Focusing on extreme environments, from Umberto Nobile’s expedition to the Arctic to the commercialization of Mt Everest, this volume examines global environmental margins, how they are conceived and how perceptions have changed. Mountaintops and Arctic environments are the settings of social encounters, political strategies, individual enterprises, geopolitical tensions, decolonial practises, and scientific experiments.
Concentrating on mountaineering and Arctic exploration between 1880 – 1960, contributors to this volume show how environmental marginalisation has been discursively implemented and materially generated by foreign and local actors. It examines to what extent the status and identity of extreme environments has changed during modern times, moving them from periphery to the centre and discarding their marginality. The first section looks at ways in which societies have framed remoteness, through the lens of commercialization, colonialism, knowledge production and sport, while the second examines the reverse transfer, focusing on how extreme nature has influenced societies, through international network creation, political consensus and identity building. This collection enriches the historical understanding of exploration by adopting a critical approach and offering multidimensional and multi-gaze reconstructions.
This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in environmental history, geography, colonial studies and the environmental humanities.
Author(s): Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, Stefano Morosini
Series: Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies
Publisher: Routledge/Earthscan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 222
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A world that is losing its margins
1 Emotions and mountaineering for internationalist purposes: The case of the Union Internationale des Associations d’Alpinisme (UIAA), 1939–1951
2 Power, politics and exploration in fascist Italy: The 1928 watershed
3 Roald Amundsen vs Umberto Nobile: The role of the newspapers in the age of nationalism and polar imperialism
4 Umberto Nobile between two totalitarianisms
5 Imperialist Italian geography currents in the work of Roberto Almagià and his ambiguous relationship with the fascist regime
6 Walter Wood and the legacies of science and alpinism in the St Elias Mountains
7 Physiology and biomedicine on high-altitude expeditions (c. 1880–1980)
8 Italian geographers, scientists, travellers and mountaineers in the Karakoram (1890–1954)
9 Commercialisation and Mount Everest in the twentieth century
10 Geographical exploration via the environmental humanities: Decolonising approaches to space
Appendix: The rediscovery of two files relating to the Karakoram (1928–1929) and North Pole (1928) expeditions conserved at the Municipal Archives in Milan
Index of names and places
