Pulver edits book tracking history of interactions between people and their environments

Simone Pulver co-edited the new book, Foundations of Socio-Environmental Research Legacy Readings with Commentaries, an anthology of foundational readings that showcase the rich history of socio-environmental research from the late 1700s onwards.

News about our interactions with the environment hits us daily, from zoonotic disease pandemics to flood damage due to climate change to deforestation driving species extinctions.  It’s always topical, it always seems new, and in scale it often is. Never before has a pandemic spread this far or this fast. Never before have our actions increased temperatures this much.  However, the interactions between people and their environments are not new; they have long precedents.  

Foundations of Socio-Environmental Research tracks the history of research about socio-environmental interdependence via 53 foundational readings, spanning centuries, continents and disciplines. Intended as a canonical reference volume, the assembled readings, along with critical commentaries from leading experts, showcase key ideas about socio-environmental change. The book’s conclusion then links those ideas to the wide diversity of current approaches to socio-environmental scholarship.  

For research teams, the book can serve as a springboard for advancing collaborative, interdisciplinary projects. As a resource in the classroom, the legacy readings with commentaries provide instructors and students with a landscape view of the past and present of socio-environmental research. 

Learn more about the book at Cambridge University Press.