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.
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.
Disrupted Landscapes focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation’s forests, farmlands, and rivers.
Eriksson and Arnell address the ecological and cultural effects of the Swedish infield system in Scandinavia. Their essay sheds light on how the human construction and management of infields maintained a spatial continuity that greatly altered, and continues to impact, how humans and other organisms have developed.
Kluiving and Hamel explore why the Anthropocene emerged. They suggest that an analysis of global changes in human niche construction using geoarchaeological data offers new perspectives on the causes and effects of the Anthropocene.
A visual exploration of the settlement of Australia’s Mallee country by Europeans in the twentieth century.
In 2000, the government restored land resources to the indigenous people of Zimbabwe. The chaotic land reform caused widespread environmental problems.