ASIAN 2208 Introduction to Southeast Asia: Environment

This is the best book to start with on this topic. From Angkor Wat to Agent Orange, [this book] tells the story of some of the most dramatic effects humans have had on the natural and developed environment anywhere in the world and examines the ways in which environmental factors have helped shape the culture, politics, and societies of the region. From the importance of its spices to 17th-century Europeans to the jungle canopies that sheltered Communist insurgents throughout much of the 20th century, the region's environment has often proven decisive in human affairs.

Volume 7 of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability, provides unprecedented analyses by regional experts and scholars elsewhere in the world on China, India, East and Southeast Asia. Despite growing demands internally on their natural resources (China and India alone are home to more than one-third of the world's population), the expanding global economic influence of this region makes these countries vital players in a sustainable future for all citizens of the Earth.

Discussing diverse aspects of the environmental history of South and Southeast Asia, from a variety of perspectives, it brings together leading experts from the fields of history, history of science, archaeology, geography and environmental studies, and covers a time span from 50,000 BC to thepresent. Spanning a geographical region from Peshawar on the North-West Frontier to the Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia, this book tells the story of the highly complex relationship between people and their environment.

In case studies ranging from coffee and hardwood products to mushroom pickers and Vietnamese factory workers, the authors detail the Southeast Asian articulations of these processes while also discussing the broader implications of these shifts. Taken together, the cases show how commodities illuminate the convergence of changing social forces in Southeast Asia today, as they transform the terms, practices, and experiences of everyday life and politics in the global economy.

...." to identify real repeating patterns in Southeast Asia's past: clientelistic political structures, periodic tectonic and climatic disasters, ethnic occupational specializations, long cycles of economic globalization and deglobalization. Their contributions range across many centuries: from the Austronesian expansion to the Aceh tsunami, and from the Sanskrit cosmopolis to the Asian financial crisis"