ecology

Commentary on the articles in this special issue of Environment and History, “Ecological Visionaries/Ecologised Visions.”

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).

This paper gives an account of the participatory, democratic and pluralistic perspectives of Boulding and other important figures in the General Systems Community (GSC).

This special issue of Environment and History stems from a series of conference sessions that attempted to address the gap between environmental history and the history of ecology.

A review of: Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama; Ecological Relations in Historical Times: Human Impact and Adaptation by Robin A. Butlin, and Neil Roberts; and Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia by Tom Griffiths.

The study of history in a sense that can be called ‘environmental’ is a discipline yet to be created in Latin America. This has become an obstacle that must be overcome if we are to understand better the serious social and environmental deterioration of the region.

There seems little doubt that many environmental historians, this editor included, have tended to fall into a veritable elephant trap of simplistic polarities when they deal, as they increasingly are doing, with the unwieldy but vital subject of the colonial impact on the tropical environment and its people…

The Kautiliya Arthasastra is a famous treatise on state-craft which within its state policies includes ecological concerns…

Two broad themes taken up in the literature will be the focus of this essay: how far colonialism was an ecological watershed, and how producers responded to new pressures. The third issue is of what we can or should learn (or unlearn) from the colonial experience.

Introduction to a special issue that reflects the rapid growth of research in environmental history now apparent throughout the South Asian region.