City, Country, Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History
A collection of essays addressing the collaboration of human and natural forces in the creation of cities, the countryside, and empires.
A collection of essays addressing the collaboration of human and natural forces in the creation of cities, the countryside, and empires.
This issue of RCC Perspectives offers insights into similarities and differences in the ways people in Asia have tried to master and control the often unpredictable and volatile environments of which they were part
Four centuries of colonial extraction lead to severe ecological degradation of the forests and soils of the Atlantic region of Brazil. This article discusses the management of soil fertility and the relationship between agricultural practices and forest stands based on agricultural manuals published in Brazil over a period of more than two centuries.
Recent research on Africa has emphasised conservation and trypanosomiasis control as the major factors, which first motivated colonial officials and scientists to embark on forestry preservation and bush clearing policies. This paper contends that in Chepalungu, Kenya, forestry preservation and bush clearing were implemented with the objective to create a racially and tribally segregated landscape.
This paper explores imperial forestry networks by focusing on a single individual, Sir David Hutchins, who spent the final years of his life in New Zealand extolling the need for scientific forest management in the Dominion.
Environmental building in Australia as a form of communing with nature.
Life as a Hunt chronicles the history of the Valley Bisa people, their evolving landscapes and knowledge, and the ‘conservation battlefield’ their homeland has become.
Frawley’s essay explores oyster populations and technologies in southern Queensland in the late nineteenth century.
Tom Griffiths argues for the importance of environmental history, and gives us three reasons for the uniqueness of the environmental history of Australia.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Alexander R. D. Zahara and Myra J. Hird explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and “trash animals” in particular. They compare vermin control practiced in Canada’s waste sites with the freedom of ravens to explore waste sites within Inuit communities, arguing that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes.