imperialism

Paul Josephson discusses the project he worked on during his Carson Fellowship, from August to December 2011: an environmental history of the Soviet Arctic.

Conservation Song explores ways in which colonial relations shaped meanings and conflicts over environmental control and management in Malawi. By focusing on soil conservation, which required an integrated approach to the use and management of such natural resources as land, water, and forestry, it examines the origins and effects of policies and their legacies in the post-colonial era.

An introduction to the seven papers in this issue of Environment and History. The papers are based on presentations to the seventh conference of the Australian Forest History Society, held early in 2007 in Christchurch, New Zealand.

An introduction to seven articles—five of which are written by current doctoral or recent postdoctoral students—that explore ideas, themes, and methods relating to research in the field in New Zealand.

Jocelyn Thorpe, currently an assistant professor of women’s studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, talks about her work on the social construction of the Temagami region as a wilderness area and its implications for the Teme-Augama Anishnabai.

Lawrence Culver, Carson Center fellow from June to December 2010, speaks about his research project “Manifest Disaster: Climate and the Making of America.”

Professional forest management in the Philippines is largely attributed to the ideas and endeavours of American foresters such as Gifford Pinchot, George Ahern and Henry Graves who were instrumental in establishing the Insular Bureau of Forestry in 1900 and in passing the forestry laws of 1904 and 1905.

Using Garrett Hardin’s concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, this article examines Spanish overexploitation of both the oyster beds around the island of Cubagua and the native peoples along the mainland by competing groups of Spaniards.

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.

Using New Zealand as a case study, Beattie demonstrates the strength of settler beliefs in the connections between existing environments, environmental transformation, and their own health.