The article reflects on how to feed a growing world population in a context of natural resource scarcity and considers the 2012 World Water Day as a means to open an international debate in order to identify strategic choices capable of combining, globally and locally, the objective of food security with that of water resource protection.
Using Northern Ghana as a case study, this paper questions the usefulness of regional data for understanding food insecurity, and shows that the supposedly novel ideas of the present in fact have a strong colonial lineage.
Powerless Science? looks at complex historical, social, and political dynamics, made up of public controversies, environmental and health crises, economic interests, and political responses, and demonstrates how and to what extent scientific knowledge about toxicants has been caught between scientific, economic, and political imperatives.
Managing the Unknown offers essays that show that deficient knowledge is a far more pervasive challenge in resource history than conventional readings suggest. Furthermore, environmental ignorance does not inevitably shrink with the march of scientific progress. This volume combines insights from different continents as well as the seas in between and thus sketches outlines of an emerging global resource history.
Disrupted Landscapes focuses on the emblematic case of postsocialist Romania, in which the transition from collectivization to privatization profoundly reshaped the nation’s forests, farmlands, and rivers.
DeB. Richter addresses the problem with declensionist narratives of the environment, proposing the Georgic narrative as a valuable alternative.
The focus on human-environment relations from the perspective of climate change alone is too narrow. Often, society experiences climate change through political and technical decisions, rather than as an environmental crisis.
Wild Earth 8, no. 3 features articles on the relationship between agriculture and biodiversity as well as an examination of whether conservation biology needs natural history. The issue also provides updates on the Wildlands Project.
