Animals

Applying Animal Theory to Gale’s National Geographic Virtual Library

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By Jessica Crawley, Gale Ambassador at Lancaster University

National Geographic is not only a non-profit organization, but also a media company that has taken the printing world by storm. Readers have been using the National Geographic Magazine to scratch that adventurous itch since the magazine’s first publication in 1888, quite literally placing a gateway to the non-human world at the fingertips of human hands. The magazine has sold millions of copies in 40 different languages to date, pairing fascinating visuals with a layman-friendly tone, making it the perfect companion for any reader with an interest in science, wildlife, and exploration.

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New Environmental History Archive: Colonial Policy and Global Development, 1896-1993

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│By Clem Delany, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

On sitting down to write a brief explanation of what environmental history is, I have spent the last twenty minutes staring into space thinking about Pando. Pando is, as I’m sure the sophisticated and well-travelled audience of this blog will know, the largest and heaviest living organism on earth. Pando covers 100 acres and is around 10,000 years old. That means that when Pando first began its long, slow life, there were woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed cats still living, although increasingly finding their parties a little light on company.

Pando is a tree. It is a quaking aspen in Utah; in appearance it is over 45,000 individual quaking aspens, but below ground it has a single root system. Each ‘tree’ is a clone of its neighbours, a stem of one single organism. And it is on my mind because I am trying to think of a pithy way to describe environmental history, an area of study where many different disciplines and topics meet, connected at their roots as different expressions of one phenomenon: human interaction with the natural world.

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The First Module in Gale’s Environmental History Series – Conservation and Public Policy in America, 1870-1980

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│By Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editor│

In the summer of 2023, four alarming global climate records were broken: the hottest day on record globally; the hottest June on record; the warmest global ocean temperatures in May, June, and July; and the lowest recorded level of Antarctic sea-ice. One could not turn on the television or look at a news website without seeing images of harrowing wildfires in Europe, Hawaii and Canada or the devastating typhoon in East Asia. As I sat sweltering on a Sardinian beach during heatwave Charon in late July, my thoughts echoed those from all over the globe, is the Earth now in a climate crisis? And how did we get here?  

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Heroic Hedgehogs – The Hedgehog in Popular Culture

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Hedgehog in a cup

│by Constance Lam, Gale Ambassador at the University of Durham University│

The twenty first century marks the return of the hedgehog: from the recent February 14th release of Sonic the Hedgehog, to the rise of hedgehog cafés throughout Japan and Hong Kong, it seems hedgehogs are resurfacing in popular culture.

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