Libby Robin Research Articles

The Environment: A History of the Idea. By Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. ix + 244 pages. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $29.95.

<i> The Environment: A History of the Idea. </i> By Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. ix + 244 pages. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $29.95.

"The Environment: A History of the Idea" by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, 2018. [book review

"The Environment: A History of the Idea" by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, 2018. [book review

By the Fox or the Little Eagle: What Remains Not Regional?

By the Fox or the Little Eagle: What Remains Not Regional?

The Environment: A History of the Idea. By Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin

The Environment: A History of the Idea. By Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin

The Environment: A History of the Idea by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin

The Environment: A History of the Idea by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin

Curating the Future: Museums, Communities, and Climate Change (Newell, Robin, and Wehner, eds.)

This work is a book review considering the title Curating the Future: Museums, Communities, and Climate Change edited by Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin, and Kristen Wehner.

The First Four Wells: Unconventional Gas in Australia

The First Four Wells: Unconventional Gas in Australia

Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human-Plant Studies (HPS)

Plants have been—and, for reasons of human sustenance and creative inspiration, will continue to be—centrally important to societies globally. Yet, plants—including herbs, shrubs, and trees—are commonly characterized in Western thought as passive, sessile, and silent automatons lacking a brain, as accessories or backdrops to human affairs. Paradoxically, the qualities considered absent in plants are those employed by biologists to argue for intelligence in animals. Yet an emerging body of research in the sciences and humanities challenges animal-centred biases in determining consciousness, intelligence, volition, and complex communication capacities amongst living beings. In light of recent theoretical developments in our understandings of plants, this article proposes an interdisciplinary framework for researching flora: human-plant studies (HPS). Building upon the conceptual formations of the humanities, social sciences, and plant sciences as advanced by Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose, Libby Robin, and most importantly Matthew Hall and Anthony Trewavas, as well as precedents in the emerging areas of human-animal studies (HAS), I will sketch the conceptual basis for the further consideration and exploration of this interdisciplinary framework.

Ecology and Collaboration

Ecology and Collaboration

Bunnies, Bilbies, and the Ethic of Ecological Remembrance

Bunnies, Bilbies, and the Ethic of Ecological Remembrance

A Hunger Strike - The Ecology of a Protest: The Case of Bahraini Activist Abdulhad al-Khawaja

This article uses the case of a Bahraini activist to explore the twin interrelated ecologies of a hunger strike. The first ecology is the ethical framing of a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction intended to achieve political ends. The second ecology is the operation of global media where international inaction inadvertently foregrounds the political struggles that larger events and discourses surrounding Egypt, Libya and Syria overshadow. What connects these two ecologies is the body of the hunger striker, turned into a spectacle and mediated via a politics of affect that invites a global public to empathize and so enter into his suffering. The connection between the two lies in the emaciated body of the hunger striker in this case, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja

‘I shut my eyes and picture our place’: gardens, farm landscapes and working-class dreams in 1930s–1940s south-eastern Australia

In spring 1937, ‘Peanuts’ wrote to the ‘Women's Bureau’ of the Weekly Times, a rural newspaper in south-eastern Australia: I would love to take you folk who are not fortunate enough to live in the ...

Book Reviews

Abstract Thaddeus Sunseri, Wielding the Ax: State Forestry and Social Conflict in Tanzania, 1820-2000 (John Dargavel) Oliver H. Creighton, Designs upon the Land: Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages (Jonathan Finch) Christopher T. Fisher, J. Brett Hill and Gary M. Feinman, eds., The Archaeology of Environmental Change: Socionatural Legacies of Degradation and Resilience (Richard Hunter) Libby Robin, Robert Heinsohn and Leo Joseph, eds., Boom and Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry Country (Robert Lambert) Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877-1947 (Laxman D. Satya)

Climate and Culture

Climate and Culture

Book Reviews

Abstract Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (MUCHAPARARA MUSEMWA) Neena Ambre Rao, Forest Ecology in India: Colonial Maharashtra, 1850-1950 (LAXMAN D. SATYA) Paige West, Conservation is our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea (LIBBY ROBIN) John Elder, Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa. From Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh (ROSS BALZARETTI) Gregory S. Aldrete, Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome (SUSANNE DOBROVOLNY)

How a Continent Created a Nation. By Libby Robin. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007. viii + 259 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $39.95

This book is too short. While Libby Robin has identified a fascinating topic, here she has only begun to explore it. How a Continent Created a Nation was written to explore the connections between the particular and unique environment of Australia and the development of modern Australian society. Because of her expertise in the history of Australian science, Robin has entered this topic by looking at the way scientists have engaged with the Australian continent and the way in which broader Australian society has in turn been shaped by its scientific understanding. The larger ambition of the book is indicated by its title; the book is the beginning of a discussion about the ways in which Australian nature has affected and continues to affect the type of society Australians have built.

Tsuneo Yoshikuni, African Urban Experiences in Colonial Zimbabwe: A Social History of Harare before 1925; Firozi Manji and Stephen Marks (eds.), African Perspectives on China in Africa; Allison Drew, Between Empire and the Revolution: A Life of Sidney Bunting, 1873-1936; South African Democracy Education Trust, The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 2; Ivor Chipkin, Do South Africans Exist?:

Tsuneo Yoshikuni, African Urban Experiences in Colonial Zimbabwe: A Social History of Harare before 1925; Firozi Manji and Stephen Marks (eds.), African Perspectives on China in Africa; Allison Drew, Between Empire and the Revolution: A Life of Sidney Bunting, 1873-1936; South African Democracy Education Trust, The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 2; Ivor Chipkin, Do South Africans Exist?:

Understanding the Environment: Bridging the Disciplinary Divides. Edited by R Quentin Grafton, , Libby Robin, and , Robert J Wasson. Published by University of New South Wales Press, Sydney (Australia), in association with Centre for Applied Economic Research, Sydney (Australia); distributed by University of Washington Press, Seattle (Washington). $40.00 (paper). xviii + 229 p; ill.; index. ISBN: 0‐86840‐912‐X. 2005.

<i>Understanding the Environment: Bridging the Disciplinary Divides</i>. <i>Edited by </i>R Quentin Grafton<i>, </i>, Libby Robin<i>, and </i>, Robert J Wasson. <i>Published by University of New South Wales Press, Sydney (Australia), in association with Centre for Applied Economic Research, Sydney (Australia); distributed by University of Washington Press, Seattle (Washington)</i>. $40.00 (paper). xviii + 229 p; ill.; index. ISBN: 0‐86840‐912‐X. 2005.

Whole Knowledge

Whole Knowledge

A change in the weather: climate and culture in Australia By Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin

A change in the weather: climate and culture in Australia By Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin