Perspectives Article
Local Effects of Global Forest Conservation Policy: On Zapotec Resistance against a Protected Natural Area
This article looks at the controversial issue of forest conservation in the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.
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Perspectives Article
Reclaiming the Seeds, Becoming “Peasants”: On-Farm Agrobiodiversity Conservation and the Making of Farmers’ Collective Identity
This article examines the significance of “peasant seeds” and outlines the development of the “Peasant Seed Network” movement.
Perspectives Article
Towards a Political Ecology of Scale in High Mountains
This article looks at how the ongoing processes of border-making are experienced and negotiated by the ethnic minorities who live in the Himalayan mountain peripheries.
Perspectives Article
Jhum Cultivation versus the New Land Use Policy: Agrarian Change and Transformation in Mizoram
This paper adds to current debates surrounding jhum cultivation, forest conservation, and agrarian change in Mizoram by looking at jhum cultivation in relation to the New Land Use Policy introduced by the government of Mizoram in 1984.
Perspectives Article
Psychotropy and the Patterns of Power in Human History
Human cultures have exploited bottlenecks in commodities or resources in order to gain power and control. This essay looks at two examples of psychotropic mechanisms being used in this way
Perspectives Article
Erythroxylum Coca and Its Discontents: A Neurohistorical Case Study of Cocaine, Pleasure, and Empires
This article looks at the history of the plant Erythroxylum coca—a natural source of cocaine—which offers one way to trace the interaction between a physiological agent in history and the growth of empires.
Perspectives Article
Arrested Development? Energy Crises, Fuel Supplies, and the Slow March to Modernity in Scotland, 1450–1850
This article considers the various factors that hindered intensification of industrial activity and retarded national economic growth. Eventually the pressure of social and cultural factors encouraged abandonment of the use of an abundant and relatively cheap resource—peat—and promoted the use of a scarcer and more expensive alternative—coal.
Perspectives Article
“The People’s Fuel”: Turf in Ireland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
This article examines in detail the trends in turf production and consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, noting its striking resilience.
Perspectives Article
The Social Metabolism of European Industrialization: Changes in the Relation of Energy and Land Use from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
This essay offers an historical sociometabolic perspective on the changing relationship between energy and land use during industrialization.
Perspectives Article
Fossil Fuels Consumption and Economic Growth in Italy in the Last Two Centuries
The introduction of new energy carriers and of engines able to transform energy into mechanical work was a necessary, although not unique, condition of modern growth in Europe and subsequently in the rest of the world.