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.
Between the 1890s and 1920s street trees became a more prominent feature in streetscapes across New South Wales, Australia.
This paper explores how an expert body, The Investigation of Atmospheric Pollution, was established in the face of different interests and agendas, the importance (and difficulties) of technical standard-setting with reference to environmental pollution, and, finally, the uses of environmental monitoring.
This article traces contentious debates throughout the years leading up to and following the creation of the Australian Forestry School, between and among leading foresters throughout the British Empire born outside of Australia on the one hand, and, on the other, professionally trained foresters and Australian politicians who had been born in Australia.
The pollution of the Herbert River with tin dredge effluent after 1944 sparks the first Act specifically to control water pollution in the Australian state of Queensland.
This paper explores how economics, technology, politics and ecology interacted in causing ups and downs in the production of traditional iron making, and its subsequent decline in the early twentieth century.
Using Garrett Hardin’s concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, this article examines Spanish overexploitation of both the oyster beds around the island of Cubagua and the native peoples along the mainland by competing groups of Spaniards.
This study argues that when farmers raised concerns about miners’ activities, ‘precautionary stewardship’ of the environment designed to stop entrepreneurial practices harmful to the environment was not a concern. This was a struggle over the ownership of the means of production by two competing forms of capitalism—a characteristic intra-class as well as intra-racial conflict.
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 explores the dynamics of failure to strike a solution to the problem of invasive species in the form of water hyacinth through an examination of the competing domains of bureaucracy, science and private commercial interests in a colonial context.
