What we now know of as environmentalism began with the establishment of the first empire forest in 1855 in British India, and during the second half of the nineteenth century, over ten per cent of the land surface of the earth became protected as a public trust. Sprawling forest reservations, many of them larger than modern nations, became revenue-producing forests that protected the whole 'household of nature', and Rudyard Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt were among those who celebrated a new class of government foresters as public heroes. Imperial foresters warned of impending catastrophe, desertification and global climate change if the reverse process of deforestation continued. The empire forestry movement spread through India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and then the United States to other parts of the globe, and Gregory Barton's study looks at the origins of environmentalism in a global perspective.
Contemporary anxieties about global warming and climate change impacts have unsettled the ways in which we think about environmental politics and human history. Intense discussions have already begun over whether we need to reconsider what we understand by the term 'environmental change' and if humans have truly become a 'geo-physical' force. Put differently, how should we recast our understanding of the planet's varied environmental pasts in order to make sense of the Anthropocene present? This collection of 19 essays on forestry and environmental change in the erstwhile colonies of the British Empire builds on Richard Grove's quest for achieving a 'global synthesis' as efforts towards writing environmental histories on a planetary scale. The Commonwealth of Nations as a single environmental bloc for study, enquiry and historical scrutiny, explores connected environmental histories, compares dissimilar ecological regions and debates ideologies for environmental management.
"This collection of essays from a pioneering scholar in the field of environmental history vividly demonstrates that concerns about climate change are far from being a uniquely modern phenomenon. Grove traces the origins of present-day environmental debates about soil erosion, deforestation and climate change in the writings of early colonial administrators, doctors and missionaries. He traces what is known and what can be inferred concerning historic El Nino events centuries before the devastating 1997/98 instance. In an important and wide-ranging concluding essay he analyses the general significance of 'marginal' land and its ecology in the history of popular resistance movements."--Amazon.com.
Lively and accessible account of the relationship between man and nature in Graeco-Roman antiquity. Describes the ways in which the Greeks and Romans intervened in the environment and thus traces the history of tension between the exploitation of resources and the protection of nature.
Modernizing Nature contributes to the debate regarding the origins, institutionalization, and politics of the sciences and systems of knowledge underlying colonial frameworks of environmental management. It departs from the widely prevalent scholarly perspective that colonial science can be understood predominantly as a handmaiden of imperialism. Instead, it argues that the myriad colonial sciences had ideological and interventionist traditions distinct from each other and from the colonial bureaucracy and that these tensions better explain environmental politics and policy dilemmas in the post-colonial era. Professor Rajan argues that tropical forestry in the nineteenth century consisted of at least two distinct approaches towards nature, resource, and people; and what won out in the end was the Continental European forestry paradigm. Rajan also shows that science and scientists were relatively marginal until the First World War. It was the acute scientific and resource crisis felt during the War, along with the rise of experts and expertise in Britain during that period and the lobby-politics of an organized empire-wide scientific community, that resulted in resource management regimes such as forestry beginning to get serious state backing. Over time, considerable differences in approach and outlook towards policy emerged between different colonial scientific communities, such as foresters and agriculturists. These different colonial sciences represented different situated knowledges, with different visions of nature, people, and empire, and in different configurations of power. Finally, in a panoramic overview of post-colonial developments, Rajan argues that the hegemony of these state-scientific regimes of resource-management during the period 1950-1990 engendered not just social revolt, as recent historical work has shown, but also intellectual protest. Consequently, the discipline of forestry became systematically re-conceptualized, with newapproaches to sylviculture, economics, law, and crucially, with new visions of modernity. This disciplinary change constitutes nothing short of a cognitive revolution, one that has been brought about by a clearly articulated political perspective on the orientation of the discipline of forestry by its practitioners.
Now in its second edition and refreshed by a decade of new research, The Environment in World History uncovers the deep-rooted causes of interconnected climate, biodiversity, and ecological crises that have brought the environment to the top of the global political agenda in the twenty-first century. Its expanded chapters and case studies explore a wide range of issues including the following: the hunting of wildlife and the loss of biodiversity across the globe; deforestation and the development of strategies to protect the world’s forests; soil degradation caused by worldwide agricultural expansion, one of the most profound ways that humans have altered the planet; the widening impact of urban-industrial growth and the deepening ecological footprints of the world’s cities; and the rising levels of air, land and water pollution as the trade-off for continued economic growth worldwide. Covering the last five hundred years, it offers an essential environmental perspective on well-known world history narratives of imperialism and colonialism, trade and commerce, technological progress and the advance of civilisation. Clearly written and fully up-to-date, it is an invaluable resource for all students of world history and environmental studies.
Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia, specifically examining steppe environments, hydraulic engineering, soil and forestry, water pollution, fishing, and the interaction of the environment and disease vectors. Throughout, the authors place the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a trans-chronological, comparative context, seamlessly linking the local and the global. The chapters are rooted in the ecological and geological specificities of place and community while unveiling the broad patterns of human-nature relationships across the planet. Eurasian Environments brings together an international group scholars working on issues of tsarist/Soviet environmental history in an effort to showcase the wave of fascinating and field-changing research currently being written.
