Environment and History (journal)

After centuries of seclusion, Pescasseroli and the upper Sangro River valley in Italy’s central Apennine Mountains began opening to the world in the early twentieth century…

As the millennium approaches it seems that environmental historians are increasingly drawn to the task of writing world history…

Deforestation of mountain slopes in Java began to be perceived as a problem around 1850. This led to the establishment of a colonial Forest Service and, from c. 1890 onwards, to the creation of protected forests.

As the British entered the Mizo hills (part of the Indo-Burmese range of hills, then known as the Lushai hills) to chase the headhunting tribal raiders and try to gain control over them by securing a foothold in the heart of the hills at Aizawl, they witnessed an amazing ecological phenomenon: a severe famine apparently caused by rats.

Deposits of coarse gravels which line the southern margin of the Tay Estuary entrance channel east of Tayport support a thriving population of mussels. Large numbers of Eider ducks, dependent on mussels for food, overwinter in this part of the estuary.

Stapledon’s suspicions of inductive science and reductionist economics, his concern with holism, ‘spiritual values’ and ‘the nature of things’ and his emphasis upon breadth of vision and the cultivation of the imagination was in stark contrast to many scientists of the day.

Detailed examination of the fabric records suggests that there is no simple, direct relationship between coal use and fabric repair costs. Complicating the relationship are a whole set of complex human systems involved in identification of decay, the style of restoration and management of the repair work.

This article compares Australian and Canadian forestry histories, with particular reference to New South Wales and British Columbia respectively.

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.

This paper suggests an approach for using different types of data sources, and for bringing together understandings of ecosystem dynamics and of people’s interaction with the environment, and thereby achieving ‘closure’ in a highly contested terrain.