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Contemporary anxieties about climate change have fueled a growing interest in how landscapes are formed and transformed across spans of time, from decades to millennia. While the discipline of geography has had much to say about how such environmental transformations occur, few studies have focused on the lives of geographers themselves, their ideologies, and how they understand their field. This edited collection illuminates the social and biographical contexts of geographers in postwar Britain who were influenced by and studied under the pioneering geomorphologist, A. T. Grove. These contributors uncover the relationships and networks that shaped their research on diverse terrains from Africa to the Mediterranean, highlighting their shared concerns which have profound implications not only for the study of geography and geomorphology, but also for questions of environmental history, ecological conservation, and human security.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Reminiscences.- 3. A half century of developments in desert geomorphology and the place of A.T. Grove.- 4. From the highlands to the lowlands and back again: Reconstructing past environmental changes in south-central and southern Africa.- 5. Quaternary dune systems in space and time.- 6. The changing human environments of eastern Saudi Arabia.- 7. Migrant birds and the threatened Sahel: Geographies of land use and degradation.- 8. Mediterranean forests, woods and shrublands.- 9. From Saharan palaeoclimates to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
About the author
Max Martin is Research Associate in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, UK.
Vinita Damodaran is Professor of South Asian History at the University of Sussex, UK.
Rohan D’Souza is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies at Kyoto University, Japan.
Summary
Contemporary anxieties about climate change have fueled a growing interest in how landscapes are formed and transformed across spans of time, from decades to millennia. While the discipline of geography has had much to say about how such environmental transformations occur, few studies have focused on the lives of geographers themselves, their ideologies, and how they understand their field. This edited collection illuminates the social and biographical contexts of geographers in postwar Britain who were influenced by and studied under the pioneering geomorphologist, A. T. Grove. These contributors uncover the relationships and networks that shaped their research on diverse terrains from Africa to the Mediterranean, highlighting their shared concerns which have profound implications not only for the study of geography and geomorphology, but also for questions of environmental history, ecological conservation, and human security.
