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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2009
Normally we do not think of living organisms as machines or as relays in complex, tightly coupled technological systems. Nonetheless, in recent years this is precisely the manner in which many environmental historians have come to approach the study of certain organisms and their natural or anthropogenic environments. Over the millennia and across the globe, humans have so manipulated certain organisms that they have come to exist solely as parts of technological systems or industrialized chains of production and consumption. Technological artifacts are, of course, only nature refashioned: nonetheless, modern industrialized societies tend to view themselves as gradually distancing themselves from, replacing, or, in some instances, even killing nature with their advanced technologies and gadgetries, when actually they are only refashioning their inseparable relationship to it.
1. This subfield of environmental history is often called “envirotech.” As the name suggests, it bridges scholarship in the history of technology and environmental history. See LeCain, Timothy, “What Is Envirotech? Some Emergent Properties of a New Historical Subfield,” The Envirotech Newsletter 5 (2005): 1, 4–5.Google Scholar
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