An enormously valuable teaching and research resource for the practitioner of environmental history: many chapters will serve nicely as the first assignment for students working at advanced undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels within the broad thematic and topical areas of individual chapter coverage...Yet this Handbook will be equally valuable as a showcase of what the field has to offer other historians. It will demonstrate with vigour and verve that environmental history, rather than existing out there, somewhere on the margins, sealed off from other fields within historical studies, is actually quite near here, ready, willing and ripe for cross-pollination, and, actually not that strange after all, subject to all the usual trends and turns that shape and reshape historical studies.