"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.
ecology
"Ecology, Epidemics and Empires: Environmental Change and the Geopolitics of Tropical America, 1600–1825"
After yellow fever was firmly ensconced via an ecological reconfiguration connected to sugar (c. 1640–90) it underpinned a military and political status quo, keeping Spanish America Spanish. After 1780, and particularly in the Haitian revolution, yellow fever undermined that status quo by assisting independence movements in the American tropics.
"Potash Production in Northern Sweden: History and Ecological Effects of a Pre-industrial Forest Exploitation"
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…
"Science and the Desiccationist Discourse of the 20th Century"
This essay explores the progression of theoretical models and empirical research linked to the understanding of the capacity of forested systems to regulate the hydrological regimes of a given area.
Robin, Libby, "Radical Ecology and Conservation Science: An Australian Perspective"
Histories of environmentalism in Australia often overlook the 1950s, an era when scientific ecology dominated environmental activism…
"Editorial" for Environment and History 4, no.2, Australia special issue (June, 1998)
There is an urgency and a fracture to Australian environmental history…
"Historical and Applied Perspectives on Prehistoric Land Use in Eastern North America"
Archaeological evidence demonstrates that prehistoric human activities caused significant environmental alteration in many parts of the region…
"Afterword: The Ends of Environmental History: Some Questions"
This commentary steps back from the specifics of the foregoing papers in order to take another look at wider historiographical questions with special reference to two, broad issues: the interface between environmental history and the history of ecology, and perspectives on environmental history from the viewpoint of practitioners from different disciplinary, national and regional contexts.
"The Politics of the Conservation of Nature"
Commentary on the articles in this special issue of Environment and History, “Ecological Visionaries/Ecologised Visions.”
"'Potatoes Made of Oil': Eugene and Howard Odum and the Origins and Limits of American Agroecology"
Eugene P. Odum and Howard T. Odum were at the forefront of the ‘new ecology’ of ecosystems, in the 1950s and 1960s. They were also firmly committed to bringing both natural and human ecosystems into accord with the laws of ecoenergetics (the flow of energy through a system).