Wild Earth 13, no. 2/3, features essays on the biological and cultural significance of snakes, the populist right in America, rednecks as wildlife managers, and mosquitoes across the Florida Everglades.
After traders from East India Company discovered Assam’s wild tea plants in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the commodification of this resource in the eastern border of Bengal radically transformed the ecological condition of the region.
Through a short account of French reclamation in Algeria, this paper shows that it is between two divergent notions of environmental agency—environments acted upon and environments acting—that unruliness emerges as a provocative and potentially useful theme for environmental historians.
Combating malaria through travel, diet, natural remedies, and architecture in early modern England.
Epidemic yellow fever plagued New Orleans due to a series of environmental and demographic changes enabled by the rise of sugar production and urban development.
Rather than revealing the power of nature to shape human history, yellow fever is a disease that historically entangles nature and culture.
An animated Disney film featuring the Seven Dwarves, showing various methods of combating the transmission of malaria by Anopheles mosquitoes.
After yellow fever was firmly ensconced via an ecological reconfiguration connected to sugar (c. 1640–90) it underpinned a military and political status quo, keeping Spanish America Spanish. After 1780, and particularly in the Haitian revolution, yellow fever undermined that status quo by assisting independence movements in the American tropics.
Mosquito Empires, spanning nearly three centuries and the histories of many peoples, nations, and empires in the American tropical world, places considerable responsibility upon mosquitoes for the course of events in this region.
