Christof Mauch translated from the original German by Lucy Jones
“A colourful road trip that opens readers’ eyes to the many layers of ‘blues’ that have shaped the American continent, its history and environment.”
Dorothee Brantz
“In Mauch’s tales, each landscape becomes a tapestry of forces and visions, a journey that spans temporal dimensions that are both close and profound. Meticulously researched and delicately personal, this book will take you on a journey and travel with you, transforming the American landscape into a rich and unpredictable epiphany of stories.”
Paradise Blues is an unconventional history of the United States of America, an unusual travel guide that follows and renders visible the country’s paths of nature, history and civilisation. Christof Mauch is a leading German historian who has spent many years in the US and in this book he attempts, from a European perspective, to grasp the diversity of American culture and the transformation of its environments, combining travel reporting with nature writing, personal observation and philosophical reflection. Mauch seeks the familiar in unfamiliar places and the curious in places that seem common and well-known.
The journey begins in tiny Wiseman, Alaska and the final portrait is of Portland, Oregon, famously America’s most sustainable city. In between, Mauch’s wanderings in space and time, his serendipitous and planned encounters with places and people, bring to light the tension and ambivalence in most Americans’ attitudes towards their often-perilous environment, the intertwining throughout history of valuation, conservation and destruction. Interactions between human beings and the environment have settled like sediment down the centuries and may be read in the present – in the form of landscapes and collective memory, in bodies of water and the earth’s strata, tree rings and human cells. One of Mauch’s dominant themes is that the grand hopes and bitter disappointments of the American paradise are not equally distributed – the blues is the voice of the dispossessed and disadvantaged; and here environmental injustice toward Black, Indigenous and other marginalised people is a recurring and haunting motif.
This is a book of melancholia and hope – Mauch exposes the beauty, the imperilment, at times the wreckage, of the American environment. And he shows us that, more powerfully than abstract ideas, governmental edicts or technological forces, stories reveal the infinite discoveries to be made in humans’ relationship to nature – in beautiful landscapes where danger lurks as well as in visions and behaviours that change the world and ecosystems. Above all, stories demonstrate that where we come from and where we are going are intimately connected and therefore nothing has to remain as it is. The stories told in Paradise Blues demonstrate that vulnerabilities and pressures are almost always political constructions and, for that reason, it must be possible to deconstruct them.
Academic monographs are seldom translated into other languages, so the appearance of an English edition of Mauch’s original 2022 German text is a welcome surprise. Mauch (Ludwig Maximilian Univ. of Munich, Germany), long a pillar in the broader global field of environmental humanities, offers a unique outside perspective on American history and culture through the lens of environmental history. He considers how the US and its environments have transformed one another and gives space to a wide range of diverse voices and perspectives…. The text is highly readable and engaging as Mauch interweaves traditional historical research with personal anecdotes from his travels and lyrical reflections on America’s natural environments.
B. W. Rensink
“Mauch has always been great intellectual company, but in Paradise Blues he excels himself. This dazzling portrait of America reveals a nation that is neither monolithic nor polarized. Instead, we see the intricate interplay between many peoples and their particular landscapes from an agricultural Eden above the Arctic circle to Disneyworld, from Memphis’s radicalized development patterns to Portland’s ecofreaks. Seldom is such deep scholarship combined with such compassionate storytelling. Paradise Blues lets us ride in the passenger seat, while Christof Mauch shows us the stunning beautiful, complex, troubled country beyond American stereotypes.”
Julia Adeney Thomas
“The rise of the United States from semi-wilderness to superpower is the foundational story of modernity. Usually, its history is told as a grand narrative of progress or failure—always monumental in scope, simple in conclusions. Paradise Blues, in contrast, eschews the big picture and provides a more complex narrative, focused on a series of American communities. He approaches their histories as a happy traveller looking for people to talk to, novels and reports to read, and with an eye for telling detail. The result is wonderfully engaging and revealing. In Mauch’s vision Americans may be guilty of ruining many places, but often the ruin is mixed with encouraging triumphs. Highly recommended as a new kind history for a world seeking hope.”
Donald Worster
THE AUTHOR
Christof Mauch studied at Tübingen University and King’s College London and majored in German literature, theology, philosophy and history. He received his Dr.phil. in German literature from Tübingen and his Dr. phil. habil. in Modern History from the University of Cologne. From 1999 to 2007, Mauch headed the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. He has been Chair of American Cultural History at LMU Munich since 2007; and Director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU since 2009. Mauch was the first Chairperson (now: President) of the Board of Directors of the International Consortium for Environmental History Organizations, ICEHO (2009–2011) and he served as Vice President and President of the European Society for Environmental History (2009–2013). In 2013 he was named Honorary Professor and Senior Fellow at the Center for Ecological History of Renmin University in China. Mauch has been a visiting professor at universities in Australia, Austria, Canada, India and Poland. In 2020 he was the Carl Schurz Memorial Professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (USA). He has received numerous international awards for his scholarly contributions and engagement, including the Distinguished Career in Public Environmental History Award from the American Society for Environmental History, the Teaching Innovation Award from the LMU Munich, and the Planetary Award from the Institute for Future Competences.
Mauch has authored, edited or co-edited over forty books in the fields of Modern German Literature; US, German and transatlantic history; and the environmental humanities. Paradise Blues is his most personal book, drawing on his travels through the United States over a period of fifteen years.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations and Maps
Prologue
Wiseman, Alaska
Malibu, California
Memphis, Tennessee
St Thomas, Nevada
Dodge City, Kansas
Niagara
Walt Disney World, Florida
Portland, Oregon
Afterword
Index
Publication date, January 2024
ISBN 978-1-912186-78-5 (PB) £28 e-ISBN 978-1-912186-79-2 (OPEN ACCESS)
Success and Failure in the Fight to Save an Ecosystem of Critical Importance to the Planet
Timothy J. Killeen
Vital reading for all those interested in the conservation of the world’s most important ecosystem
In a lucid style backed by encyclopaedic knowledge, Killeen unpicks the extremely complex ecological and socio-political threads that comprise the recent history and the vital future of the Pan Amazon region. The fight to save the Amazon is a fight for sustainability that is emblematic of the entire future of human co-existence with Nature on Earth. Killeen is an authoritative and impassioned guide, eschewing soundbites in favour of a clearsighted and highly nuanced picture of the realities on the ground. Only in understanding present realities and how they came to pass, he argues, can we proceed hopefully into the future. Events of the last ten years are discussed in detail, because future events will have to build upon – or modify – the cultural and economic forces driving events in the Pan Amazon. Nonetheless, the text provides a longer historical perspective to show how policies create legacies that reverberate over decades, long after they have been recognised as being fundamentally flawed.
The book does not demonise stakeholder groups or economic actors, but explains the social and economic realities that constrain their decisions and motivates them to act as they do. Likewise, it identifies the policies that have created a foundation for positive change, as well as those that are not delivering the benefits their advocates had hoped to generate.
The broad scope and descriptive detail of the narrative will provide the reader with an understanding of the synergies among the multiple complex phenomena that threaten the conservation of the Amazon, as well as an objective analysis of the alternative production models and regulatory reforms that are essential for bending the arc of history and saving an ecosystem on critical importance to the planet Killeen makes no attempt to predict the future via a ‘scenarios analysis’, but he does identify certain phenomena that will most definitely happen (regardless of new policies or market forces), those that might or might not happen (depending on new policies and markets forces), some that should never happen (e.g., extreme climate change), and those that absolutely must happen in order to change the current trajectory of Amazonian development (e.g., revenue transfers that can change human behaviour).
VOLUME 1: The Conventional Economy and the Drivers of Change Volume 1, comprising the first four chapters of the book, is now available as a paperback or an eBook. Paperback, 484 pages (ISBN 978-1-912186-23-5) £42, order here. eBook, 484 pages (eISBN 978-1-912186-63-1) Open Access on JSTOR and OAPEN.
Volumes 2 and 3 will be published when they are ready.
CHAPTER DOWNLOADS All chapters are published Open Access in serial form (CC BY 4.0). All published chapters are available to read at the Environment and Society Portal. All enquiries to Sarah [@] whpress.co.uk.
Forthcoming chapters will appear here as soon as they are ready: 8 – Biocommerce: The Quest for Sustainability 9 – Advances in Biodiversity Science 10 – Knowledge is Power: Deforestation, Water Cycles and Climate Change 11 – An Indigenous Awakening 12 – Conservation Report Card 13 – What Next?
A Perfect Storm on Mongabay
More information about the project, including Spanish and Portuguese summaries, is available on Mongabay:
