Australia and New Zealand share a southern, settler society history, and cultural solidarity as British colonies and dominions. Their early unity as ‘Australasia’ is where this paper begins, focusing on the strong role of science in shaping environmental history and policy in both countries.
Content Index
This essay charts and reflects on developments in the environmental history of the Americas over the past decade, arguing that the field has become more inclusive and complex as it tackles a broader spectrum of physical environments and moves beyond an emphasis on destructiveness and loss as the essence of relations between humans and the rest of the natural world.
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.
This paper shows how the story of Alpine milk illustrates that in premodern times food production reflected much more the connection between local land resources and farmer’s skills, tools, and practices—a link that has ceased to exist in the mindset of industrialised societies.
This article examines a series of projects and discussions among the Enlightenment elite in the Danish kingdom, that relate to the need for technological improvement and agricultural reform in Iceland, a distant province of the Danish state in the eighteenth century.
This article argues that during the interwar period in Australia, contrary to assertions that social, political and economic pressures stifled environmental debate, there were a wide range of interests pushing for conservation, the development of National Parks and limits on development schemes.
This paper uses archaeological and documentary records to look at the human impact on a montane environment, the pre-alps of Savoy, over the long-term, from pre-history up to the pre-modern period.
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.
While many of Marsh’s novel conservation insights were universal and true for citizens of all countries, his key warnings about degradation were characteristically American—having been interpreted, produced, and packaged by an American for Americans.
This article challenges the premise that Marsh was unique in laying out an ecological justification for conservation. It suggests that these principles were common currency in early American natural history.