Review of Global Environmental History: 10,000 BC to AD 2000 by Ian Gordon Simmons
Economic historian Paolo Malanima reviews a work of ambitious scale by geographer Ian Gordon Simmons.
Economic historian Paolo Malanima reviews a work of ambitious scale by geographer Ian Gordon Simmons.
An interview with Joachim Radkau, professor of history at the University of Bielefeld in Germany and author of Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment..
Using case studies from Austria and Kansas, this paper compares the socioecological structures of the agricultural communities immigrants left to those that they found and created on the other side of the Atlantic.
The present paper examines the chronic occurrence of famine in Manbhum, Bengal District, after the 1860s due to environmental degradation as a result of colonial intervention and an increase in commodity production and the expansion of monoculture.
This paper attempts to explore the historic impacts of forest politics and policy on social equity and ecology in Nepal’s Terai region. It is suggested that past forest politics and policies may continue to influence the forest bureaucracy in Nepal and, hence, shape present-day forest management in the Terai.
The interview with Piero Bevilacqua touches on a broad range of subjects: From the use of pesticides to the “Green Revolution”; from GMOs to biodynamic and biological agriculture, and the respect of biodiversity; from modern farming’s wasteful use of water to Common Agricultural Policy with its nonsustainable exploitation of farmland.
Using Northern Ghana as a case study, this paper questions the usefulness of regional data for understanding food insecurity, and shows that the supposedly novel ideas of the present in fact have a strong colonial lineage.
The article reflects on how to feed a growing world population in a context of natural resource scarcity and considers the 2012 World Water Day as a means to open an international debate in order to identify strategic choices capable of combining, globally and locally, the objective of food security with that of water resource protection.
Fei Sheng analyzes the ecological factors in China that spurred migration to Australia at a time when the discovery of gold as a natural resource made the country an ideal migration destination. He shows how Chinese migrants applied their environmental experience in a white settler colony.
This article examines climate and perceptions of climate as factors in the migration and settlement history of the western United States. It focuses on two regions of great interest in the nineteenth century: The so-called Great American Desert in the western Great Plains and the Mexican state of Alta California, which after 1848 became the US state of California.