This study argues that when farmers raised concerns about miners’ activities, ‘precautionary stewardship’ of the environment designed to stop entrepreneurial practices harmful to the environment was not a concern. This was a struggle over the ownership of the means of production by two competing forms of capitalism—a characteristic intra-class as well as intra-racial conflict.
The magnitude of this two-way trade created domestic timber shortages on both sides of the Tasman Sea, and stimulated conservation efforts from the early years of the twentieth century.
This paper traces the dynamic of a rapid transition from forest to grass on Banks Peninsula, South Island, New Zealand, from 1850 to 1900, as well as the subsequent partial transition back towards forest.
Spanish dehesas, the most extensive wood pastures in Mediterranean Europe, are a vivid example for demonstrating that the impact of rural communities on forests has not always been a bad thing.
Two substantive criticisms of Warren Dean’s ‘wood hypothesis’ are offered here: the wood hypothesis is accurate in general but underestimated the industrial consumption of fossil fuels, without conclusively rejecting the competing ‘hydroelectricity’ hypothesis; the method used for estimating potential energy supply from forest area was erroneous.
Germans arrived in Tanzania with a vision of scientific forestry derived from European and Asian templates of forest management that was premised on the creation of forest reserves emptied of human settlement. They found a landscape and human environment that was not amenable to established practices of rotational forestry.
This paper argues that far from having been an empty space, much of the area currently devoted to tourism once played an important role within global markets, especially through the production of dyewoods, chicle (the original raw material for chewing gum), and other natural resources.
George Perkins Marsh, United States minister to Italy, renowned as a linguist and a geographer, was a fitting choice to be named arbiter of a disputed Italo-Swiss boundary segment, the alpe of Cravairola, north of Domodossola and west of Locarno, in 1874.
The aim of this study is to analyse the transformation of one river in boreal Sweden, the Vindelalven, during 1820–1945, caused by the introduction of large scale floating of timber.
State formation in south-west India at the end of the 18th century led to heavy exploitation of natural resources, particularly of the hardwood timbers of Travancore, Malabar, and Kanara…
