As uncontrolled development forces crises in the natural world, deeply ingrained human connections with the earth are changing. Oral history's proven ability to explore issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality make it a uniquely effective methodology for bringing in new perspectives to our understanding of environments.
This book brings together interviews with a global range of activists, farmers, water system managers, victims of catastrophe, tribal trustees, wilderness rangers, reindeer herders, and foresters, among others whose life experience gives them special insights into human-environmental interaction and adaption. Commentary by oral historians examines how these stories can be used to better understand our relationship with the natural world. Oral History and the Environment takes what could seem broad and impersonal forces such as climate change and environmentalismLand crystalizes their meaning through personal stories. It overturns narrow historical frameworks bounded artificially by national borders and instead portrays the issues facing our common ecosystems.
Author(s): Stephen M. Sloan, Mark Cave
Series: Oxford Oral History Series
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 317
City: New York
Cover
Oral History and the Environment
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction: Querying Environmental and Human Landscapes
1. Grim Humor and Hope: Australian Oral Histories of Drought
2. A Pelican in Her Piety: Perspectives on Wildlife Rescue in Louisiana Following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
3. Fragmentary Time: Memory and Politics in the Wake of the Torrey Canyon
4. The Ghosts of Bhopal: Oral History, Environmental Justice, and the Literature of Protest
5. Floating Reed Islands: Gendered Stories of Resilience during Ecological Disaster in the Mara Region, Tanzania
6. Fighting through the Fallout: Maternal and Feminist Resistance and the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster
7. More than H2O: Exploring the Biophysical and Social Dimensions of Water
8. Environmental Guardians: Learning from Māori Perspectives on Geothermal Fields
9. When Little Fish Encounter a Big Dam: Environmental Conflict on the Upper Yangtze
10. The Free Play of Natural Forces: Wild Methods of Oral History in Documenting Wilderness
11 Culture Keepers: Voices of Renewal in the Eurasian Taiga
12. Who Speaks for the Trees?: Forestry in the Scottish Highlands
Epilogue: The Fall and Rise of Oral Testimony in Environmental History
References
Seriespage
Index
