social change

This paper focuses on historical analysis of the local management of the Brazilian Amazonian floodplain.

The counter-hegemonic struggle for ecological democracy is one of the fastest growing social movements in contemporary society, and requires the attention of environmental historians to situate it within the broader context of the history of environmentalism.

Prasad counters the proposition that pre-colonial, caste-based, natural resource management regimes were superior, in terms of stability and coherence, to colonial regimes.

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.

Taylor seeks to describe the popular outdoor movement that he maintains has developed generically in both its ‘ideological evolution and its practical expression’ (16), from the earliest establishment of the Footpath Preservation Societies, through the Campaign for Access, and an Outdoor Movement on Wheels.

The ‘domination of nature’ is a concept now fraught with negative connotations; however, it was not always thus.