Caroline Ford's new book, "Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France," explores the roots of French environmental consciousness in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ford shows how French society began to understand how humans adversely affected their surroundings during that time.
Popular writers like Francois-Antoine Rauch demonstrated how deforestation altered the climate and damaged the habitability of the nation. War, revolution and a series of devastating floods brought the questions of deforestation, urbanization and industrial capitalism into conflict with the finite resources of nature, according to Ford. Public worries over resource depletion and climate change mingled with a new bourgeois consciousness developing in the 19th century. France’s countryside became a place of romantic longing for families, a source of inspiration for artists, and an important symbol of national pride.
Ford teaches courses on modern France, French colonialism and the Algerian war, the history of Paris, modern European history, and European landscape and environmental history in comparative perspective. She completed her Ph.D. in European history at the University of Chicago and taught at Harvard University (1988-1995) as an assistant and associate professor. She then joined the faculty at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, (1995-2004) as associate professor before taking her current position at UCLA as professor of history in July 2004.
