How Do Humans and Locusts Make Space in an Early Modern Chinese Grain Field?
David Bello explores the fraught struggle between humans and locusts for occupancy of the agricultural niches created by farmers during China’s Qing dynasty.
grains
“But where the danger lies, also grows the saving power”: Reflections on Exploitation and Sustainability
This article looks at the discovery and storming of the Americas in relation to narratives of sustainability.
Der Ährenmann [The Man in the Wheatfield]
This film profiles the work of Eckart Irion, German researcher and cultivator of new types of grain. He uses natural selection to develop his own seeds for growing rye, wheat, and oats.
"Medieval Slash-and-Burn Cultivation: Strategic or Adapted Land Use in the Swedish Mining District?"
The general view in Swedish historiography of an inherent conflict between iron-making and the practice of slash-and-burn is questioned on the basis of this palaeoecological case study of repeated slash-and-burn cultivation from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in a mining district of central Sweden.
"The Limits of Agricultural Growth in the Nineteenth Century: A Case Study from the Mediterranean World"
With reference to the principle of Coevolution between Nature and Society and the nineteenth-century Spanish agricultural sector, this paper aims to verify a fundamental hypothesis and, in so doing, suggest a new way of looking at the past of Mediterranean agriculture and its late incorporation into the more advanced agricultural world.
"The Wasting of Wolin: Environmental Factors in the Downfall of a Medieval Baltic Town"
This medieval environmental history examines the tenth-century industrial and trade town of Wolin which grew rapidly on an island immediately off the northwestern coast of Poland.
"Frontier Foods for Late Medieval Consumers: Culture, Economy, Ecology"
This essay considers medieval long distance trades in grain, cattle, and preserved fish as antecedents to today’s globalised movements of foodstuffs.