New book on environmental crises in Central Asia released

Environmental Crises in Central Asia: From Steppes to Seas, from Deserts to Glaciers has just been published by Routledge as part of its Studies in Environmental Communication and Media series.

The editors are Professor Eric Freedman, the Knight Chair in Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University, U.S., and Professor Mark Neuzil of the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, U.S.

The multidisciplinary book explores an array of environmental challenges in a strategically crucial part of the globe, including the impact of climate change on glacial melt, desertification, deforestation, destruction of biodiversity, hazardous wastes, water quality and supply, energy exploration, air and pesticide pollution, and environmental diseases.

Those challenges cross national borders and may affect economic, political and cultural relationships on a vast geographic scale at a time when the region’s governments are burdened by limited economic resources, weak civil society institutions and political authoritarianism.

The book emphasizes the reality that environmental conditions don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re influenced by science, politics, history, public policy, culture, economics, public attitudes and competing priorities, as well as past human decisions. In the case of Central Asia, such Soviet-era decisions include irrigation systems and physical infrastructure that are now crumbling, mine tailings that leach pollutants into soil and groundwater, and abandoned factories that are physically decrepit and contaminated with toxic chemicals.

Thus it draws on research in the social sciences, natural sciences, media studies and health by scholars and practitioners in Central Asia, Europe and the United States.

New Book by Jonathan Oldfield and Denis Shaw

The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment

Jonathan D Oldfield and Denis J B Shaw

Routledge, London, 2016.

Jon Oldfield and Denis Shaw have published their book, The Development of Russian Environmental Thought, the product of several years of collaborative research, a number of UKRC research grants and other funding sources, and of many research visits to Russian libraries and archives and to many other repositories. According to the publisher’s blurb:

‘This book provides a comprehensive overview of the very rich thinking about environmental issues which have 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 emphasized 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.’

More information at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/books/details/9780415580595/