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.
This paper explores how economics, technology, politics and ecology interacted in causing ups and downs in the production of traditional iron making, and its subsequent decline in the early twentieth century.
The Reserve Mining Company discharged taconite tailings directly into Lake Superior for 25 years, creating a massive tailings delta and polluting the waters of the lake. When the EPA took Reserve to court in 1973, the town of Silver Bay was divided between a struggle for economic well-being and public health.
This article is a critique of the “open door” development policy promoted by the Liberian government after World War II, and shows the environmental and social impact of state reliance on foreign direct investment.
This article examines the energy transition in the iron industry and studies the consequence of this switch to coal-fueling technology upon forests.
Alok Amatya studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay Walking with the Comrades (2010). He suggests that narratives of conflict over the extraction of natural resources can be studied as the corpus of “resource conflict literature,” thus generating a global comparative framework for the study of contemporary indigenous struggles.
