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Three giant-sized mammals, bison, African elephants, and sperm whales, faced sustained hunting in the 19th century. Demand for hides, ivory, and whale oil, all of which were useful in industrial production, animated the hunts. Most of the industrial production in question took place in the northeastern United States, while the hunts took place thousands of kilometers away, linking regions in what I call "ecological teleconnections." The hunts dramatically reduced the populations of all three species, most drastically the bison. For ten thousand years, bison had helped to regulate their biome, the North American prairie grasslands, playing a role of a keystone species. East African elephants on their savanna grasslands, and sperm whales in oceans, had functioned for even longer as keystone species. The sharp and sudden reductions in populations of these animals after 1800 produced a variety of indirect ecological effects, reshuffling the ecosystems in question, making for difficult times for human communities that had come to depend on them.

Historians are curious creatures. We believe nowadays in the uniqueness of events, so much so that notions of regularity, pattern, and system have become inherently suspect. Sometimes efforts to see these in the human past are deemed evidence of some nefarious political inclination toward domination or imperialism. Thus we ordinarily leave the very big picture to others, such as journalists, sociologists, or even biologists such as Jared Diamond [6]. Their work offers a challenge from which historians usually shrink, although that charge cannot be leveled at David Christian [3] who has recently sought to find regular patterns not only in human history, but throughout the history of the Universe. In this chapter I offer two different attempts to identify big patterns, regularity, and system in human history. The first concerns a proposed pattern in the evolution of differentiation and integration in human culture, or, as I put it, using terms for the conditions rather than the processes, heterogeneity and homogeneity. The second considers analogies between animal species and human societies.

Over the past five hundred years, North Americans have increasingly relied on mining to produce much of their material and cultural life. From cell phones and computers to cars, roads, pipes, pans, and even wall tile, mineral-intensive products have become central to North American societies. As this process has unfolded, mining has also indelibly shaped the natural world and the human societies within it. Mountains have been honeycombed, rivers poisoned, forests leveled, and the consequences of these environmental transformations have fallen unevenly across North America. Drawing on the work of scholars from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, Mining North America examines these developments. It covers an array of minerals and geographies while bringing mining into the core debates that animate North American environmental history. Taken all together, the essays in this book make a powerful case for the centrality of mining in forging North American environments and societies

The material and energy flows that characterized the metabolism of preindustrial and industrial societies were organized through complex infrastructures based on interwoven social and natural elements. Analyzing infrastructures from many methodological and thematic perspectives, the present volume adopts an extensive periodization to identify the undeniable changes caused by industrialization and the persistence of pre-existing features and dynamics. The contributions range from the late Middle Ages to the 1990s and deepen historical characteristics of urban metabolism, the study of energy systems and their transitions, and the management and control of water resources. These reveal the strategies societies and states adopted to transform and adapt their surrounding environment in a constant and challenging equilibrium of diverse interests, whose impact over time has had environmental consequences on a global scale

A range of published arguments against formalizing the Anthropocene as a geological time unit have variously suggested that it is a misleading term of non-stratigraphic origin and usage, is based on insignificant temporal and material stratigraphic content unlike that used to define older geological time units, is focused on observation of human history or speculation about the future rather than geologically significant events, and is driven more by politics than science. In response, we contend that the Anthropocene is a functional term that has firm geological grounding in a well-characterized stratigraphic record. This record, although often lithologically thin, is laterally extensive, rich in detail and already reflects substantial elapsed (and in part irreversible) change to the Earth System that is comparable to or greater in magnitude than that of previous epoch-scale transitions. The Anthropocene differs from previously defined epochs in reflecting contemporary geological change, which in turn also leads to the term's use over a wide range of social and political discourse. Nevertheless, that use remains entirely distinct from its demonstrable stratigraphic underpinning. Here we respond to the arguments opposing the geological validity and utility of the Anthropocene, and submit that a strong case may be made for the Anthropocene to be treated as a formal chronostratigraphic unit and added to the Geological Time Scale.

A range of published arguments against formalizing the Anthropocene as a geological time unit have variously suggested that it is a misleading term of non-stratigraphic origin and usage, is based on insignificant temporal and material stratigraphic content unlike that used to define older geological time units, is focused on observation of human history or speculation about the future rather than geologically significant events, and is driven more by politics than science. In response, we contend that the Anthropocene is a functional term that has firm geological grounding in a well-characterized stratigraphic record. This record, although often lithologically thin, is laterally extensive, rich in detail and already reflects substantial elapsed (and in part irreversible) change to the Earth System that is comparable to or greater in magnitude than that of previous epoch-scale transitions. The Anthropocene differs from previously defined epochs in reflecting contemporary geological change, which in turn also leads to the term's use over a wide range of social and political discourse. Nevertheless, that use remains entirely distinct from its demonstrable stratigraphic underpinning. Here we respond to the arguments opposing the geological validity and utility of the Anthropocene, and submit that a strong case may be made for the Anthropocene to be treated as a formal chronostratigraphic unit and added to the Geological Time Scale.