On the behalf of the prize committee:

Timothy LeCain
Erik Rau
Heike Weber

Finn Arne Jørgensen‘s book Making A Green Machine: The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling is out!

Consider an empty bottle or can, one of the hundreds of billions of beverage containers that are discarded worldwide every year. Empty containers have been at the center of intense political controversies, technological innovation processes, and the modern environmental movement. Making a Green Machine examines the development of the Scandinavian beverage container deposit-refund system, which has the highest return rates in the world, from 1970 to present. Finn Arne Jørgensen investigates the challenges the system faced when exported internationally and explores the critical role of technological infrastructures and consumer convenience in modern recycling. His comparative framework charts the complex network of business and political actors involved in the development of the reverse vending machine (RVM) and bottle deposit legislation to better understand the different historical trajectories empty beverage containers have taken across markets, including the U.S. The RVM has served as more than a hole in the wall–it began simply as a tool for grocers who had to handle empty refillable glass bottles, but has become a green machine to redeem the empty beverage container, helping both business and consumers participate in environmental actions.

Visit the book’s page at Rutgers University Press:
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/making_a_green_machine.html

More information from Routledge: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415803984/.

The American Urban Reader

Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth
We tend to see history and evolution springing from separate roots, one grounded in the human world and the other in the natural world. Human beings have, however, become probably the most powerful species shaping evolution today, and human-caused evolution in other species has probably been the most important force shaping human history. This book introduces readers to evolutionary history, a new field that unites history and biology to create a fuller understanding of the past than either can produce on its own. Evolutionary history can stimulate surprising new hypotheses for any field of history and evolutionary biology. How many art historians would have guessed that sculpture encouraged the evolution of tuskless elephants? How many biologists would have predicted that human poverty would accelerate animal evolution? How many military historians would have suspected that plant evolution would convert a counter-insurgency strategy into a rebel subsidy? With examples from around the globe, this book will help readers see the broadest patterns of history and the details of their own life in a new light.

More information on the book from Cambridge University Press: http://www.cambridge.org/aus/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521745093&ss=cop

Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History

Envirotechie Sara Pritchard’s book on the Rhône is out!

Because of its location, volume, speed, and propensity for severe flooding, the Rhône, France’s most powerful river, has long influenced the economy, politics, and transportation networks of Europe. Humans have tried to control the Rhône for over two thousand years, but large-scale development did not occur until the twentieth century. The Rhône valley has undergone especially dramatic changes since World War II. Hydroelectric plants, nuclear reactors, and industrialized agriculture radically altered the river, as they simultaneously fueled both the physical and symbolic reconstruction of France.

In Confluence, Sara B. Pritchard traces the Rhône’s remaking since 1945. She interweaves this story with an analysis of how state officials, technical elites, and citizens connected the environment and technology to political identities and state-building. In the process, Pritchard illuminates the relationship between nature and nation in France.

Pritchard’s innovative integration of science and technology studies, environmental history, and the political history of modern France makes a powerful case for envirotechnical analysis: an approach that highlights the material and rhetorical links between ecological and technological systems. Her groundbreaking book demonstrates the importance of environmental management and technological development to culture and politics in the twentieth century. As Pritchard shows, reconstructing the Rhône remade France itself.

Visit the book’s page at Harvard University Press:  http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=31134

The Illusory Boundary

The Illusory Boundary
Environment and Technology in History

Edited by Martin Reuss and Stephen H. Cutcliffe

The view of nature and technology inhabiting totally different, even opposite, spheres persists across time and cultures. Most people would consider an English countryside or a Louisiana bayou to be “natural,” though each is to an extent the product of technology. Pollution, widely thought to be a purely man-made phenomenon, results partly from natural processes. All around us, things from the natural world are brought into the human world. At what point do we consider them part of culture rather than nature? And does such a distinction illuminate our world or obscure its workings?

This compelling new book challenges the view that a clear and unwavering boundary exists between nature and technology. Rejecting this dichotomy, the contributors show how the history of each can be united in a constantly shifting panorama where definitions of “nature” and “technology” alter and overlap.

In addition to recognizing the artificial divide between these two concepts, the essays in this book demonstrate how such thinking may affect societies’ ability to survive and prosper. The answers and ideas are as numerous as the landscapes they consider, for there is no single path toward a more harmonious vision of technology and nature. Technologies that work in one place may not in another. Nature that is preserved in one community might become the raw material of technological progress somewhere else. Add to this the fact that the natural world and technology are not passive players, but are profoundly involved in cultural construction. Understanding such dynamics not only reveals a new historical complexity; it prepares us for coping with many of the most difficult and pressing social issues facing us today.

Contributors
Peter Coates * Craig E. Colten * Stephen H. Cutcliffe * Hugh S. Gorman * Betsy Mendelsohn * Joy Parr * Peter C. Perdue * Sara B. Pritchard * Martin Reuss * William D. Rowley * Edmund Russell * Joel A. Tarr * Ann Vileisis * James C. Williams * Thomas Zeller

You can order the book here: http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/reuss.html

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 the largest human-made artifacts on the planet, the Bingham Pit entailed literally “moving a mountain,” replacing it with a yawning chasm that is now three-quarters of a mile deep and two and a half miles wide (below).

Bingham Pit

Jackling blasted out more than five billion tons of low-grade ore with a new system of “mass destruction” mining that gave Americans the cheap and abundant copper needed to electrify the nation. Jackling’s open-pit mass destruction mining technology soon replaced constricted and deadly underground mines like those in Butte, Montana, that probed nearly a mile beneath the earth. Mass Destruction tells the story of the deep Butte mines as well, where miners survived only with the aid of advanced life-support technologies. When these machines failed them, as in the disastrous 1917 Speculator Fire, scores could perish.

Berkeley Pit Flooded

Jackling’s immense pit and scores of imitators became the ultimate symbol of the modern faith that science and technology could overcome all natural limits. What emerged was a new culture of mass destruction that promised nearly infinite supplies not only of copper, but also of coal, timber, fish, and other natural resources. Mass destruction technology was thus the foundation of mass consumption and the celebrated modern “American Way of Life.” Yet, the costs were paid in immense dead zones of environmental and human devastation. Back in Butte, underground mining gave way to the Berkeley Pit. Abandoned in 1982, the pit is now flooded with acidic water impregnated with a toxic brew of poisonous heavy metals (above). Part of the largest Superfund site in the nation, the Berkeley Pit is a haunting reminder of the consequences of the still-growing American and global appetite for copper and other essential natural resources.

Mass Destruction offers a compelling look at a critical but largely overlooked chapter in the creation of the modern technological world. Mass destruction technology was environmentally devastating, yet it also wired America and much of the world. Where future supplies of copper to do the same for the billions of new consumers in India, Brazil, and China will come from remains a troubling question.

Advance praise for Mass Destruction:

“The colossal open-pit mines of the past century have left behind some of the largest artifacts on the face of the earth. Timothy LeCain’s engaging history of this mega-industrial enterprise is remarkable for its insight, clarity, and wisdom. Readers interested in the contours of our technological and environmental past—and the inextricable connections between the natural and artificial—will find Mass Destruction a treasure trove of reasoning and enlightenment.”

—Jeffrey K. Stine, Smithsonian Institution, author of America’s Forested Wetlands:

“This is an eloquent and searing portrait of the environmental cost of the coins in our pockets and wires in our walls. As Timothy LeCain argues in this hard-hitting book, the quest for efficiency that gave us mass production and mass consumption also brought us mass destruction of the environment.”

— Edmund Russell, University of Virginia, author of War and Nature

For more information, visit Rutgers University Press or buy the book on Amazon.