of authors, rivers, and themes, but he also links the series to the "regionalist" perspective of Frederick Jackson Turner. |
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Chris Pearson's "'The Age of Wood': Fuel and Fighting in French Forests, 1940–1944" focuses on the important but still largely underappreciated relationship between war and the environment. He points out that the forests of southern France were arenas of productivity and contestation throughout the war, serving first as a fuel source for the Vichy government, then as an occupation site for German and Italian troops, and ultimately as a liberation site for the French resistance. |
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Jane Carruthers, author of "Tracking in Game Trails: Looking Afresh at the Politics of Environmental History in South Africa," needs no introduction: She has long been one of the world's most acclaimed historians of southern Africa. In this historiographic overview, she traces the roots of contemporary environmental history writing in South Africa back to a wide variety of local and international events; these include, most importantly, the radical social activism of the 1970s, the liberating effect of the immediate post-apartheid era, and the globalization of environmental issues.
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| THIS IS A GOOD TIME to remind potential contributors that historiographic essays offer insights into fields and subfields that typically cannot be gleaned from traditional monographs and book reviews. I urge you to consider writing an essay about your area of specialty. |
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MARK CIOC
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