Based on detailed archival research and site visits, Scarred Landscapes is the first environmental history of Vichy France. From mountains and marshlands to foresters and resisters, it examines the intricate and often surprising connections between war, history, and the 'natural' environment during these turbulent years.

The first environmental history of Vichy France, examining the intricate and often surprising connections between war, history, and the natural environment during these turbulent years.

The black smoke billowing from burning oil wells during the Gulf War of 1990-91 directed media and public attention towards war's devastating environmental impact. Yet even before the first bomb is dropped, preparation for warfare materially and imaginatively reshapes rural landscapes and environments. This volume is the first to explore the comparative histories and geographies of militarized landscapes. Moving beyond the narrow definition of militarized landscapes as theatres of war, it treats them as simultaneously material and cultural sites that have been partially or fully mobilized to achieve military aims. Ranging from the Korean DMZ to nuclear testing sites in the American West, and from Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain, Militarized Landscapes focuses on these often secretive, hidden, dangerous and invariably controversial sites that occupy huge swathes of national territories.

Post-industrial landscape scars are traces of 20th century utopian visions of society; they relate to fear and resistance expressed by popular movements and to relations between industrial workers and those in power. The metaphor of the scar pinpoints the inherent ambiguity of memory work by signifying both positive and negative experiences, as well as the contemporary challenges of living with these physical and mental marks. In this book, Anna Storm explores post-industrial landscape scars caused by nuclear power production, mining, and iron and steel industry in Malmberget, Kiruna, Barsebäck and Avesta in Sweden; Ignalina and Visaginas/Snie?kus in Lithuania/former Soviet Union; and Duisburg in the Ruhr district of Germany. The scars are shaped by time and geographical scale; they carry the vestiges of life and work, of community spirit and hope, of betrayed dreams and repressive hierarchical structures. What is critical, Storm concludes, is the search for a legitimate politics of memory. The meanings of the scars must be acknowledged. Past and present experiences must be shared in order shape new understandings of old places.

Landscape in American Guides and View Books: Visual History of Touring and Travel is vested in the American relationship to landscape and the role guidebooks and view books played in touring and travel experiences, including immigration. Early in the history of the republic, the relationship to landscape turns visual, that is, landscapes inspire artistic responses in the form of written descriptions and visual representations. The predominant element is the scene. From the 1820s on scenic thinking, within an emerging industrial economy, characterizes a major cultural and social development. As immigration increases, within the country and from abroad, publishers and trade groups create souvenir guidebooks and view books to facilitate the movement of people, and to encourage economic expansion and tourism. Guide and view book analysis centers on pictures of landscape transformations and includes the cultural basis of scenes changing from pastoral and picturesque expressions to the documentation of managed views. The general acceptance of managed views as replacements for romantic ones illustrates a commitment to landscapes that denote utility and the influence of commercial and industrial urban centers on American life. Guidebook and view book imagery, composed of durable schemas, promotes visual thinking across social classes and time. The primary medium for souvenirs is the photograph, which printing methods, like photolithography, transform into printed products. The visual history of touring and travel is part of America's first visual culture, as well as the social formation of landscape, the emergence of a collective vision among souvenir producers and consumers, and the role visual information plays in landscape commentary, which is the literary context for printed souvenirs.

The global economy threatens the uniqueness of places, people, and experiences. In Here and There, Bill Conlogue tests the assumption that literature and local places matter less and less in a world that economists describe as “flat,” politicians believe has “globalized,” and social scientists imagine as a “global village.” Each chapter begins at home, journeys elsewhere, and returns to the author’s native and chosen region, northeastern Pennsylvania. Through the prisms of literature and history, the book explores tensions and conflicts within the region created by national and global demand for its resources: fertile farmland, forest products, anthracite coal, and college-educated young people. Making connections between local and global environmental issues, Here and There uses the Pennsylvania watersheds of urban Lackawanna and rural Lackawaxen to highlight the importance of understanding and protecting the places we call home.

Mobilizing nature traces the environmental history of war and militarisation in France, from the creation of Châlons Camp in 1857 to military environmentalist policies in the twentieth century. It offers a fresh perspective on the well-known histories of the Franco-Prussian War, Western Front (1914-18), Second World War, Cold War and the anti-base campaign at Larzac, whilst uncovering the largely 'hidden' history of the numerous military bases and other installations that pepper the French countryside. Mobilising nature argues that the history of war and militarisation can only be fully understood if human and environmental histories are considered in tandem. Preparing for and conducting wars were only made possible through the active manipulation and mobilisation of topographies, climatic conditions, vegetation and animals. But the military has not monopolised the mobilisation of nature. Protesters against militarisation have consistently drawn on images of peaceful and productive civilian environments as the preferable alternative to destructive tanks and bombs. Written in an accessible style, Mobilizing nature will appeal to readers interested in modern France, environmental history, military geographies and histories, anti-military protests, and environmentalism.

Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place argues that photography is a prevalent practice of making American places. Its collected essays epitomize not only how pictures situate us in a specific place, but also how they create a sense of such mutable place-worlds. Understanding photographs as prime sites of knowledge production and advocates of socio-political transformations, a transnational set of scholars reveals how images enact both our perception and conception of American environments. They investigate the power photography yields in shaping our ideas of self, nation, and empire, of private and public space, through urban, landscape, wasteland and portrait photography. The volume radically reconfigures how pictures alter the development of American places in the past, present, and future.

In Landscapes Between Then and Now, Nicola Brandt examines the increasingly compelling and diverse cross-disciplinary work of photographers and artists made during the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid and into the contemporary era. By examining specific artworks made in South Africa, Namibia and Angola, Brandt sheds light on established and emerging themes related to aftermath landscapes, embodied histories, (un)belonging, spirituality and memorialization. She shows how landscape and identity are mutually constituted, and profiles this process against the background of the legacy of the acutely racially divisive policies of the apartheid regime that are still reflected on the land. As a signpost throughout the book, Brandt draws on the work of the renowned South African photographer Santu Mofokeng and his critical thinking about landscape. Landscapes Between Then and Now explores how practitioners who engage with identity and their physical environment as a social product might reveal something about the complex and fractured nature of postcolonial and contemporary societies. Through diverse strategies and aesthetics, they comment on inherent structures and epistemologies of power whilst also expressing new and radical forms of self-determinism. Brandt asks why these cross-disciplinary works ranging from social documentary to experimental performance and embodied practices are critical now, and what important possibilities for social and political reflection and engagement they suggest.

Hong Kong’s border with Shenzhen is dissolving. By 2047, the border will likely not exist. Integration with the Mainland will remove distinctions created by the "One Country Two Systems" policy. The uncertainty surrounding what will happen has created anxiety relating to law, identity, freedom of speech, and voting rights. Caught in this debate is the Frontier Closed Area, a 1951 undeveloped buffer zone of estuaries, fish farms, forests, villages and military posts. In contrast, Shenzhen, has exploded into a metropolis of 15 million plus. The book explores this unique border ecology. Design strategies inserted within this ecology promote alternate forms of development. The example widens the discourse on borders to raise critical issues that impact the contemporary city.