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.

The authors assert that potash production in northern Sweden lost out to German producers, who started to produce potash industrially at the same time that production in northern Sweden ceased. The ecological significance of the potash production is difficult to estimate…

Archaeological evidence demonstrates that prehistoric human activities caused significant environmental alteration in many parts of the region…