Environment and History (journal)

National metabolism of the US grew exponentially from 1790 to 2000, increasing 1600 per cent…

McQuaid advances the view that NASA consistently misread the importance of the most popular science-based political movement of the late twentieth century.

Allen, Robert C., and Ian Keay. “Bowhead Whales in the Eastern Arctic, 1611–1911: Population Reconstruction with Historical Whaling.” Environment and History 12, no. 1 (Feb., 2006): 89–113. doi:10.3197/097634006776026791. As early as 1611 bowhead whales resident between the east coast of Greenland and the island of Spitzbergen were the subject of intensive commercial hunting effort by Dutch, German and British whalers. By 1911 there was no significant, permanent population of bowhead whales living in these waters.

This paper examines the relationship between prevailing weather systems and colonialism in the context of Spanish possessions in the Pacific from Magellan till the end of the nineteenth century.

This two-part paper examines the origins, spread, and practices of professional forestry in Southeast Asia, focusing on key sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

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

This paper examines the historical development of three beaches, and the subsequent implications for the beaches during the inevitable big seas and cyclones. This coastal environmental history informs local coastal communities about the importance of foresight in protecting dune systems in their natural state.

Burning cultivation of peatlands has been practised in peat-rich countries at one time or other throughout Western Europe. In these and other peat-rich countries, the inclusion of the emissions from burning cultivation could substantially alter historical carbon dioxide emission estimates.

Two substantive criticisms of Warren Dean’s ‘wood hypothesis’ are offered here: the wood hypothesis is accurate in general but underestimated the industrial consumption of fossil fuels, without conclusively rejecting the competing ‘hydroelectricity’ hypothesis; the method used for estimating potential energy supply from forest area was erroneous.

Germans arrived in Tanzania with a vision of scientific forestry derived from European and Asian templates of forest management that was premised on the creation of forest reserves emptied of human settlement. They found a landscape and human environment that was not amenable to established practices of rotational forestry.