The paper provides a case study of the range of preoccupations which the statutory planner, agricultural interests and mineral developer brought to bear on the conflict arising from the early twentieth-century development of the Yorkshire ‘concealed’ coalfield.
Prasad counters the proposition that pre-colonial, caste-based, natural resource management regimes were superior, in terms of stability and coherence, to colonial regimes.
This paper describes a regional case study of the history of forestry practices in the north-eastern part of the central plateau of Switzerland during the nineteenth century, based on an analysis of official documents connected with forestry.
Detailed examination of the fabric records suggests that there is no simple, direct relationship between coal use and fabric repair costs. Complicating the relationship are a whole set of complex human systems involved in identification of decay, the style of restoration and management of the repair work.
The issues discussed provide an interface between ‘green history’ and frameworks for sustainable development. An overview of groundwater exploitation is presented with case studies of low flows, the nitrate issue and salinisation of chalk aquifers.
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.’
Coutinho’s analysis compares and contrasts claims put forward in the journal The Ecologist between 1970 and 1993, with those advanced in the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development published in book form under the title Our Common Future in 1987.
There seems little doubt that many environmental historians, this editor included, have tended to fall into a veritable elephant trap of simplistic polarities when they deal, as they increasingly are doing, with the unwieldy but vital subject of the colonial impact on the tropical environment and its people…
This paper contends that recent scholarly interest in systems of colonising knowledge, whether called ‘scientific forestry,’ or ‘development,’ has paid inadequate attention to the historical processes shaping such knowledge production in specific colonial locations.
This paper argues that much historical and political analysis of Zimbabwe neglects a crucial resource: water.
