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.’
Content Index
Without doubt the transformative moment came in the mid-nineteenth century, when the various German states began shifting from wood to coal as a fuel source to feed the new steam engines coming from Great Britain…
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…
As the south coast of New South Wales moved from relative isolation and a declining pastoral economy to being an area of rapid growth, it also become the site for a range of national environmental and indigenous rights controversies…
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.
Ringbarking, as a means of destroying trees, was known and practised from the earliest years of British settlement in New South Wales…
In this article, which considers the settlement of the high-rainfall forests of Eastern Australia, it is argued that the main pests were indigenous not exotic.
There is an urgency and a fracture to Australian environmental history…
Research on climatic variations in the sixteenth century has stressed the exceptionality of extreme events, but the case of the lower Po basin, where lack of instrumental data renders the concept of exceptionality complex and relative, shows that this is not necessarily valid.
This article describes the process involved in creating a watershed model for the upper Konto watershed area in Java.