Wild Things. Nature and the Social Imagination

Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination assembles eleven substantive and original essays on the cultural and social dimensions of environmental history. They address a global cornucopia of social and ecological systems, from Africa to Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and their temporal range extends from the 1830s into the twenty-first century. The imaginative (and actual) construction of landscapes and the appropriation of Nature - through image-fashioning, curating museum and zoo collections, making 'friends', 'enemies' and mythical symbols from animals - are recurring subjects. Among the volume's thought-provoking essays are a group enmeshing nature and the visual culture of photography and film. Canonical environmental history themes, from colonialism to conservation, are re-inflected by discourses including gender studies, Romanticism, politics and technology. The loci of the studies included here represent both the microcosmic - underwater laboratory, zoo, film studio; and broad canvases - the German forest, the Rocky Mountains, the islands of Haiti and Madagascar. Their casts too are richly varied - from Britain's otters and Africa's Nile crocodiles to Hollywood film-makers and South African cattle. The volume represents an excitingly diverse collection of studies of how humans, in imagination and deed, act on and are acted on by 'wild things'.