This essay explores the dynamics of failure to strike a solution to the problem of invasive species in the form of water hyacinth through an examination of the competing domains of bureaucracy, science and private commercial interests in a colonial context.
Content Index
This article examines of the daily journals covering the first decade of Dutch VOC occupation of South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, and the origins of European exploration, exploitation and conservation of natural resources at the Cape.
This study argues that when farmers raised concerns about miners’ activities, ‘precautionary stewardship’ of the environment designed to stop entrepreneurial practices harmful to the environment was not a concern. This was a struggle over the ownership of the means of production by two competing forms of capitalism—a characteristic intra-class as well as intra-racial conflict.
This article traces contentious debates throughout the years leading up to and following the creation of the Australian Forestry School, between and among leading foresters throughout the British Empire born outside of Australia on the one hand, and, on the other, professionally trained foresters and Australian politicians who had been born in Australia.
The pollution of the Herbert River with tin dredge effluent after 1944 sparks the first Act specifically to control water pollution in the Australian state of Queensland.
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.
Using Garrett Hardin’s concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, this article examines Spanish overexploitation of both the oyster beds around the island of Cubagua and the native peoples along the mainland by competing groups of Spaniards.
Professional forest management in the Philippines is largely attributed to the ideas and endeavours of American foresters such as Gifford Pinchot, George Ahern and Henry Graves who were instrumental in establishing the Insular Bureau of Forestry in 1900 and in passing the forestry laws of 1904 and 1905.
Three species of the family Mustelidae (stoats, weasels and ferrets) were initially introduced into New Zealand (and granted statutory protection) in an attempt to control a burgeoning rabbit population…
While many saw the landscape transformation which followed the European settlement of New Zealand as firmly within the prevailing ‘doctrine of progress,’ this transformation was viewed with misgivings by others, who observed how deforestation led to erosion and floods, and advocated more prudent forest management.