This volume focuses on environmental knowledge production in the United States by taking as starting points the impact of natural catastrophes and of public debates on climate change and environmental threats. Individual chapters address the social, political, economic, ecological, as well as cultural effects of natural catastrophes. At stake are issues such as disaster management and politics, disaster as spectacle, and the popular imagination of catastrophe. In bringing together historians and geographers, literary and cultural studies scholars, political scientists, anthropologists, and scientists from the United States and Europe, this volume demonstrates that the human experience and imagination of environment have played a truly important role in American culture.