Christine Hansen uses the concept of deep time to challenge the idea that never-before-witnessed events are unprecedented. Using the case of a massive firestorm in 2009 in southeast Australia, she calls into question the shallow temporal frames through which deep time environmental phenomena are understood in Australian settler culture and offers an insight into often unnoticed ways in which contemporary society struggles with the colonial legacy.
In the context of current concerns within the environmental humanities to challenge the idea that humans are somehow irreducible to nature, the authors in this article take up the much-neglected history of the idea of human exceptionality itself, arguing that this form of humanist discourse often forgets its own contingencies and instabilities, and its comprehensively violent inheritances.
João Afonso Baptista uses an ethnographic approach to analyze ecological knowledge in Angolan forests as shaped by local dwellers and represented by (neo)colonial processes of distinction and separation, namely the external knower and the object known.
The author examines the advent of native forest conservation in New Zealand’s Colony and the role of Thomas Potts in advocating exotic tree-planting as a response to timber shortage.
This article examines the environmental impacts of Cantonese gold-miners in New Zealand and situates its research in both Chinese environmental history and comparative global environmental history.
The author attempts to reframe the classical distinction in conservation biology between native and invasive species by referring to migration and settlement of nonhuman beings as diasporas. She uses the introduction of Canadian beavers in Chilean Tierra del Fuego in 1947 as a case study.
Dorothee Brantz and Avi Sharma discuss the history of green urban visions, looking at historical precedents of the modern green city.