The modernization, the declinist, and the inclinist paradigms of the late twentieth century, despite their differences, all tended to frame environmental change in a unilinear Nature-to-Culture fashion, which in turn entailed homogenizing the agency, process, and outcome of environmental change. This article examines the characteristics of each paradigm, as well as some of the paradoxes that have arisen in their wake. Finally, it looks to alternative approaches.
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Under the European colonial powers, agricultural methods and techniques, along with well-organized routines in sugar production, were developed on the Caribbean islands with a view to managing sugar plantations as efficiently as possible. The results were in many cases deforestation, impoverished soils, and erosion.
Holly High reflects on how past violence becomes incorporated into contemporary landscapes and associated narratives.
Castro wishes to encourage a new reading of the best-known sources and authors associated with this issue, as well as the adoption of a new perspective on the deep origins of the environmental problems that the country faces today.
Founded in 1997 and located in the Altmark region of Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, Sieben Linden is considered a classical example of an ecovillage as it tries to present a special “Culture of Sustainability” whose inhabitants aim to maintain an ecologically sustainable lifestyle without reducing their own quality of life.
Late medieval efforts at river management to control floods in the county of Roussillon reveal environmental awareness and responsibility in an emerging state and also the grounds and strength of local resistance.
Burning cultivation of peatlands was by far the greatest source of carbon dioxide in Finland during the whole of nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century.
This book is a collection of papers from one of the first major US conferences on environmental history, which took place 1–3 January 1982 at the University of California’s Irvine campus, and brought together over 100 scholars active in the field.
In the course of less than 30 years, the vultures of India have reached the brink of extinction.
Source: Alfred Wegener, Tagebücher, June 1912 – July 1913. DMA NL 001/010.