Urban Narratives about Nature - (Environment and Society) by Carlos Tabernero & Douglas A Vakoch (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book invokes the relationship between nature and urban contexts as powerful storytellers through a timely contribution to the historical understanding of our mechanisms of production of narratives about nature, therefore breaking new ground for current and future research for locally situated and globally shared environmental concerns.

Book Synopsis

When more than half of the Earth population lives in cities, and living conditions worldwide suffer from a steady increase in environmental issues, historical inquiry provides useful reflections and new perspectives on the present. Urban Narratives about Nature: Socio-Ecological Imaginaries between Science and Entertainment aims at generating specific historical knowledge concerning processes of production, circulation, and management of natural history narratives and the associated struggles for meaning within the socio-ecological relations involved. The city is a powerful storyteller, and this book, upon a relational perspective, provides a diverse and interrelated collection of case studies of urban-based production and circulation of narratives about nature. Altogether, these cases probe the complex relationships among scientific authority, public awareness, policymaking, corporate and political interests, and environmental advocacy, in effect expanding the interdisciplinary linking of urban and environmental history within a global history view.

Review Quotes

""Nature has been narrated as dangerous, backward, salvific, and endangered. Urban Narratives about Nature: Socio-Ecological Imaginaries between Science and Entertainment looks to cities for the mechanisms of production, development, and circulation nodes of some of these narratives. Through carefully chosen and researched cases studies, mostly located in twentieth-century Spain and Great Britain, the chapters in this edited volume compellingly show the transnational networks of media, experts, businesses, and activists that re-imagined non-urban landscapes from cities. From these studies, cities themselves emerge as contested spaces with porous walls traversed, often in unexpected ways, by the very natural entities that urban dwellers sought to tame through their storytelling."" --Lino Camprubí, University of Seville

"This is an eclectic and original collection exploring how the many entanglements between cities, their inhabitants, and the rural and wild worlds helped shape notions of modernity. It will make a valuable addition to the bookshelves of scholars working in urban history, environmental history, history of science, more-than-human studies, and media studies. The geographical emphasis of many contributors makes an important contribution to the growing body of Anglophone literature on science and nature in twentieth-century Spain." --Sarah Hamilton, University of Bergen

About the Author

Carlos Tabernero is associate professor at the Institut d'Història de la Ciència (iHC) of Universtat Autònoma de Barcelona.