"Editorial" for Environment and History 4, no.2, Australia special issue (June, 1998)
There is an urgency and a fracture to Australian environmental history…
There is an urgency and a fracture to Australian environmental history…
The aim of this study was to analyse the swift land-use transition, from nomadic to agricultural, in the last colonised landscape of northern Sweden. Using historical documents and maps together with modern maps and a field survey, the authors wanted to link land-use patterns as strongly as possible to landscape features and ecosystems.
The author argues in this paper that the basis of these cattlemen’s use of fire to manage the land was their understanding of the practices during the ‘pioneering’ period of European settlement and of Aboriginal people before that.
The modernization, the declinist, and the inclinist paradigms of the late twentieth century, despite their differences, all tended to frame environmental change in a unilinear Nature-to-Culture fashion, which in turn entailed homogenizing the agency, process, and outcome of environmental change. This article examines the characteristics of each paradigm, as well as some of the paradoxes that have arisen in their wake. Finally, it looks to alternative approaches.
This study examines the role of colonial foresters in introducing new socioeconomic arrangements that resulted in increased poverty among the Tonga, Shona, and Ndebele communities in the Gwai Forest Reserve of North-Western Matabeleland, Zimbabwe.
This article examines the long-term anthropogenic factors that have affected the Atlantic Coastal Forest.
Douglas Sheil reviews the book Traditional Forest-Related Knowledge Sustaining Communities, Ecosystems and Biocultural Diversity by John A. Parrotta and Ronald L. Trosper.