society

Martin Knoll, Carson Fellow from October to March 2009, talks about his research concerning perceptions of nature and the creation of environmental knowledge in early modern topographical literature.

This multi-authored collection examines the complex interrelations between societies in different parts of the world and the soils they relied on from the perspectives of geomorphology, archaeology, pedology, and history.

While modern penal institutions exist, putatively, to transform the people held within them into law-abiding citizens, it is not generally recognised that since the early twentieth century, Australian and New Zealand penal systems have also sought to transform ‘wastelands’ into ordered, productive landscapes.

Tasmania (formerly known as Van Diemen’s Land) received approximately 72,000 convicts, mainly from the British Isles and Ireland, between 1803 and 1853. This article focuses on the environmental experience of this unusual settler population, especially in the first decades of settlement.

The article argues that diversified subsistence and a high degree of flexibility were essential for ancient Mesopotamian societies to absorb the many risks that life in this marginal semiarid environment involved.

Rhododendron ponticum is the most expensive alien plant conservation problem in Britain and Ireland.

Hugh Bennett, then Chief of the United States Soil Conservation Service, paid a two-month official visit to South Africa in 1944, a trip that threw into relief, inter alia, the administrative division between the Department of Agriculture, responsible for soil conservation on white-owned farms, and the Department of Native Affairs, responsible for soil conservation in so-called ‘native areas.’

A survey of African environmental history during in the period 1994 to 2004 is provided and distinctions between the environmental history of Africa and that of other geo-regions are identified.

An historical assessment of a state afforestation project at Mangatu on the east coast of New Zealand demonstrates that Maori have seldom been trusted as environmental guardians.

The author explores some of the expressions of the changes in human perceptions of, and responses to, a group of plants with which people have had to contend for places, and the deeper cultural significances of the contest itself. New Zealand’s discrete landscape and the settler society is the context in which Clayton further develops his analysis.