Hassan comes to the subject from an economic history perspective, and the central theme of the book is the development, and the changing orientations of water policy.
The issues discussed provide an interface between ‘green history’ and frameworks for sustainable development. An overview of groundwater exploitation is presented with case studies of low flows, the nitrate issue and salinisation of chalk aquifers.
Commercial agriculture in the dry interior of South Africa is heavily reliant upon irrigation water from the Orange River. Most of this vital water does not fall as rain on South African soil but as rain and snow in the mountains of Lesotho…
Over the Colonial period, prolonged drought episodes had severe impacts on all sectors of society, particularly indigenous rural populations. This paper employs a variety of colonial historical records to document the nature and extent of these impacts within the context of prevailing social, political and economic conditions.
The vision of a new kind of society without private ownership, and thus profit interests, of natural resources had promised a utopia of man and nature in harmony. What went wrong?
The science of palynology has proved to be a good tool to reconstruct the past, to build up archaeological scenarios and to record climatic changes during the Holocene period. However, the terms employed to denote climate, like arid and humid, are often used without proper definitions, ignoring intricacies of climate…
This paper argues that much historical and political analysis of Zimbabwe neglects a crucial resource: water.
The review of an introduction to environmental history by an historical geographer and of a comprehensive account of the Valasian bisses with directions for twenty one walks, the work of a former British consul in Geneva.
Inner Harngzhou Bay, on the east coast of China at approximately 30 degrees N, is an unstable macrotidal estuarine system whose geographical configuration has altered dramatically over the last thousand years…
