The Plough That Broke The Steppes

Download or read book The Plough that Broke the Steppes written by David Moon and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first environmental history of Russia's steppes. From the early-eighteenth century, settlers moved to the semi-arid but fertile grasslands from wetter, forested regions in central and northern Russia and Ukraine, and from central Europe. By the late-nineteenth century, they had turned the steppes into the bread basket of the Russian Empire and parts of Europe. But there was another side to this story. The steppe region was hit by recurring droughts, winds from the east whipped up dust storms, the fertile black earth suffered severe erosion, crops failed, and in the worst years there was famine. David Moon analyses how naturalists and scientists came to understand the steppe environment, including the origins of the fertile black earth. He also analyses how scientists tried to understand environmental change, including climate change. Farmers, and the scientists who advised them, tried different ways to deal with the recurring droughts: planting trees, irrigation, and cultivating the soil in ways that helped retain scarce moisture. More sustainable, however, were techniques of cultivation to retain scarce moisture in the soil. Among the pioneers were Mennonite settlers. Such approaches aimed to work with the environment, rather than trying to change it by planting trees or supplying more water artificially. The story is similar to the Dust Bowl on the Great Plains of the USA, which share a similar environment and environmental history. David Moon places the environmental story of the steppes in the wider context of the environmental history of European colonialism around the globe.

Download or read book The Plough that Broke the Steppes written by David Moon and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first environmental history of Russia's steppes. David Moon focuses on the settlement of migrants from central Russia, Ukraine, and central Europe, and analyses how naturalists and scientists came to understand the steppe environment, including the origins of the fertile black earth.

Download or read book The Nature of Soviet Power written by Andy Bruno and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth exploration of five industries in the Kola Peninsula examines Soviet power and its interaction with the natural world.

Download or read book The Hungry Steppe written by Sarah Cameron and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.

Download or read book Empire of Extinction written by Ryan Tucker Jones and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire of Extinction examines the environmental catastrophe resulting from Russia's expansion into the North Pacific, causing Russians and other Europeans to recognize the threat of species extinction for the first time. This book demonstrates the importance of the North Pacific both for the Russian empire and for global environmental history.

Download or read book Desert Edens written by Philipp Lehmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-12-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How technological advances and colonial fears inspired utopian geoengineering projects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries From the 1870s to the mid-twentieth century, European explorers, climatologists, colonial officials, and planners were avidly interested in large-scale projects that might actively alter the climate. Uncovering this history, Desert Edens looks at how arid environments and an increasing anxiety about climate in the colonial world shaped this upsurge in ideas about climate engineering. From notions about the transformation of deserts into forests to Nazi plans to influence the climates of war-torn areas, Philipp Lehmann puts the early climate change debate in its environmental, intellectual, and political context, and considers the ways this legacy reverberates in the present climate crisis. Lehmann examines some of the most ambitious climate-engineering projects to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with the Sahara in the 1870s, the French developed concepts for a flooding project that would lead to the creation of a man-made Sahara Sea. In the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel proposed damming the Mediterranean in order to geoengineer an Afro-European continent called “Atlantropa,” which would fit the needs of European settlers. Nazi designs were formulated to counteract the desertification of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Despite ideological and technical differences, these projects all incorporated and developed climate change theories and vocabulary. They also combined expressions of an extreme environmental pessimism with a powerful technological optimism that continue to shape the contemporary moment. Focusing on the intellectual roots, intended effects, and impact of early measures to modify the climate, Desert Edens investigates how the technological imagination can be inspired by pressing fears about the environment and civilization.

Download or read book The Development of Russian Environmental Thought written by Jonathan Oldfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive overview of the very rich thinking about environmental issues which has grown up in Russia since the nineteenth century, a body of knowledge and thought which is not well known to Western scholars and environmentalists. It shows how in the late nineteenth century there emerged in Russia distinct and strongly articulated representations of the earth’s physical systems within many branches of the natural sciences, representations which typically emphasised the completely integrated nature of natural systems. It stresses the importance in these developments of V V Dokuchaev who significantly advanced the field of soil science. It goes on to discuss how this distinctly Russian approach to the environment developed further through the work of geographers and other environmental scientists down to the late Soviet period.