bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Historical Evidence for Climate Instability and Environmental Catastrophes in Northern Syria and the Jazira: The Chronicle of Michael the Syrian
Authors: Widell Magnus 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
Significant cataclysms occurred frequently throughout the history of northern Syria and the Jazira, and had severe short- and long-term implications on the region's economy and the social structure. This paper uses the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian, a Patriarch of Antioch in the late twelfth century a.d., as a representation of environmental and climatic catastrophes taking place in northern Syria and the Jazira in the third and early second Millennium b.c. The proportions, general frequency and the clustering tendency of the different disasters in the Chronicle are treated in detail, as well as their general economic, environmental and social significance. The article argues that diversified subsistence and a high degree of flexibility were essential for ancient Mesopotamian societies to absorb the many risks that life in this marginal semiarid environment involved.
Enclosing the River: Industrialisation and the 'Property Rights' Discourse in the Liri Valley (South of Italy), 1806-1916
Authors: Barca Stefania 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
The 'tragedy of the commons' narrative states the eco-efficiency of private property, but this is basically a theoretical assumption, nor it is supported by the environmental history of the industrial era. The Liri valley story, located at the periphery of the industrial revolution, provides an excellent opportunity for investigating the environmental impact of privatisation in water resources, and its social costs. The article also shows how, in the process of appropriating the energetic yield of water, early industrial capitalists participated in the emergence of the post-feudal discourse of private property and public good.
Sovereignty, Collective Ingenuity and Moral Economies: The Confluence of Transnational Trends, States and Local Strategies in the Pyrenees
Authors: Vaccaro Ismael 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
The expansion and consolidation of the state's sovereignty and the market economy in the Pyrenees, in northeast Spain, took place through the implementation of a series of territorialisation policies designed to reorganise the territory, its natural resources and its population. This process was supposed to introduce state-driven modernity into these valleys. These governmental technologies also specifically targeted common property. The explicit goal of such political schemes was to dismantle these putatively outdated managerial institutions. In this paper, however, I focus on three examples of commons endurance. Two collective institutions showing high degrees of ingenuity survived the pressure of market and state, and reformulated modernity from a local perspective while preserving or gaining access to natural resources for local communities. These institutions and the social agency that built them were clearly informed by the sets of values that constitute local moral economies. This paper thus examines local responses to the expansion of state-driven modernity as a hegemonic ideological framework, and sovereignty as its jurisdictional scaffold. These answers are analysed as institutional transformations, discursive elaborations, and as political conflicts.
Book Reviews
Authors: Ling Peter , Dobrovolny Susanne 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
Dianne Glave and Mark Stoll (eds), To Love the Wind and Rain: African Americans and Environmental History (PETER LING)
Mikko Saikku, This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain (SUSANNE DOBROVOLNY)
Water as a Weapon: The History of Water Supply Development in Nkayi District, Zimbabwe
Authors: Cleaver Frances 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
This paper argues that much historical and political analysis of Zimbabwe neglects a crucial resource: water. Using data from Nkayi district, evidence is presented to show how access to water rather than land has been the critical factor in its settlement and development. Water supplies were provided by the state during the first half of the century to support economic and fiscal policies and to render forced resettlement possible. During the years of struggle preceding and including the Liberation War, control over water was used as a weapon, and this remained a significant issue in the post-Independence period. Examples are offered of people's resistance to such control through non-cooperation in water development activities and the evolution of a culture of minimal water use strongly associated with concepts of solidarity and survival. Finally the implications of this historic legacy for current development initiatives are discussed.
Conservation, Control and Ecological Change: The Politics and Ecology of Colonial Conservation in Shurugwi, Zimbabwe.
Authors: McGregor JoAnn 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
The transformation of rural societies and their strategies of resource use in the colonial period was the outcome of contestation, negotiation and alliance on a number of different levels. Conservation ideas and policies have played an active part in this process, shaping as well as reflecting the nature of colonial rule. Though the appeal of conservation lies in invoking mutual benefits, the history of its implementation in Zimbabwe is one of authoritarianism and discrimination. For settlers, conservation entailed financial and other incentives: for Africans, it entailed coercion and punitive restrictions on resource use. Conservationist alarm provided not only a justification for state intervention, but also a legitimation for using force. Focusing first on official discourse and the conflict which accompanied the passage of early conservation legislation, this article then looks at the different interpretations of the effects of implementation in Shurugwi communal area. Shurugwi was particularly significant because it was the testing ground for early state interventions and was upheld as a model of successful state ‘development’ – a representation which allowed for the (forcible) reproduction of the same policies in different ecological contexts around the country.2 Policies justified as conservationist provoked some of the most widespread rural resistance3 and also created new environmental problems. Where local leaders welcomed state conservation interventions, they often did so for different reasons than those officials intended: adoption was not necessarily an endorsement of the policies’ technical value. As legitimate political authority at local level was tied to maintaining the fertility of the land, disputes over conservation were at the same time struggles over local authority. Such disputes drew on notions of the relationship between nature, community and ancestors which differed significantly from the ‘autonomous’ view of nature enshrined in natural science.4 Although local environmental knowledge is often more detailed and commonly incorporates a more accurate understanding of local conditions than officials’ technical ideas, local as much as official representations of ecological change are embedded in a political, economic and cultural context, and are neither shared nor uncontested.
Local Environmental Conservation Strategies: Karanga Religion, Politics and Environmental Control
Authors: Mukamuri B.B. 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
In southern and central Zimbabwe, religious and political authority is drawn from land guardianship cults. Intellectuals have emphasised the role of these cults in providing communal economic and ecological benefits. Schoffeleers, for example, stated: Territorial cults are rituals to counteract droughts, floods, blights, pests and epidemic disease afflicting cattle and man ... territorial cults function in respect of the well-being of the community, its fields and livestock ... and the general economic interests ... they also issue and enforce directives with regard to a community's use of the environment ... The impact of territorial cults on the ecological system is such that, borrowing Rappaport's phrase, we may justifiably speak of a 'ritually directed ecosystem'.1This article questions Schoffeleers' interpretation. It argues that local religious institutions are used by ruling lineages for political control, to grant preferential access to particular resources and to enhance political hegemony. The symbolism expressed in the rituals and environmental taboos is more powerful than the idiom of 'conservation'. Researchers should be more sceptical when they talk about a 'ritually controlled ecosystem'.
Artists with Axes
Authors: Bonyhady Tim 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
Nineteenth century artists have been widely identified as agents of environmental protection, particularly in the United States. But while their paintings and photographs sometimes helped to secure the protection of particular places, artists often showed little respect for the environment when they set about securing their views. This destructiveness may lie behind even those works which seem to express greatest awe before nature - causing us to reassess both the role of art and our attitude to it.
Man Against the Sea: Natural and Anthropogenic Factors in the Changing Morphology of Harngzhou Bay, circa 1000-1800
Authors: Elvin Mark , Ninghu Su 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
Inner Harngzhou Bay, on the east coast of China at approximately 30 degrees N, is an unstable macrotidal estuarine system whose geographical configuration has altered dramatically over the last thousand years. In particular, the mouth of the Qiartarng river has shifted twice: (1) in 1620 from a southern debouchement just to the north of Mount Kan to a central or mid-bay debouchement south of mount Herzhuang, and (2) in 1692-5 from this central debouchement to approximately its present northern exit. A thousand years ago there was an approximate balance between the deposition of sediments, mostly brought in by the tides from the mouth of the Yarngzii immediately to the north, and their removal by river flow, especially at periods of peak discharge, in conjunction with ebb tides. Human intervention made a major contribution to disrupting this equilibrium by the building of sea-walls, the diversion of rivers, and the reduction of peak discharge, in part by storing water in irrigation systems. The shift of the Yellow River to a predominantly southern course after 1194, and especially the increased discharge of fine-grain sediment at its sea-mouth as the result of hydraulic engineering in 1578-9, also played a part, by increasing the quantity of fine-grain sediments transported southwards down the coast. The committment of both local society and imperial government to complex and costly hydraulic systems in this area created forms of what may be termed 'technological lock-in', in other words a foreclosing of other options on the future use of labour, resources and administrative inputs, though release from the 'lock-in' could also sometimes occur as the result of shifts in the patterns of sediment deposition and erosion that were favourable to human economic interests. The present paper summarises and interprets previous work on the hydrology and hydraulics of this area, presents a preliminary reconstruction of the geographical pattern of change based on historical maps and documents, and outlines some of the analytical problems that will need to be addressed in the future. It also shows that, under certain circumstances, geomorphological change, partly anthropogenic in origin, can affect human social and economic life over relatively short periods (typically tens to hundreds of years). The conclusion is that long-term economic history without environmental history is, at best, lopsided and, at worst, misleading.
Reading Forest History Backwards:The Interaction of Policy and Local Land Use in Guinea's Forest-Savanna Mosaic, 1893-1993
Authors: Fairhead James , Leach Melissa 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
Sophisticated local agricultural and forest management techniques have underlain the creation and maintenance of the main landscape features in Kissidougou Prefecture of Guinea's forest-savanna transition zone. Social anthropological, oral historical, archival and aerial photographic evidence shows how over long periods, peri-village forest islands have been created from savannas, productive rice swamps from inland valleys, and productive upland soil and vegetation conditions from unimproved herbaceous savanna. From 1893, colonial policy was based on reading the region's environmental history backwards, assuming forest islands to be relics of a once-extensive dense humid forest cover which local agriculture and fire-setting had destroyed. Archival evidence shows how the deductions of botanists, agronomists and foresters, coupled with the assumptions of administrators and other visitors, mutually reinforced each other to create and sustain a vision of degradation so pervasive that it still underlies modern environmental policy. The paper examines how colonial and post-colonial policies conceived within this vision have interacted with local land use. Given varying administrative capabilities, it considers the extent to which changes in local practices have been conditioned by policy as opposed to other social, economic, political or ecological changes, and the extent to which environmental changes have fortuitously coincided with policy objectives.
In Our Own Image: The Environment and Society as Global Discourse
Authors: Redclift Michael 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
The environment is clearly shaped by human hands, but it is also shaped by the human mind. The paper examines the way in which the environment is produced, as intellectual capital. It asks about the extent to which the environment can be understood by science and through science. It explores the way in which science, as a cultural form, enables us to construct an environment which is 'manageable', but prevents us from coming to terms with increased uncertainty. Drawing on research about the Canadian frontier in the 1840s and current critiques of environmental economics, the paper concludes by suggesting that research on the global environment should recognise the existence of different, and divergent, understandings of what the global environment is, and how the problems associated with global environmental change can be addressed. This paper is about how the environment is produced. It is about the physical landscape that results from human activities and ingenuity, and the mental landscape that shapes these activities and is shaped by them. It asks whether our environment, any environment, can be understood by science or through science. It explores the way in which our science, as a cultural form, gives rise to our construction of the environment. When I say that the environment is a social construction, what do I mean? Here are some examples: these are the discourses.
Man and the Natural World: Reflections on History and Anthropology
Authors: Goody Jack 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
The efforts of both anthropologists and historians have been weakened by a failure to take into account what the other half were doing. Anthropologists have tended to see nature and culture as too harmoniously related in the simpler societies, overlooking evidence of the kind of ambivalence that is often regarded as typical of later societies. Modern historians, on the other hand, have tended to see new feelings of nature emerging in their chosen period. In Keith Thomas's Man and the Natural World, for example, the idea of development is closely tied to notions of the Enlightenment. A discussion of the cultural history of flowers demonstrates that what seems from a local point of view to be a rapid advance towards the modern may in fact be a catching up with other great traditions, earlier as well as wider.
'Unswept stone, besmeer'd by sluttish time': Air Pollution and Building Stone Decay in Oxford, 1790-1960.
Authors: Viles Heather 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
On 1st January 1790 the Oxford canal finally opened with the arrival in Oxford of 200 tons of cheap coal from the Midlands. This event was one important stimulus to the economic transformation of Oxford from a quiet university and market town to a large commercial and industrial centre. The advent of affordable coal in plentiful supply encouraged economic progress, but at the same time brought a largely silent pollution legacy which is still evident today. In this essay, I wish to argue that the issue of building stone decay induced by air pollution has been a major theme in the recognition of, and reaction to, 'the air pollution nuisance' in Oxford. Changing perceptions of the aesthetic appeal of decayed buildings; opposition to industrial and economic progress; increasing scientific understanding of the decay process; and a concern with conservation and preservation of the historic university centre have all been important strands within the history of air pollution here.
Historical Cadmium and Lead Pollution Studied in Growth Rings of Oak Wood
Authors: Eklund Mats , Bergbäck Bo , Lohm Ulrik 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
Time-defined oak wood segments and soil samples were used as a source of information on the cadmium and lead pollution process induced by the emissions that occurred from 1726 to 1840 around a Swedish alumworks. Trees growing during the time of the emissions contained elevated levels of both cadmium and lead, probably as a result of increased metal concentrations in the atmosphere. Younger trees, which started their growth after the emissions ceased contained no elevated levels of cadmium or lead. The only exception was one tree where the lead concentration of the soil was about 1700 mg/kg in the 10-20 cm layer. A conclusion that can be drawn is that a relatively small increase in the Cd/Pb content of the atmosphere can produce a substantial increase in the Cd/Pb concentrations in the wood. On the other hand, it takes much more Cd/Pb in a soil to produce similar concentrations of Cd/Pb in wood. The lead chronologies of some young trees in the immediate vicinity of the alumworks illustrate the dilution of lead in the environment, displaying decreasing lead concentrations over time. There are still, however, substantial amounts of lead present in the area shown both in the soil and the wood analysis, thereby again emphasising the long duration of lead pollution of an area.
Estimates of Air Pollution in York: 1381-1891
Authors: Hipkins S. , Watts S.F. 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
Plume dispersion modelling has been used to estimate the smoke and sulphur dioxide concentrations for historic York in five individual years, 1381, 1672, 1841, 1851, and 1891. Historical data concerning population, housing, industrial distribution, fuel imports and exports have been used to generate a source matrix for sulphur dioxide and smoke for the model. The general levels of pollutants implied by the results seem to be consistent with changes in York over the time-span studied. Maximum annual average sulphur dioxide concentrations (in central York) range between 10 and 120 mgm3 (1672 and 1861 respectively), and for smoke between 5 and 40 mgm-3 (1381 and 1861 respectively). The main sources of uncertaintity are implicit in the quality of the data set, which in this case due to certain peculiarities of York record keeping is thought to be good. Sensitivity analyses indicates that because the results of this model are estimates of annual average concentrations, they are likely to be relatively insensitive to changes of up to 20% in up to 15% of the source matrix providing the distribution of the errors in the historical data is random.
Environmental Histories of South Asia: A Review Essay
Authors: Rangarajan Mahesh 
Published: June 2007

Abstract

Ecological histories of South Asia are going through a growth phase. Within a few years of the first ecologically informed study of a peasant movement, there has been a welter of fresh monographs. From an initial focus on forests and irrigation, the agenda is also broadening out to include a range of sectors, from small dam systems to urban air pollution, from changing attitudes to fauna to histories of science. Yet, the unifying theme largely remains the nature and significance of the colonial experience. The only overview of the processes of change,
This Fissured Land
, is an ambitious attempt to span centuries and subregions to map the changing patterns of prudence and profligacy in resource use. Two broad themes taken up in the literature will be the focus of this essay: how far colonialism was an ecological watershed, and how producers responded to new pressures. The third issue is of what we can or should learn (or unlearn) from the colonial experience. Such a select reading of themes still omits a large corpus of work, but it can help focus attention on interpretive problems that may well be of wider interest.
The Attitude of Kautilya to Aranya
Authors: Ray Rita Ghosh 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
The Kautiliya Arthasastra is a famous treatise on state-craft which within its state policies includes ecological concerns, implicitly but effectively. The Kautiliya Arthasastra gives a vivid and lively description of different categories of forests. The essence of the text lies in the fact that it makes a clear departure from the Vedic texts and Puranas, where forest is depicted as an abode of demons and a place of exile for unfortunate kings and evil-doers. It is Kautiliya Arthasastra which for the first time stresses the economic importance of forests in the formulation of principles and policies of the state.
Past Environments through Palynology: A Short Appraisal with Reference to the Western Ghats
Authors: Meher-Homji V.M. 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
The science of palynology has proved to be a good tool to reconstruct the past, to build up archaeological scenarios and to record climatic changes during the Holocene period. However, the terms employed to denote climate, like arid and humid, are often used without proper definitions, ignoring intricacies of climate. Sometimes the species whose pollen grains are used as markers of dryness or wetness are themselves not very faithful indicators. In yet other cases the vegetation change registered through pollen spectrum is solely attributed to climate without considering the anthropic interference or other factors of environment like shifts in courses of river or pests and diseases. Taking the Indian region as an example where the spatial and temporal variations of climate are pronounced, the deficiencies in expressing the climate in its multifaceted complex, and in deriving the climate change, are exposed by a critical analysis of two well acclaimed papers on palaeo-palynology.
Colonialism and Professionalism: A German Forester in India
Authors: Saldanha Indra Munshi 
Published: June 2007

Abstract
Professional German foresters played an important role in shaping the course of forest management in India during the last century. It is to Sir Dietrich Brandis that the credit for the introduction of scientific methods of management is given. Brandis introduced seriousness and professionalism into Indian forest administration. But in general for Brandis German forestry served as a model for the establishment of systematic forest management in India. When the above is viewed in the light of the further fact that in Brandis' time the knowledge of tropical forests was extremely limited in Germany, a number of problematic issues emerge. The paper explores Brandis' relation with the British government. From the evidence available, it appears that Brandis often felt constrained by the 'narrow mindedness' and the 'prejudice and ignorance' of the government. It is argued that the systematic forestry introduced in India by Brandis was along the lines of forestry developed in very different social and ecological conditions, and that its development was greatly constrained by colonial interests.