During the 1840s, the biometric approach to soil fertility appraisal was found to be a false one, and was replaced by a developing ecological one, which relied on specific plant indicators of soil fertility.
Content Index
The history of environmental anxiety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New Zealand can be traced by focusing on problems caused by deforestation.
An historical assessment of a state afforestation project at Mangatu on the east coast of New Zealand demonstrates that Maori have seldom been trusted as environmental guardians.
The author explores some of the expressions of the changes in human perceptions of, and responses to, a group of plants with which people have had to contend for places, and the deeper cultural significances of the contest itself. New Zealand’s discrete landscape and the settler society is the context in which Clayton further develops his analysis.
This article focuses on attempts, some experimental but all ultimately unsuccessful, to render Queensland’s Fitzroy River suitable for large-scale shipping by constructing ‘training’ walls and dredging intensively.
The optimism characteristic of the Enlightenment multiplied initiatives designed to secure and improve the milieus within which Europeans earned a precarious living, notably through greater control of hydraulic resources…
Attempts at combining reconstruction of physical processes with the discursive perceptions of a disaster need an interdisciplinary approach. Current discussions in cultural science have heightened the sensitivity of historians, leading them to seek and elaborate new models and to establish contact with scientific disciplines…
The main hypothesis is that the metaphorical discourse about the disaster and nature in general serves as a metaphorical reservoir for illustrating and legitimising the abstract political process of the German Reunification.
The present investigation examines the resonance of such catastrophes in the correspondence network of the universal scholar Albrecht von Haller (1708–77).
Different interpretations of the biblical deluge give us an idea of various modes of perceptions of natural disasters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In analysing these interpretations we learn much about early modern European ways of thinking about nature, mankind and the relationship between both.