This paper gives an account of the participatory, democratic and pluralistic perspectives of Boulding and other important figures in the General Systems Community (GSC).
Eugene P. Odum and Howard T. Odum were at the forefront of the ‘new ecology’ of ecosystems, in the 1950s and 1960s. They were also firmly committed to bringing both natural and human ecosystems into accord with the laws of ecoenergetics (the flow of energy through a system).
This commentary steps back from the specifics of the foregoing papers in order to take another look at wider historiographical questions with special reference to two, broad issues: the interface between environmental history and the history of ecology, and perspectives on environmental history from the viewpoint of practitioners from different disciplinary, national and regional contexts.
This issue of Environment and History completes a third year of the new journal, and presents a useful opportunity for reflection about the state of the discipline.
Over the Colonial period, prolonged drought episodes had severe impacts on all sectors of society, particularly indigenous rural populations. This paper employs a variety of colonial historical records to document the nature and extent of these impacts within the context of prevailing social, political and economic conditions.
Carruthers explores the relevance of work conducted by James Stevenson-Hamilton, during his employment in the Sudan civil service, to the modern conservation doctrine of sustainable yield.
While gender-blindness has characterised much writing on colonial environmental history, women have assumed center-stage in the historical narratives produced by two linked contemporary policy discourses: ecofeminism, and ‘women, environment and development.’
Four million Tiv people form the major culture of the Benue state of southern Nigeria. They are popularly known as the greatest democrats in Africa as their society is based on fraternal cooperation between age mates rather than on authoritative chieftaincy…
Archaeological evidence demonstrates that prehistoric human activities caused significant environmental alteration in many parts of the region…
The essay outlines and criticises three prominent features of current environmental history writing: the idea of history as negative progress, the rhetoric of ‘on the one hand’ - ‘on the other hand,’ and the use of the term ‘capitalism.’
