The Amazon River Forest: A Natural History of Plants, Animals, and People
An investigation, based on both fieldwork and historical sources, of changing land use practices in the Amazonian floodplain forest.
An investigation, based on both fieldwork and historical sources, of changing land use practices in the Amazonian floodplain forest.
This study explores the hypothesis that a serious reduction in “landscape efficiency,” typified by significant landscape degradation, underlies the increase observed in external inputs and the corresponding loss of energy efficiency that the agrarian system has undergone over the last 150 years.
Imperfect Balance offers a balance of accessible writing and scholarly approaches to understanding the Western Hemisphere’s incredibly diverse landscapes, the human forces that shaped them, and the impact of this interaction on sustained human settlement.
Stoll traces the origins of nineteenth-century conservation, which grew out of a rich and heated discussion, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, about soil fertility, plant nutrition, and livestock management. More fundamental than any other resource, soil “became the focal point for a conception of nature as strictly limited.” The problem gave rise to a major disagreement about the wisdom of territorial expansion.
Most contributors to Agrarmodernisierung und Ökologische Folgen deal with the ecological consequences of farming and agriculture in twentieth-century Germany.
Brian Donahue offers an innovative, accessible, and authoritative history of the early farming practices of Concord, Massachusetts.
Presents state-of-the-art research on the impact of ongoing and anticipated economic policy and institutional reforms on agricultural development and sustainable rural resource in two East-Asian transition (and developing) economies—China and Vietnam.
Around the world, fields and forests are increasingly dominated by the market, mediated by science, and subjected to new modes of transnational environmental governance. This volume of RCC Perspectives presents ethnographic insights into the impacts of such environmental globalization.
This article argues that in contemporary Wayanad in Kerala, southern India, human-animal relations are embedded in a history of ecological modernity composed of three modes of encounter between agrarian change (capitalist settler agriculture) and forest conservation (state-led and globalizing). It suggests that the notions of “frontier,” “fortress,” and (precarious) “conviviality” best capture the historical and emerging environmental relations in this environment of crisis.
This paper adds to current debates surrounding jhum cultivation, forest conservation, and agrarian change in Mizoram by looking at jhum cultivation in relation to the New Land Use Policy introduced by the government of Mizoram in 1984.