This special issue of Environment and History stems from a series of conference sessions that attempted to address the gap between environmental history and the history of ecology.
‘Wilderness’ has become a widely used term in environmentalist discussion as a symbol for caring about nature. Haila delves into the historical background of the term.
This paper attempts to show the ways in which the recurring image of an older landscape served as a powerful metaphor in Chotanagpur’s resurgence.
Taylor seeks to describe the popular outdoor movement that he maintains has developed generically in both its ‘ideological evolution and its practical expression’ (16), from the earliest establishment of the Footpath Preservation Societies, through the Campaign for Access, and an Outdoor Movement on Wheels.
This paper examines age as a parameter in colonial and recent science. It then recounts attempts to impose an ordered progression of age classes on the forests of Victoria and Queensland according to the classical principles of forestry transmuted through an imperial model.
After some years of absence, I found myself again active in the Australian conservation movement. A forest was to be razed, not far from where this is being written, for a relatively small yield of saw-planks…
After centuries of seclusion, Pescasseroli and the upper Sangro River valley in Italy’s central Apennine Mountains began opening to the world in the early twentieth century…
Sacred groves in the ancient Mediterranean are compared with surviving groves of South India, particularly Uttara Kannada, to evaluate the roles of these refugia in maintaining balance between human groups and the ecosystems of which they are part.
This article examines the influence of empire forestry on the environmental movement in the United States. It particularly examines the British Indian forestry exemplar, and traces its influence on environmental thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
The article analyses the trajectory of a group of Brazilian intellectuals from 1786 to 1810, who inaugurated a systematic critique of the environmental damage caused by colonial economy in Brazil, especially forest destruction and soil erosion.
