Consumption is also a matter of changing cultural taste, as Jennifer Price wonderfully details in Fight Maps. Our material relations are also cultural. Consumption is a hydra-headed monster, and population is just one head. The differences between the fates and populations of Atlantic salmon (abundant at least in fish farms) and Pacific salmon, between buffalo and deer, cannot be explained by only looking at human population density and deriving from that human consumption.
Neither salmon nor buffalo were or are "American"，and one of the important changes involved in environmental history since the mid-1980s, as J. Donald Hughes points out, is its inter-nationalization. particular subset of these studies-those I will call transnational-have considerable importance even for historians whose ambitions stop at the American border. Alfred Crosby, of course, pioneered this history and remains its most eminent practitioner. Thomas Dunlap in two very fine recent books has quietly, forcefully, and effectively made many of the earlier claims about the distinctiveness of American attitudes toward nature look rather silly. They are rather conventional attitudes in the English-speaking settler colonies that Dunlap ex-amines.
In a related vein, a new, and I think neglected,
book by the Australian historian Ian Tyrrell has looked at what amounts to the coevolution of Australia and California in the Late ineteenth and early twentieth centuries as ideas, plants, insects, and people moved back and forth across the Pacific.
One of the strongest sections in Tyrrell's hook is his discussion of how particular landscapes became racialized in California and how the search for an edenic California of small, irrigated farms became quite explicitly a search for a white California in which Mexicans and Chinese in particular disappear from the landscape.
不要用软件翻译的。。。在线直译的也麻烦绕道。。。谢谢。