This article proposes a strong role for environmental history in informing current policy and debate in the policy field of sustainability (or, sustainable development).
The Spanish Law of common lands reduction (1855) ordered the Forester Corps (Public Works Department) to prepare a survey of grazing lands, scrublands and woodlands to be sold and the ones to be retained…
Sacred groves in the ancient Mediterranean are compared with surviving groves of South India, particularly Uttara Kannada, to evaluate the roles of these refugia in maintaining balance between human groups and the ecosystems of which they are part.
This article examines the influence of empire forestry on the environmental movement in the United States. It particularly examines the British Indian forestry exemplar, and traces its influence on environmental thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
This paper discusses the historical identity of the Indian Forest Service, the elite environmental organisation which controlled and managed nearly a third of India during the late nineteenth century.
This paper employs the case of India’s forest administration to illustrate how the political-economic environment, authoritarianism and internal culture have militated against forest conservation and the incorporation of rural interests in forest management.
The article analyses the trajectory of a group of Brazilian intellectuals from 1786 to 1810, who inaugurated a systematic critique of the environmental damage caused by colonial economy in Brazil, especially forest destruction and soil erosion.
The ‘received wisdom’ is that bushes result from overgrazing, displace the climax community, and lower carrying capacity. In contrast, this paper is informed by non-equilibrium ecological and range management science, as well as recent challenges to degradationist interpretations about environmental change in Africa.
The British Solomon Islands Protectorate government, in the 1910s, encouraged logging operations on Vanikolo in order to diversify the economy and extend government control in the easternmost islands…
Despite the devastating impact that flooding, drought and fire associated with the 1982/3 and 1997/8 El Nino events had on both the natural environment and human society, there is little information on the persistence or impact similar events may have had in the ‘deeper’ past…
