Carl Zimring recently wrote with news of a website that may be of interest to Envirotech readers. Roosevelt University recently launched a blog for our Sustainability Studies program that combines discussion of current events (mostly in Illinois) with historical perspectives on systems to manager water, food, waste, and energy. The link is: http://rusustain.wordpress.com/

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Timothy LeCain’s new envirotech book, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (Rutgers University Press, 2009), has been chosen as an “Outstanding Academic Title for 2009″ by Choice, the review journal of the American Library Association. Every year in the January issue, in print and online, Choice publishes [...]

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Tim LeCain’s book is out on Rutgers University Press!

MASS DESTRUCTION:
The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (Rutgers University Press, 2009)

Timothy J. LeCain

Mass Destruction is the fascinating story of Daniel Jackling, a Utah mining engineer who created the gigantic Bingham open-pit copper mine near Salt Lake City. One of [...]

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The University Press of Mississippi will release Craig Colten’s new book, Perilous Place, Powerful Storms:  Hurricane Protection in Coastal Louisiana in July 2009.
The hurricane protection systems that failed New Orleans when Katrina roared on shore in 2005 were the product of four decades of engineering hubris, excruciating delays, and social conflict. In Perilous Place, Powerful [...]

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Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America
Ann Norton Greene
Harvard University Press, 2008
Historians have long assumed that new industrial machines and power sources eliminated work animals from nineteenth-century America, yet a bird’s-eye view of nineteenth-century society would show millions of horses supplying the energy necessary for industrial development. Horses were ubiquitous in cities and on [...]

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James Williams sent us a note to say that he has retired from teaching at De Anza College in California, but that he is still writing and will continue to be involved with Envirotech. His web site continues to be hosted by De Anza College at http://www.deanza.edu/faculty/williams.

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The Society for the History of Technology honored long-time envirotechie Joel Tarr with the Leonardo da Vinci Medal during the Lisbon Annual Meeting in October 2008. The Leonardo da Vinci Medal is the highest recognition from SHOT and is awarded to individuals for their “outstanding contribution to the history of technology, through research, teaching, publications, [...]

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A new book from envirotechie Jeffrey K. Stine: America’s Forested Wetlands: From Wasteland to Valued Resource
From the darkest, most forbidding swamp to the smallest soggy bog at the side of a housing development, wetlands provide invaluable ecological services to life on earth. Yet, prior to the 1930s, few people worried about the mounting loss of [...]

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Finn Arne Jørgensen successfully defended his PhD dissertation “The infrastructure of everyday environmentalism: Tomra and the reverse vending machine, 1970-2000″ Friday November 23, 2007. The dissertation examines the parallel technical development of reverse vending machines for the return of empty beverage containers and the cultural context of beverage container recycling.
For more information, see http://finnarne.jorgensenweb.net/

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I remain a professor at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University.  Every fall my wife Deborah, a geographer at the College of Staten Island/City University of New York, and I teach a course on land-use planning at the Environmental Studies Program at Princeton University.  We were in South Dakota in June [...]

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