Stapledon’s suspicions of inductive science and reductionist economics, his concern with holism, ‘spiritual values’ and ‘the nature of things’ and his emphasis upon breadth of vision and the cultivation of the imagination was in stark contrast to many scientists of the day.
This paper suggests an approach for using different types of data sources, and for bringing together understandings of ecosystem dynamics and of people’s interaction with the environment, and thereby achieving ‘closure’ in a highly contested terrain.
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.
This article describes the process involved in creating a watershed model for the upper Konto watershed area in Java.
Histories of environmentalism in Australia often overlook the 1950s, an era when scientific ecology dominated environmental activism…
This paper examines age as a parameter in colonial and recent science. It then recounts attempts to impose an ordered progression of age classes on the forests of Victoria and Queensland according to the classical principles of forestry transmuted through an imperial model.
Archaeological evidence demonstrates that prehistoric human activities caused significant environmental alteration in many parts of the region…
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.
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).
Coutinho’s analysis compares and contrasts claims put forward in the journal The Ecologist between 1970 and 1993, with those advanced in the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development published in book form under the title Our Common Future in 1987.
