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.
The author argues in this paper that the basis of these cattlemen’s use of fire to manage the land was their understanding of the practices during the ‘pioneering’ period of European settlement and of Aboriginal people before that.
Salinity in Victoria’s irrigated districts can be understood as the result not only of environmental predisposition and technological inadequacies, but of a prevailing political philosophy which considered irrigation as a social and economic good per se.
Spanish dehesas, the most extensive wood pastures in Mediterranean Europe, are a vivid example for demonstrating that the impact of rural communities on forests has not always been a bad thing.
The paper discusses the expansion of toxicological and ecological knowledge about the grasslands of South Africa and explores some of the measures put forward to encourage more sustainable animal husbandry.
This paper shows how the story of Alpine milk illustrates that in premodern times food production reflected much more the connection between local land resources and farmer’s skills, tools, and practices—a link that has ceased to exist in the mindset of industrialised societies.
Feelings of hatred, fear and alienation towards the Australian environment have been amongst the major themes of Australian history. Farmers especially have been characterised as hating trees, particularly in the densely treed, difficult to clear rainforests of eastern Australia…
A period of drought in the American Great Plains, combined with unsustainable agricultural practices, turns the region into a “Dust Bowl.”
