Review of Global Environmental History: 10,000 BC to AD 2000 by Ian Gordon Simmons
Economic historian Paolo Malanima reviews a work of ambitious scale by geographer Ian Gordon Simmons.
Economic historian Paolo Malanima reviews a work of ambitious scale by geographer Ian Gordon Simmons.
Using case studies from Austria and Kansas, this paper compares the socioecological structures of the agricultural communities immigrants left to those that they found and created on the other side of the Atlantic.
The present paper examines the chronic occurrence of famine in Manbhum, Bengal District, after the 1860s due to environmental degradation as a result of colonial intervention and an increase in commodity production and the expansion of monoculture.
The interview with Piero Bevilacqua touches on a broad range of subjects: From the use of pesticides to the “Green Revolution”; from GMOs to biodynamic and biological agriculture, and the respect of biodiversity; from modern farming’s wasteful use of water to Common Agricultural Policy with its nonsustainable exploitation of farmland.
Using Northern Ghana as a case study, this paper questions the usefulness of regional data for understanding food insecurity, and shows that the supposedly novel ideas of the present in fact have a strong colonial lineage.
The article reflects on how to feed a growing world population in a context of natural resource scarcity and considers the 2012 World Water Day as a means to open an international debate in order to identify strategic choices capable of combining, globally and locally, the objective of food security with that of water resource protection.
This article aims to disclose the nature and underlying causes of the recent food crises focusing on both conjunctural and structural factors; to analyze the socio-economic and geopolitical impacts of food price increases; to identify the possible strategies to minimize the trade-off between the increase of agricultural production and the sustainable use of natural resources.
Using the Central Coast of California as a case study, this article argues that a nexus of ambitious growers and a growing state agricultural bureaucracy worked to create a “brand name” and teach cultivation approaches with increased production and expanded markets. But these same actors also made efforts to keep the long-term health of the industry and the community in mind.