bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Basutoland: A Historical Journey into the Environment.
Authors: Singh Meena
Published: June 2007

Reconstructing the environment of Lesotho in order to assess soil erosion at different time scales, highlights conflicting views about the initiation of accelerated erosion. Indigenous agricultural practices were sensitive to the fragile environment and aimed to ensure a protective vegetative cover. The imposition of colonial conservation techniques overlooked local wisdom regarding soil erosion prevention, was often ineffective, and arguably accelerated soil erosion. Loss of flat fertile land to the Boers, changes from indigenous agriculture to commercial cultivation, concentration of population on steep slopes, were among causes that contributed to accelerated erosion, and to indigenous agricultural systems becoming less effective.
Control of Air Pollution in Manchester prior to the Public Health Act, 1875.
Authors: Bowler Catherine , Brimblecombe Peter
Published: June 2007

Industrialising cities of the 19th century are seen as lax in environmental matters. However, Manchester took a strong stand against air pollution. It modified complex medieval administrative practices to address industrial pollution, and created new bodies (e.g. Police Commissioners) that considered environmental matters. Its committees and inspectors worked diligently, but pro-industrial sympathies prevented systematic prosecution of industrial offenders. Nevertheless, the smoke menace was certainly systematically addressed. Effective response was limited by inadequate abatement technology, despite a rapid evolution of the administrative policy prior to the Public Health Act 1875.
Utilitarianism and the Identity of the Indian Forest Service
Authors: Hannam Kevin
Published: June 2007

This paper discusses the historical identity of the Indian Forest Service, the elite environmental organisation which controlled and managed nearly a third of India during the late nineteenth century. This organisation has been widely criticised by numerous authors, however it has rarely been analysed directly. Based upon an evaluation of the key voice of the forest service, the journal the Indian Forester, as well as the memoirs of various forest officers, this article will attempt to provide an outline of the identity of the Indian Forest Service in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Firstly, I demonstrate that despite some antagonism from the Indian Civil Service, the Indian Forest Service was initially structured along the same utilitarian lines. In particular, I show how, in the face of popular protests, the Indian Forest Service created and maintained its own esprit de corps through particular methods of recruitment and training. Secondly, I show that the Indian Forest Service had a crisis of identity and was at pains to distinguish itself from the Indian Civil Service, mainly through recourse to a more muscular definition of masculinity.
Grasslands and Thickets: Bush Encroachment and Herding in the Kalahari Thornveld
Authors: Jacobs Nancy
Published: June 2007

This paper addresses bush encroachment around Kuruman, South Africa. The 'received wisdom' is that bushes result from overgrazing, displace the climax community, and lower carrying capacity. In contrast, this paper is informed by non-equilibrium ecological and range management science, as well as recent challenges to degradationist interpretations about environmental change in Africa. To what extent has bush encroachment occurred? Has a consequent drop in sustainability contributed to dependence upon wage labour among black households? Using documentary evidence, the paper establishes a broad chronology for change. It asserts that because of non-human and human factors black herders live in a bushier environment than they did when the first travellers arrived around 1800. It concludes with oral evidence to consider the effects of the change. Interviews show that people do not consider bush encroachment to be an environmental problem. They are too poor to keep many grazing cattle, and the browsing small stock and donkeys they can afford are well suited to bushes. Also, because bushes survive drought better than grass, they are valued fodder for all animals. Dependence upon wage labour results from wider social factors and this environmental change has not degraded livelihoods.
Can Climate Influence Cultural Development? A View through Time
Authors: Haberle Simon G. , Lusty Alex Chepstow
Published: June 2007

Despite the devastating impact that flooding, drought and fire associated with the 1982/3 and 1997/8 El Nino events had on both the natural environment and human society, there is little information on the persistence or impact similar events may have had in the 'deeper' past. Palaeoecologists can offer insight into the nature of environmental change over a range of spatiotemporal scales, utilising high-resolution techniques that can broaden the interpretation of issues that are specifically relevant to historians, geographers and anthropologists. In some cases there appears to be a correspondence between major climatic events and a change in cultural development that leads us to ask the question, 'How significant has climate change been in the development of human society?' We discuss the role of environmental history in studies of cultural change, and critically assess four case studies where climate may have had a significant impact on the development of human society: human evolution in Africa, development of agriculture in New Guinea, urban collapse in Central and South America, and Pacific island occupation.
Yorkshire's 'Sloughs of Despond': An Inter-War Perspective on Resource Development in Britain
Authors: Sheail John
Published: June 2007

Not only do questions of environmental management have an intrinsic importance, but the manner in which they were addressed may offer insight into the relevance and robustness of the mechanisms by which they might be resolved. The paper provides a case study of the range of preoccupations which the statutory planner, agricultural interests and mineral developer brought to bear on the conflict arising from the early twentieth-century development of the Yorkshire 'concealed' coalfield. Where mechanisms existed for reconciling the sectoral interests within, say, a city and its immediate environs, there was increasing need in the inter-war years for such accommodation to extend to whole river-catchments or regions. Where the geographically-largest unit in local government, the county council, might appear to favour agriculture, central government was especially protective of local mining interests. Whilst the consequent impact of surface subsidence on land drainage created considerable acrimony, the raised political consciousness proved essential in sustaining the ill-defined, four-fold process by which agreement was achieved for the ameliorative action required.
Frontier Foods for Late Medieval Consumers: Culture, Economy, Ecology
Authors: Hoffmann Richard C.
Published: June 2007

A continual western history of humans feeding beyond the bounds of natural local ecosystems goes back to Europe's high and later Middle Ages. This essay considers medieval long distance trades in grain, cattle, and preserved fish as antecedents to today's globalised movements of foodstuffs. Pulled by demand from consumers in populous and wealthy western Europe, significant amounts of plants, animals, their biomass, and their calories moved across major ecological boundaries, notably from thinly populated areas on Europe's peripheries. As today, the large cultural, economic, and ecological consequences are unevenly acknowledged. Distant zones of perceived abundance let consumers avoid changing their own cultural preferences and social practices by externalising, even forgetting, the social and environmental costs of satisfying them.
The Wasting of Wolin: Environmental Factors in the Downfall of a Medieval Baltic Town
Authors: Broich John
Published: June 2007

This medieval environmental history examines the tenth-century industrial and trade town of Wolin which grew rapidly on an island immediately off the northwestern coast of Poland. It arose in an environment incapable of supporting its population of 8000 - the largest population in the Baltic during the period. Palaeobotanical evidence records the island's large-scale deforestation and the rapid deterioration of its soils. Having outstripped its local natural assets, Wolin quickly became dependent on imported grain, lumber, and industrial resources. By the mid-eleventh century, Wolin could no longer sustain itself, and became too exhausted to repulse, or recover from, sea-borne raids.
Geo-Environmental Disconnection and the Colorado River Delta: Technology, Culture, and the Political Ecology of Paradise
Authors: Ward Evan R.
Published: June 2007

This article examines the alienation of water users in the lower Colorado River Basin from the river and its delta during the twentieth century. The author posits technological advances, affluence, geographic distance from the river itself, and prevalent Newtonian attitudes towards the landscape as the principal reasons for these geo-environmental disconnections. Politically, the competition between municipal, agricultural, and tourist-related activities contributed to the severing of ecological linkages between the urban and irrigated oases and the delta.
Technological Transformation and Water Conflicts in the Bhavani River Basin of Tamil Nadu, 1930-1970
Authors: Saravanan Velayutham
Published: June 2007

This article examines in a historical perspective (1930-1970) the water conflicts that have occurred due to technological transformation in water lifting devices (viz.: electric and oil-engine pumpsets) in the agricultural sector in the old Kalingarayan channel and new Lower Bhavani Project canal of the Bhavani River Basin in Tamil Nadu. It discusses the consequences of technological transformation leading to water conflicts between the head-reach and tail-end farmers during the colonial and post-colonial periods. It also analyses the role of politicians in these conflicts. Further, it looks into government policies and the role of the judiciary in resolving these conflicts.
Wildlife Conservation in Malawi
Authors: Morris Brian
Published: June 2007

This article discusses the history of wildlife conservation in Malawi from the beginning of the colonial period to the present day. It concludes by suggesting a new approach to wildlife conservation in Africa.
The Conservation Society: Harbinger of the 1970s Environment Movement in the UK
Authors: Herring Horace
Published: June 2007

The Conservation Society was the first environmental society in the UK. It was founded in 1966 in response to the then widely perceived global threat of over-population. It was an uneasy coalition between political radicals wanting wider public access to birth control and traditional conservationists, like Lady Eve Balfour of the Soil Association. By the early 1970s, under the Directorship of John Davoll, it moved away from population concerns to articulate an 'environmental' message based on an integrated view of population, resources and technology (strongly influenced by Paul Ehrlich). Despite its initial success it went into a slow decline from 1973. It was at heart a conservative and traditional organisation and it could not compete with the more dynamic and youthful Friends of the Earth. Its inability to adapt to a changing culture was its downfall, but its intellectual message was the foundation for 1970s environmentalism.
'Welcome to the Atomic Park': American Nuclear Landscapes and the 'Unnaturally Natural'
Authors: Wills John
Published: June 2007

Atomic landscapes in the American West are typically understood as despoiled and irradiated territories. Nevada Test Site, with its grim medley of twisted military structures, bombed-out craters and radioactive desert, is an emblem of the nuclear age. By contrast, Yosemite National Park is a very different icon to hail from Western climes. Yosemite is legendary for its wild nature and monumental scenery. The two landscapes, Nevada Test Site and Yosemite National Park, have, on the surface, very little in common. However, in recent years, a number of nuclear and post-nuclear landscapes have been praised for attracting rare species of flora and fauna. A few nuclear sites have even become nature reserves. While aware that so-called atomic parks are hardly likely to become the Yellowstones and Yosemites of the late twenty-first century, this article explores a few of the unexpected links between two forms of landscape for so long considered extreme opposites.
Subaltern Environmentalism in the United States: A Historiographic Review
Authors: Egan Michael
Published: June 2007

When a group of people is faced with both social and environmental subordination, they are the victims of environmental injustice. This subordination is manifest in the disproportionate siting of environmental hazards in poor or minority communities and also in the inequitable distribution of ecological resources, both of which perpetuate the marginalisation of subaltern groups. At the heart of the environmental justice movement is a fight for the empowerment of subaltern groups, heretofore excluded from environmental decision-making. In recognising that the environmental health of their living spaces and families is critical to exacting any kind of improvement of their socioeconomic conditions, subaltern groups have added a dynamic new dimension to their social struggles. This counter-hegemonic struggle for ecological democracy is one of the fastest growing social movements in contemporary society, and requires the attention of environmental historians to situate it within the broader context of the history of environmentalism.
Co-Management of Natural Resources: The Long View from Northwestern Spain
Authors: Guillet David
Published: June 2007

Stakeholder co-management, a relatively new approach to environmental management, has come under criticism in recent years. The ethnographic and ethnohistorical record of co-management offers a rich body of experiences in responding to these criticisms. To illustrate, the history of local resource management of forests, water, land, and pastures in the upper Duero basin of Spain from the Reconquest to the liberal administrative reforms of the nineteenth century is discussed.
Native Forest and the Rise of Preservation in New Zealand (1903-1913)
Authors: Star Paul
Published: June 2007

This paper analyses the turning-point in attitudes to the most distinctive feature of one nation's indigenous environment. Some conservation of New Zealand's native forest began long before the Scenery Preservation Act of 1903, but until then the primary motivation was economic. After 1903, aesthetics and national identity became recognised as important additional factors. In 1913, the Forestry Commission found that managed native forest was incommensurate with New Zealand's long-term timber requirements. This left the way clear for preservation for primarily non-economic reasons to become, increasingly, the hallmark of New Zealand's approach to native forest.
Water Quality as Property: Industrial Water Pollution and Common Law in the Nineteenth Century United States
Authors: Paavola Jouni
Published: June 2007

This article examines how riparian law governed the disposal of industrial wastes into watercourses in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The article investigates how the introduction of the doctrine of reasonable use and the balancing test gradually weakened the protection of customary water uses and facilitated industrial waste disposal. The article also examines the counter-reaction to weak protection of customary water uses at the turn of the twentieth century, which tightened the rules regulating industrial waste disposal. The article argues that riparian law was an ineffective governance institution because it created disincentives for the enforcement of riparian rights. The article also argues that riparian law arranged participation in collective choices over the rules of water use according to ability and willingness to pay, which largely explains the change of riparian law in the nineteenth century. However, the courts also gave weight to prevailing social values, which initially affirmed developmental uses of water but later took a more critical view of the interests of big business in water use.
The Grey Seal in Britain: A Twentieth Century History of a Nature Conservation Success
Authors: Lambert Robert A.
Published: June 2007

This article examines the complex history of the grey seal problem in Britain since 1914. In particular, it will focus on our different reactions to the animal over time, and show how fishing communities and organisations have called for a government-sponsored seal cull since the mid-1920s, and how the very different types of culls that came in the 1960s and 1970s were opposed and halted by public outcry in Britain and emerging international environmentalism. The essay is broad based, to show how the grey seal problem has been a political, environmental, social, cultural, economic and animal welfare issue. The study illustrates the value of an historical perspective in assessing the different strands of contemporary debate as to the wisdom and content of consciously managing a large mammal population. From this case study, using primary evidence from England and Scotland, wider conclusions about our changing modern relationship to the natural world can be drawn.
Environmental History and the Challenges of Interdisciplinarity: An Antipodean Perspective
Authors: Pawson Eric , Dovers Stephen
Published: June 2007

The environment has attracted more 'integrative' or 'interdisciplinary' efforts than any other substantive focus, one of which is the diverse and evolving field of environmental history. However, the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity, in environmental history and elsewhere, is unclear and contested ground. In this paper, we explore the nature of interdisciplinary work in environmental history. Drawing on three brief project narratives from environmental history, the paper discusses issues and problems, both intellectual and practical, that face those who seek to move across disciplinary boundaries in environmental history (as most of us do, wittingly or not). We then propose and discuss four 'intersections' that we believe have potential as loci of interdisciplinary engagement: mutual understanding; spatial scale and locale; time and change; and the environment and agency.
The Provincial Nature of George Perkins Marsh
Authors: Hall Marcus
Published: June 2007

While many of Marsh's novel conservation insights were universal and true for citizens of all countries, his key warnings about degradation were characteristically American - having been interpreted, produced, and packaged by an American for Americans. The contrasts he saw between American and Mediterranean lands allowed Marsh to formulate and then support his thesis that humans not only modified but damaged the earth. This paper suggests that Marsh's warnings about degradation depended upon America's rising infatuation with its wild continent: not until a nation could view wildland as healthy and beneficent could one of its citizens suggest that enlightened humans often degraded it. For those accustomed to tamed, gardened land, as in southern Europe, non-human forces inflicted the worst land damage. Marsh ushered in a new paradigm of environmental damage that placed blame on culture rather than nature.
Acclimatisation and Environmental Renovation: Australian Perspectives on George Perkins Marsh
Authors: Tyrrell Ian
Published: June 2007

This article explores the global dimensions of the thought of George Perkins Marsh and his Man and Nature (1864). It argues that Marsh was not simply influenced by American versus European contrasts in environmental change, nor was his work based only on conservation ideas, being influenced also by the examples of acclimatisation movements within the British empire settlement colonies. He incorporated material on acclimatisation from Australia into his major work, and his acceptance, with reservations, of aspects of acclimatisation practice, for example global eucalyptus plant transfers, was a key factor making his work influential within those settlement colonies after publication of Man and Nature . This global context reinforces the sense of Marsh as a thinker of his times, embedded in a larger and older discourse over the fate of forests and other natural resources. Marsh's attempts to promote balance in humans' relations with nature led him to explore a renovationist and improvement oriented ethic as much as a restorationist or preservationist one. Though widely regarded as the father of conservation, his legacy is more ambiguous and more complex, and his influence reflects changing perceptions of European colonial impacts in the nineteenth century.
Alpine Milk: Dairy Farming as a Pre-modern Strategy of Land Use
Authors: Orland Barbara
Published: June 2007

From an agronomic standpoint, today's Alpine milk production as well as mountain farming in general seems to be inefficient. Due to an European overproduction of food, the massive input of labour by the mountain farmer is no longer profitable. As producers of environment and standard-bearers of landscapes, however, farmers are sorely missed in the Alps today. By the 1980s geographers were pointing out that ecological problems in the Alps can be the result of the under-use of nature. Cultural landscapes, which today are admired according to aesthetic or environmental protection considerations, disappear with the farmers. Against this background, the paper introduces the premodern Alpine dairy farming as a case study which illustrates the changing relations between natural resources, economic interests and cultural values that form the interplay between land use, agricultural production methods and the meaning of food. The story of the Alpine milk illustrates that in premodern times food production reflected much more the connection between local land resources and farmer's skills, tools and practices - a link that has ceased to exist in the mindset of industrialised societies.
Australia Unlimited? Environmental Debate in the Age of Catastrophe, 1910-1939
Authors: Frost Warwick
Published: June 2007

Between the First and Second World Wars, Australia was under significant social, political and economic pressures. It has been generally argued that these problems stifled environmental debate, encouraging governments to look to large-scale development schemes for solutions. In turn, the few critics of these schemes were ruthlessly attacked as not having the national interest at heart. This article contests this interpretation of the period. It argues that there was an environmental debate, with a wide range of interests pushing for conservation, the development of National Parks and limits on these development schemes.
Environmental History in Australasia
Authors: Robin Libby , Griffiths Tom
Published: June 2007

Australia and New Zealand share a southern, settler society history and cultural solidarity as British colonies and dominions. Their early unity as 'Australasia' is where this paper begins, focusing on the strong role of science in shaping environmental history and policy in both countries. Agricultural science was crucial to environmental policy and has given a distinctive quality to the practice of environmental history in Australasia. But the long-term influences of very different physical environments and Indigenous inheritances. ultimately define Australian and New Zealand environmental historiography as more contrastive than similar, and promise to drive these countries in divergent directions.
Hunting Narratives of the Age of Empire: A Gender Reading of Their Iconography
Authors: Wonders Karen
Published: June 2007

The hunting-and-collecting mania of sportsmen from north-western Europe and the eastern United States is explored by focusing on the many hunting narratives that recount trips to the Canadian part of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Shore during the Age of Empire (1875-1914). These narratives, many of which were lavishly illustrated, have remained largely unexplored as a source for the social history of hunting. Here the hundreds of frequently dramatic visual representations, in particular the trophy displays, are systematically scrutinised and major iconographic motifs identified. The point is made that the iconographic idiom did not primarily convey a meaning that related to the hunters' participation in the work of empire, but one that celebrated the hunters' character traits and masculinity, often by means of a conflation of victor-and-vanquished.
The Last European Landscape to be Colonised: A Case Study of Land-Use Change in the Far North of Sweden 1850-1930
Authors: Andersson Rikard , ùstlund Lars , Tùrnlund Erik
Published: June 2007

The agricultural colonisation of the interior of northern Sweden in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be regarded as Europe's last colonising venture supported by an economy based on self-sufficiency. Nevertheless, nomadic Sami people have practised basic economic approaches to resources and environment in this region for thousands of years. The aim of this study was to analyse the swift land-use transition, from nomadic to agricultural, in the last colonised landscape of northern Sweden. Using historical documents and maps together with modern maps and a field survey, we wanted to link land-use patterns as strongly as possible to landscape features and ecosystems. Resource use of farmers and the native Samis showed many similarities with some important exceptions. Some obvious disparities seem to have evolved, mainly connected to the animal species that were domesticated. With the Sami people involved and interfering with the colonisation process, their use of resources contributed significantly to local economy and land use therefore became intensified. Interestingly, in the studied area the main driving force for establishment of new settlements was commercial forestry. However, in the last colonised landscape, forestry reached its physical limits, leaving mountain birch forests with evidence of traditional Sami land use and Sami historical traces.
If John Muir Had Been an Agrarian: American Environmental History West and South
Authors: Stewart Mart A.
Published: June 2007

Environmental history in and of the American South has developed in a different direction than the field in general in the U.S., which has been shaped by its origins in the history of the American West. The history of humans and the environment in the South has been much more driven by the history of agriculture than by frontier or wilderness interactions, as well as by the history of the relationship between white and black Americans and their respective uses of the land in the region. It also has more in common with environmental history outside the U.S. than with the field as it at first developed in the U.S.
Deforestation, Forest Transitions, and Institutions for Sustainability in Southeastern Mexico, 1900-2000
Authors: Barton Bray David , Klepeis Peter
Published: June 2007

Research on tropical forest cover change processes identifies myriad driving forces and demonstrates how change dynamics are non-linear and complex. Despite appreciation in the academic literature for the historical patterns and processes of deforestation, however, a simplistic, linear 'deforestation narrative' persists in the popular imagination. Concern arises when this narrative influences environmental policy and effective response to the tropical deforestation problem. Our main goals here are twofold: (1) to contribute to a nuanced history of forest change in southeastern Mexico; and (2) to explore the role of institutional development in reducing deforestation rates. Drawing on forest transition theory, we analyse the twentieth century forest histories of the eastern Yucatan Peninsula, the southern Yucatan Peninsula, and the Lacandon Rainforest. A deforestation narrative rightly dominates characterisations of the 1960-85 period in southeastern Mexico, but it falls short of accurately representing the complex processes of deforestation, forest recovery, and the development of sustainability-oriented grassroots institutions in the 1985-2003 period.
Winds of Colonisation: The Meteorological Contours of Spain's Imperium in the Pacific 1521-1898
Authors: Bankoff Greg
Published: June 2007

This paper examines the relationship between prevailing weather systems and colonialism in the context of Spanish possessions in the Pacific from Magellan till the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that any historical appreciation of Hispanic colonialism and culture would be incomplete without due consideration of the role meteorological phenomena played, both at the macro-level in terms of the form and extent of empire and at the more micro-level as manifest in the daily experience of communities.
Interstate Water Pollution Problems and Elusive Federal Water Pollution Policy in the United States, 1900-1948
Authors: Paavola Jouni
Published: June 2007

This article examines water pollution and its control in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century until after the Second World War, a period during which water pollution became an interstate problem. State water pollution control policies existed at the time. However, states were unwilling to control the pollution of state waters because of the threat of industrial flight, and the pollution of interstate waters because it would have mainly benefited downstream states. The states first sought to resolve their conflicts over the pollution of interstate waters by litigating in the Supreme Court of the United States, but it was not well-suited for managing the quality of interstate waters. Many organisations also lobbied for federal water pollution control legislation but the federal government only endorsed the use of interstate compacts to manage water quality in interstate waters. However, they were largely ineffective and did not address the threat of industrial flight which was an obstacle for water pollution control in state waters. Federal funding of water pollution control measures during the New Deal had more lasting impacts and became an element of federal water pollution legislation when it was finally enacted after the Second World War.
Mining the Reefs and Cays: Coral, Guano and Rock Phosphate Extraction in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, 1844-1940
Authors: Daley Ben , Griggs Peter
Published: June 2007

Scholarly attention has recently focused on the extent of the deterioration of the Great Barrier Reef and several authors have attempted to place that decline into historical context. We present documentary and oral history evidence that the extent and severity of mining in the Great Barrier Reef has been hitherto neglected in environmental histories of the ecosystem. Extraction of phosphatic sandstone, guano, rock phosphate and coral from many islands, cays and coral reefs have resulted in extensive transformations of some habitats. In particular, Raine, Lady Elliot, Lady Musgrave, North West and Holbourne Islands experienced intensive mining for guano and rock phosphate, while more sustained guano mining took place at Upolu, Oyster and Michaelmas Cays prior to 1940. Coral mining - which has not previously been documented for the Great Barrier Reef - also occurred in at least twelve locations between 1900 and 1940 with the result that thousands of tons of coral were removed from some reefs and pulverised to produce agricultural and industrial lime. This account suggests that historical mining in the Great Barrier Reef has left impacts in the landscape of several islands and cays. Further scientific research and monitoring is required to elucidate the impacts of coral mining, although comparisons with coral mining sites elsewhere in the world suggest that it is reasonable to presume that the impacts of that activity were severe for parts of several reefs, including Snapper Island, Kings and Alexandra Reefs.
For the 'Preservation of Friends' and the 'Destruction of Enemies': Studying and Protecting Birds in Late Imperial Russia
Authors: Bonhomme Brian
Published: June 2007

This paper surveys major developments in the Imperial Russian history of wild bird protection and related issues of ornithology during the century or so leading up to the First World War. Emphasis is given to two related outcomes, both of which set the Russian Empire apart from many of its western neighbours: the country's refusal - despite long negotiations - to sign a landmark international treaty on cross-border bird protection (the 1902 Paris Convention) and the fact that the Empire did not pass any significant domestic legislation dedicated to wild bird protection. These are interpreted not so much as failures, however, but as evidence of a broader development. Whereas Russian ornithologists and bird-protection advocates had for most of the nineteenth century sought to imitate or catch up with European and American approaches, by the end of that century many of them had instead become convinced that what worked further west was not appropriate for their circumstances. Pointing to the peculiarities of Russian public habits and culture, as well as to the supposed distinctiveness of the Russian Empire's environmental and geographic conditions, they instead began to focus on game law reform, public education and other issues - ultimately to little effect.
'Water Used to be Scattered in the Landscape': Local Understandings of Soil Erosion and Land Use Planning in Southern Zimbabwe.
Authors: Wilson K.B.
Published: June 2007

This article presents some local understandings of ecological history in a semiarid area of Zimbabwe as an exploration of how changes in land use that reflect both local initiative and state planning have transformed the hydrology of local catchments of heavy clay ‘mopani soils’ and greatly accelerated soil erosion. Local explanations provide a wide-ranging and challenging analysis of the dynamics of watersheds situated within a complex social and historical context. In conjunction with the spread of ox-ploughing and population growth and redistribution, a range of ill-conceived and authoritarian ‘conservation’ and ‘development’ interventions by the colonial state are argued by local intellectuals to be the major causes of accelerated soil erosion. Particular attention is given to how government imposed the deforestation and intensive use of difficult top land soils, and then transformed that uneven heterogeneous landscape into a smooth bare land connected by contour ridges and paths so that water concentrates, erodes, and then leaves the desiccating land to silt the rivers. The existence of sophisticated ‘indigenous knowledge’ systems in Africa has now been widely accepted, but this case study suggests that their very depth, variability and complexity means that attempts to harness local ecological knowledge for the understanding of – or development action about – environmental change may be more problematic than is often assumed. Researchers, government and conservation and development organisations need to do much more than seek to ‘tap’ such knowledge. Real understandings and ‘sustainable development’ can only flow from new power relationships with rural people and their knowledge
'Penetrating' Foreign Lands: Contestations Over African Landscapes. A Case Study from Eastern Zimbabwe.
Authors: Schmidt Heike
Published: June 2007

While it was happening, European expansion was often legitimised by evoking frontier images: pioneers setting off from the metropolis, penetrating wilderness in order to open access to resources, like minerals, living-space, and fertile lands. Central to the ideology of the frontier is the notion of 'no-man's land'. These 'pioneers', however, often had to face local inhabitants and their interpretations and uses of this land. Thus it will be argued that contestations over landscape were at the same time battles over the legitimation of European expansion, as well as over local perceptions of this process. Ideologically, contestations by Europeans and Africans become apparent in the sexualisation of landscape. This paper is based on the case study of a Valley in eastern Zimbabwe on the border with Mozambique, and more specifically of two tea estates which were established in the rainforest. Unusually late for the region, European influence in this remote area only began to become significant in the 1950s which were an important turning point regarding land and landscape in the area. These years of great change will be analysed in order to map out different strands of interest by the main parties involved. It will be demonstrated that their readings of landscape translated into contestations over land. A recent example of such a conflict will be given.
Conflicts over Development and Environmental Values: the International Ivory Trade in Zimbabwe's Historical Context
Authors: Hill Kevin A.
Published: June 2007

The international debate over sustainable utilisation of animal species often reaches a fever pitch, especially when Northern and Southern governments and NGOs clash. This paper examines one such clash in its proper historical framework: the recent debate over the international ivory trade. The article outlines Zimbabwe's pro-ivory trade position, with special attention paid to Zimbabwe's attempts to transform a local culture which has been hostile to wildlife conservation. Specifically, the paper argues that the current majority government is trying to transform the formally racist Rhodesian preservationist policies into utilisationist policies so that local people can realise some material benefit from the conservation of the African elephant, even in face of fierce opposition from the Western world.
Ecological Change in North India: Deforestation and Agrarian Distress in the Ganga-Jamna Doab 1800-1850
Authors: Mann Michael
Published: June 2007

The British were not the only foreign rulers to bring ecological catastrophe to India. Large areas of forest had been destroyed under the Moguls in the 17th century. The Moguls' former hunting grounds west and south west of Agra had disappeared by 1800. That the residency in Fatehpur Sikri was deserted after the wells had silted up was a further clear indication of this deterioration. Yet the reasons for this overexploitation differed greatly from those of the British rulers. It can be assumed that it was demographic pressures which led to forest clearances in the 17th century. Timber was needed to build new houses and even towns, whose citizens in turn needed firewood, and land to cultivate. In the context of the transformation of Indian agrarian structures by the colonial rulers, totally different mechanisms were in operation. * Until 1835 the revenue rate in the Ceded and Conquered Provinces was over three quarters, only being reduced to 'half the net rental assets' after 1855. Only then did the revenue rate again match that in force under the Moguls, although its flexibility was still not as great. * The market for land created by the British laid a value upon the soil making it a tradeable commodity. Whilst there had been some limited private property in pre-British times, land had not been a marketable asset. These two prerequisites put in place by the colonial rulers set the ecological catastrophe in motion. For the peasants, a vicious circle of revenue and debt payment, cash crop plantation and permanent acquisition of new land was created just to meet the new demands. Forests were cleared to gain new land for cash crops, whilst cultivation of food was increasingly marginalised. Ever greater demands were put upon the soil, hardly leaving time for its regeneration and in many parts of the Doab, but particularly in the Agra Division in the second half of the 19th century, it was totally exhausted. This change was completed within more or less 25 years (1805-1830). The devastation of the ecology of the Doab, which manifested itself so appallingly in 1837-38 led to the impoverishment both of large sections of the population and of the region.
Famine in a Forest Tract: Ecological Change and the Causes of the 1897 Famine in Chotanagpur, Northern India
Authors: Damodaran Vinita
Published: June 2007

This paper addresses one of the most under-researched areas of resource use and management in rural India, that of 'wild resources', and explores the links between ecological change, famine and poverty. It is argued that once deforestation started to take place (in the context of the exploitation of the indigenous people by an outsider landlord class, aided by the colonial state), and the forest department denied people access to traditional famine foods, the Chotanagpur region found itself for the first time subject to the kind of vulnerability to famine that had affected lowland populations for a much longer period.
Imperial Science Rescues a Tree: Global Botanic Networks, Local Knowledge and the Transcontinental Transplantation of Cinchona
Authors: Philip Kavita
Published: June 2007

During the course of the nineteenth century, the rise in the number of British troops stationed in India, along with the increasing number of women and children who joined the colonial administrators, made military and public health a matter of imperial concern. Malaria in particular was responsible for thousands of English deaths. Worried at the South American monopoly over the quinine trade, British colonial administrators and scientists put together an ambitious plan that was to result in the establishment of an enormous global network of exploration, collection and systematisation of botanical knowledge, a centralised array of botanical gardens, and a colonial science of natural resource management. This paper follows the official records of the quinine story, in particular the memoirs of Sir Clements Markham, an employee of the East India Company and an amateur geographer who volunteered to undertake the exploration of the Peruvian forests in search of the cinchona tree. I use the case of the cinchona tree to examine the rhetoric of colonial science in conjunction with its economic and political functions. I suggest that in order to understand how ideas of progress are constituted by historically specific constructions of nature, we can draw methods and insights from at least three fields. I write this from within the field of Science Studies, which I seek to open up to insights from the study of colonial political economy and from the field of Environmental History
Meteorological Service in Fifteenth Century Sandwich
Authors: Brimblecombe Peter
Published: June 2007

Minstrels (or waits) in the 15th century Port of Sandwich walked the streets at night and woke mariners with information about wind directions. The provision of this simple meteorological service may have been required to encourage merchant ships to use the harbour, which had become particularly tortuous as a result of silt accumulation in the River Stour. An increased frequency of east winds during the Little Ice Age would also have made the harbour difficult for sailing ships to leave.
The Control of Alkali Pollution in St. Helens, 1862-1890
Authors: Hawes Richard
Published: June 2007

The attempts of Angus Smith and his colleagues to control alkali pollution after 1863 are usually seen as being a success. This study of St. Helens, Lancashire, once an important centre of soda production, shows that although the alkali inspectors were eventually able to limit the release of hydrochloric acid gas, they found great difficulty in curbing the generation of other noxious fumes, particularly hydrogen sulphide. Despite the intervention of the town council, prohibitive legislation and many critical reports, the manufacturers were reluctant to adopt a technique of sulphur recovery or to change the way they dumped their waste acid. Local economic importance proved to be sufficiently powerful to deflect regulation from any source.
Humans and Forests in Pre-colonial Southeast Asia
Authors: Reid Anthony
Published: June 2007

Until about fifteen centuries ago the interaction of humans with the Southeast Asian rainforest was primarily one of interdependence. Trees were felled for food and aromatic woods, and in dryer zones to burn in a process of shifting cultivation, but population pressures were low enough for routine regeneration. Before the modern era of plantation agriculture and mechanised logging, two great changes had already affected the environment profoundly: (1) the elaboration of permanently irrigated rice fields in upland valleys, creating substantial areas of permanent agricultural land progressively from about the 8th Century, and making possible greater concentrations of population, both agricultural and urban; (2) the rapid growth of commercial agriculture from the fifteenth century, primarily in pepper but later also sugar, cloves, gambier and coffee, which permanently deforested large areas of Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Vietnam and the Malayan Peninsula. Parallel with this development was the increased commercial felling of forest trees for the export of sandalwood from Timor and sappanwood from Siam. The retreat of large mammals, notably elephant and rhinoceros, was one measure of these changes.
The Environmental Impact of Industrialisation in South Wales in the Nineteenth Century: 'Copper Smoke' and the Llanelli Copper Company
Authors: Newell Edmund , Watts Simon
Published: June 2007

The development of industrial towns on the south-western side of the south Wales coalfield, such as Llanelli, Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot, was based to a large extent upon the growth of metal industries. This paper focuses on a major environmental problem associated with this development: that of 'copper smoke' produced by the region's important copper smelting industry. The first part of the paper discusses the social, economic and legal history of the copper smoke problem, and the technology employed to control emissions. The second part deals with the chemical composition of copper smoke and estimates the output and dispersion of copper smoke and other metal fumes from the Llanelli Copper Co.'s works in the 1860s using a Gaussian plume model. It is argued that the extent of long and short range deposition of sulphur and heavy metals from these works was significantly high and that the industry was therefore a major polluter, particularly when copper smelting was at its peak in the region in the mid- to late- nineteenth century.