floods

Istvan Praet, Carson Fellow from July to December 2011, talks about the perception of catastrophes among the Chachi, the Amerindian inhabitants of Esmeraldas, a lowland region on the Pacific coast.

Only in recent times have serious historical studies been published about floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storm tides, forest-fires, and other natural disasters and their effects on human life.

While many saw the landscape transformation which followed the European settlement of New Zealand as firmly within the prevailing ‘doctrine of progress,’ this transformation was viewed with misgivings by others, who observed how deforestation led to erosion and floods, and advocated more prudent forest management.

The authors take Shucheng County as a case study to reconstruct the variations of population and land use in the last 500 years, and to examine their influence on the environmental changes in this region.

This essay traces the development of the physical and cultural infrastructure of colonial flood control in the Indus valley.

This paper uses archaeological and documentary records to look at the human impact on a montane environment, the pre-alps of Savoy, over the long-term, from pre-history up to the pre-modern period.