Michael Lewis

Salisbury University · Department of Environmnental Studies

The snow leopard is a highly charismatic megafauna that elicits admiration, concern and donations from individuals and NGOs in the West. In its home territories, however, it is a threat to local communities' livestock and a potential source of income for its pelt and parts. Conservation and study are further challenged by its range; snow leopards t...

This chapter examines the role of science in environmental history. Environmental historians use science as a tool for revealing the material past. At the same time, however, they study science as a set of culturally mediated ideas about the non-human world. The chapter also discusses three different calls for “new directions” in environmental hist...

In this article I describe and discuss my attempt to design an entire course around a shared class project of conducting applied local environmental history research leading to an online book. Although I am an environmental historian, this course draws heavily on urban history as well. I start with the concrete details of my current course design,...

The implementation of Project Tiger in India, 1973–1974, was justly hailed as a triumph of international environmental advocacy. It occurred as a growing number of conservation-oriented biologists were beginning to argue forcefully for scientifically managed conservation of species and ecosystems – the same scientists who would, by the mid-1980s, c...

Students can use environmental history to analyze settlement, agriculture, urbanization, and resource use (to name a few strands of our discipline) literally anywhere - we have no excuse other than time and our lack of knowledge for not incorporating local history into our environmental history courses. Add to this the general truism that learning...

"For generations of ecologists and park managers throughout the world the destructive nature of livestock grazing on natural systems was so apparent that it never even needed to be discussed. Based on this insight, a ban on livestock grazing was put into practice in US national parks, and written into law in India. At Keoladeo Ghana National Park i...

Ecologists in India, as well as other parts of the world, acted throughout the 1950s and 1960s as if their research funding did not have any political or ethical import. Ecologists had been accustomed to taking money from any funding source and attempting to do their own work while also fulfilling grant requirements. In doing so they often implicit...