Over the Colonial period, prolonged drought episodes had severe impacts on all sectors of society, particularly indigenous rural populations. This paper employs a variety of colonial historical records to document the nature and extent of these impacts within the context of prevailing social, political and economic conditions.
This issue of Environment and History completes a third year of the new journal, and presents a useful opportunity for reflection about the state of the discipline.
This commentary steps back from the specifics of the foregoing papers in order to take another look at wider historiographical questions with special reference to two, broad issues: the interface between environmental history and the history of ecology, and perspectives on environmental history from the viewpoint of practitioners from different disciplinary, national and regional contexts.
Commentary on the articles in this special issue of Environment and History, “Ecological Visionaries/Ecologised Visions.”
Eugene P. Odum and Howard T. Odum were at the forefront of the ‘new ecology’ of ecosystems, in the 1950s and 1960s. They were also firmly committed to bringing both natural and human ecosystems into accord with the laws of ecoenergetics (the flow of energy through a system).
This paper gives an account of the participatory, democratic and pluralistic perspectives of Boulding and other important figures in the General Systems Community (GSC).
Coutinho’s analysis compares and contrasts claims put forward in the journal The Ecologist between 1970 and 1993, with those advanced in the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development published in book form under the title Our Common Future in 1987.
The ‘domination of nature’ is a concept now fraught with negative connotations; however, it was not always thus.
‘Wilderness’ has become a widely used term in environmentalist discussion as a symbol for caring about nature. Haila delves into the historical background of the term.
This special issue of Environment and History stems from a series of conference sessions that attempted to address the gap between environmental history and the history of ecology.
