Reconstructing the environment of Lesotho in order to assess soil erosion at different time scales, highlights conflicting views about the initiation of accelerated erosion.
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…
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 forest area in Switzerland has been expanding for more than one hundred years, after a long period of contraction culminating in an apparently accelerated phase of deforestation in the first half of the nineteenth century…
Mention of the island nation of Madagascar conjures up images of exotic nature, rampant deforestation, and destructive erosion. Popular descriptions of the island frequently include phrases such as ‘ecological mayhem’ or ‘barren landscape.’
The two landscapes, Nevada Test Site and Yosemite National Park, have, on the surface, very little in common. However, in recent years, a number of nuclear and post-nuclear landscapes have been praised for attracting rare species of flora and fauna…
Feelings of hatred, fear and alienation towards the Australian environment have been amongst the major themes of Australian history. Farmers especially have been characterised as hating trees, particularly in the densely treed, difficult to clear rainforests of eastern Australia…
The general view in Swedish historiography of an inherent conflict between iron-making and the practice of slash-and-burn is questioned on the basis of this palaeoecological case study of repeated slash-and-burn cultivation from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in a mining district of central Sweden.
Director Bernhard Sallmann returns to Lusatia to complete his trilogy about the region by exploring its dreamscapes, orienting himself somewhere between the scars of an industrial past and signs that nature is beginning to reclaim the degraded environments that remain.
This paper analyses the turning-point in attitudes to the most distinctive feature of one nation’s indigenous environment.
