This paper examines the interrelations of technology, environment and people by exploring the origin, design and implementation of a dam-building project intended to control water-level fluctuations and enhance the Nett Lake wild rice ecosystem at Bois Forte Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota.
In this study, the history of traditional non-timber forest uses is reconstructed by combining the analysis of forest management plans and the results from oral history interviews.
This paper examines the history of hard rock mining on the large lakes of north-west Canada (Athabasca, Great Slave and Great Bear) from 1921 to 1960.
Daley and Griggs present documentary and oral history evidence to show that the extent and severity of mining in the Great Barrier Reef has been hitherto neglected in environmental histories of the ecosystem.
The aim of this study was to analyse the swift land-use transition, from nomadic to agricultural, in the last colonised landscape of northern Sweden. Using historical documents and maps together with modern maps and a field survey, the authors wanted to link land-use patterns as strongly as possible to landscape features and ecosystems.
The author’s own research into the early years of European settlement plots an evolving cultural engagement with the indigenous environment, and in particular with forest or ‘bush,’ which ran parallel with its extensive replacement by agroecosystems.
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…
With this issue of Environment and History, van Dam contributes to the thesis that the expansion of trade systems and the emergence of large-scale human intervention in (formerly) natural ecosystems is a continuous, interactive process with a long history, long before the Industrial Revolution or the discovery of the New Worlds.
Sacred groves in the ancient Mediterranean are compared with surviving groves of South India, particularly Uttara Kannada, to evaluate the roles of these refugia in maintaining balance between human groups and the ecosystems of which they are part.
This paper suggests an approach for using different types of data sources, and for bringing together understandings of ecosystem dynamics and of people’s interaction with the environment, and thereby achieving ‘closure’ in a highly contested terrain.
