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.
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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.
This paper argues that Marsh was not simply influenced by American versus European contrasts in environmental change, nor was his work based only on conservation ideas, being influenced also by the examples of acclimatisation movements within the British empire settlement colonies.
This paper examines the reception of Marsh’s ideas in New Zealand in the 1870s along with the ideas of the largely-forgotten Titus Smith about human impacts upon the vegetation of Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century, prompting reflection upon the relevance of tales of environmental understanding from two colonial realms for the practice of environmental history in the twenty-first century.
This paper examines the history of forestry in the Russian North through a study area in the North Urals.