With over 25 percent of its land set aside in national parks and other protected areas, Costa Rica is renowned worldwide as “the green republic.” Sterling Evans explores the establishment of the country’s national park system.
This paper addresses one of the most under-researched areas of resource use and management in rural India, that of “wild resources,” and explores the links between ecological change, famine and poverty.
The majority of articles in this issue of Environment and History shed some light on the relationship between colonialism and the environment and on colonial constructions of nature.
The rapid expansion of European culture since the fifteenth century has greatly altered the face of the countryside all over the world. Among the most dramatic examples of this are the changes in North American nature wrought by Europeans since the seventeenth century…
Early European travellers were impressed by the trees and forests of the Owambo region, north Namibia. As they became better acquainted with the Owambo way of life, Europeans began to warn of deforestation in the region.
Ringbarking, as a means of destroying trees, was known and practised from the earliest years of British settlement in New South Wales…
This essay explores the progression of theoretical models and empirical research linked to the understanding of the capacity of forested systems to regulate the hydrological regimes of a given area.
A frontier environmental history of Cossack settlers in the North Caucasus reveals some of the weaknesses of the Russian imperial mission.
Deforestation of mountain slopes in Java began to be perceived as a problem around 1850. This led to the establishment of a colonial Forest Service and, from c. 1890 onwards, to the creation of protected forests.
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…
