“Science, Environment and Empire History: Comparative Perspectives from Forests in Colonial India”
An essay review of books by Arun Agrawal, Peder Anker, David Arnold, Gregory A. Barton, Richard Drayton, and S. Ravi. Rajan.
Aliases:
science
"Saving Wild Rice: The Rise and Fall of the Nett Lake Dam"
This paper examines the interrelations of technology, environment and people by exploring the origin, design and implementation of a dam-building project intended to control water-level fluctuations and enhance the Nett Lake wild rice ecosystem at Bois Forte Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota.
"Empire, Environment and Religion: God and the Natural World in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand"
This article, using colonial New Zealand as a case-study, and integrating environment, empire and religion into a single analytic framework, contends that Christian and environmental discourses interpenetrated and interacted in irreducibly complex ways during the long nineteenth century.
"Out of the Woods and into the Lab: Exploring the Strange Marriage of American Woodcraft and Soviet Ecology in Czech Environmentalism"
It is widely assumed that modern environmentalist thinking was imported into post-communist states such as the Czech Republic post 1989. This paper shows these countries had environmental traditions of their own.
"Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in Southeast Asia, Part 2"
The second part of this two-part paper looks at the influence on forestry of knowledge and management practices exchanged through professional-scientific networks.
"Soil Erosion, Scientists and the Development of Conservation Tillage Techniques in the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1935–1995"
Drawing upon archival documents, government reports and published accounts of agricultural scientists, this paper aims to document how officers of the Queensland Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations and the Soil Conservation Branch of the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Stock (later Primary Industries) tried to develop soil conservation methods suited to land cropped with sugar cane.
"Selling the Space Age: NASA and Earth's Environment, 1958–1990"
McQuaid advances the view that NASA consistently misread the importance of the most popular science-based political movement of the late twentieth century.
"How the Coast Became High: An Historical Introduction to the High Coast (Hoega kusten) World Heritage Site in Sweden"
The High Coast in north-eastern Sweden has become a popular tourist site annually attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors from throughout the world. Its environment is not only considered pleasing from a recreational aspect, but also of extraordinary intrinsic value.
"Environmental History in China"
Bao wrote this paper with a view to improving understanding and co-operation between Chinese and international environmental history studies.
"Environmental History in Australasia"
Australia and New Zealand share a southern, settler society history, and cultural solidarity as British colonies and dominions. Their early unity as ‘Australasia’ is where this paper begins, focusing on the strong role of science in shaping environmental history and policy in both countries.