Volume Four of Environment In History: International Perspectives Series Published

The RCC is pleased to announce the publication of Patrick Kupper’s Creating Wilderness, the fourth volume of our Environment in History: International Perspectives series. The history of the Swiss National Park, from its creation in the years before the Great War to the present, is told for the first time in this book. Unlike Yellowstone Park, which embodied close cooperation between state-supported conservation and public recreation, the Swiss park put in place an extraordinarily strong conservation program derived from a close alliance between the state and scientific research. This deliberate reinterpretation of the American idea of the national park was innovative and radical, but its consequences were not limited to Switzerland. The Swiss park became the prime example of a “scientific national park,” thereby influencing the course of national parks worldwide.

Creating Wilderness won the Turku Book Award 2013. It was translated from the German version by Giselle Weiss. 

This English-language series of monographs and anthologies showcases high quality research in environmental history and related disciplines from around the world. As such, it investigates the relationship between human society and the natural world from historical, cultural, and political perspectives, and it strives to bridge both national and disciplinary divides, with a particular emphasis on European, transnational, and comparative research.

Volume 1: Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective. Edited by Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper.

Volume 2: Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World. Edited by Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas.

Volume 3: Managing the Unknown: Essays on Environmental Ignorance. Edited by Frank Uekötter and Uwe Lübken.

The series is published with Berghahn Books (New York and Oxford) and peer reviewed by scholars affiliated with the RCC and the European Society of Environmental History (ESEH).