An introduction to papers delivered in 1992 at an international and interdisciplinary symposium on environmental history at the Lammi Biological Station of the University of Helsinki.
The gap between the sciences and the humanities persists in our intellectual life, with significant consequences. The new field of environmental history represents an opportunity to bridge that gap.
Olwig asserts that the discipline we now know as environmental history owes a great deal of its impetus to the emergence at the beginning of the nineteenth century of a socially engaged and environmentally committed interdisciplinary ‘proto-discipline.’
The present environment of Australia represents a palimpsest which records a history of past climates, nutrient poor soils, burning, and increasing aridity. The details of the history are not readily disentangled…
Introduction to a special issue that reflects the rapid growth of research in environmental history now apparent throughout the South Asian region.
Two broad themes taken up in the literature will be the focus of this essay: how far colonialism was an ecological watershed, and how producers responded to new pressures. The third issue is of what we can or should learn (or unlearn) from the colonial experience.
This paper contends that recent scholarly interest in systems of colonising knowledge, whether called ‘scientific forestry,’ or ‘development,’ has paid inadequate attention to the historical processes shaping such knowledge production in specific colonial locations.
Professional German foresters played an important role in shaping the course of forest management in India during the last century. It is to Sir Dietrich Brandis that the credit for the introduction of scientific methods of management is given…
The Kautiliya Arthasastra is a famous treatise on state-craft which within its state policies includes ecological concerns…
The science of palynology has proved to be a good tool to reconstruct the past, to build up archaeological scenarios and to record climatic changes during the Holocene period. However, the terms employed to denote climate, like arid and humid, are often used without proper definitions, ignoring intricacies of climate…
