This essay analyzes the use of fire on Upland Island Wilderness Area (UIW) to examine how postindustrial wilderness sites rework operative notions nature, wildness, and preservation within U.S. environmental thinking politics. Postindustrial areas complicate conceptualizations nature as pristine, unspoiled, or even beautiful, challenging us address biodiversity ecosystem function in ways that a...

The modern world is the product of two momentous changes: the Industrial Revolution of 1800, which brought sustained efficiency advances in economies, and the Demographic Transition of 1900, which channeled those efficiency advances mainly into increased income per capita, instead of increases in population. How these revolutions were connected has been a persistent unsolved puzzle in the histo...

In an analysis of the French episode of heat wave in 2003, this article highlights how heat wave dangers result from the intricate association of natural and social factors. Unusually high temperatures, as well as socioeconomic vulnerability, along with social attenuation of hazards, in a general context where the anthropogenic contribution to climate change is becoming more plausible, led to a...

If the most defining characteristic of the postindustrial age is the emergence of societies “organized around knowledge for the purpose of social control and the directing of innovation and change,”1 it should not be surprising to find technology—understood as the material instantiation of knowledge, methods, resources, and innovation—identified as the first and most important building block fo...

In the 1980s and 1990s, most advanced industrialized countries experienced substantial increases in inequality, as measured by labor market earnings, total family income, and wealth (see Blau and Kahn 2002; Freeman and Katz 1995). In some countries, such as the United States, absolute levels of labor market inequality are now as high as they were prior to World War II (see Katz and Autor 1999)....