Gangetic Floods: Landscape Transformation, Embankments, and Clay Brick-Making
The Gangetic basin, traditionally famous for huge crop production and rice farming, has witnessed gradual alteration in the land-use pattern over the last hundred years.
land use
"What Silence Knows—Planning, Public Participation and Environmental Values"
Anna Davies addresses the products of a public participation exercise conducted in Luton, south-east England in order to consider what it is that “silence knows.”
Jhum Cultivation versus the New Land Use Policy: Agrarian Change and Transformation in Mizoram
This paper adds to current debates surrounding jhum cultivation, forest conservation, and agrarian change in Mizoram by looking at jhum cultivation in relation to the New Land Use Policy introduced by the government of Mizoram in 1984.
The Social Metabolism of European Industrialization: Changes in the Relation of Energy and Land Use from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
This essay offers an historical sociometabolic perspective on the changing relationship between energy and land use during industrialization.
Human-Animal Conflicts in Kerala: Elephants and Ecological Modernity on the Agrarian Frontier in South India
This article argues that in contemporary Wayanad in Kerala, southern India, human-animal relations are embedded in a history of ecological modernity composed of three modes of encounter between agrarian change (capitalist settler agriculture) and forest conservation (state-led and globalizing). It suggests that the notions of “frontier,” “fortress,” and (precarious) “conviviality” best capture the historical and emerging environmental relations in this environment of crisis.
Manufactured Landscapes
This film is a photographic journey showing the effects of human activity on a variety of landscapes.
Fields and Forests: Ethnographic Perspectives on Environmental Globalization
About this issue
Around the world, fields and forests are increasingly dominated by the market, mediated by science, and subjected to new modes of transnational environmental governance. This volume of RCC Perspectives presents ethnographic insights into the impacts of such environmental globalization.
Content
"The Loss of Territorial Efficiency: An Ecological Analysis of Land-Use Changes in Western Mediterranean Agriculture (Vallès County, Catalonia, 1853–2004)"
This study explores the hypothesis that a serious reduction in “landscape efficiency,” typified by significant landscape degradation, underlies the increase observed in external inputs and the corresponding loss of energy efficiency that the agrarian system has undergone over the last 150 years.
The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World
Richards shows how humans—whether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapes—altered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own.
A Place for Dialogue: Language, Land Use, and Politics in Southern Arizona
Sharon McKenzie Stevens views the contradictions and collaborations involved in the management of public land in southern Arizona through the lens of political rhetoric.