The author explores some of the expressions of the changes in human perceptions of, and responses to, a group of plants with which people have had to contend for places, and the deeper cultural significances of the contest itself. New Zealand’s discrete landscape and the settler society is the context in which Clayton further develops his analysis.
Content Index
This article focuses on attempts, some experimental but all ultimately unsuccessful, to render Queensland’s Fitzroy River suitable for large-scale shipping by constructing ‘training’ walls and dredging intensively.
The optimism characteristic of the Enlightenment multiplied initiatives designed to secure and improve the milieus within which Europeans earned a precarious living, notably through greater control of hydraulic resources…
Attempts at combining reconstruction of physical processes with the discursive perceptions of a disaster need an interdisciplinary approach. Current discussions in cultural science have heightened the sensitivity of historians, leading them to seek and elaborate new models and to establish contact with scientific disciplines…
The main hypothesis is that the metaphorical discourse about the disaster and nature in general serves as a metaphorical reservoir for illustrating and legitimising the abstract political process of the German Reunification.
The present investigation examines the resonance of such catastrophes in the correspondence network of the universal scholar Albrecht von Haller (1708–77).
Different interpretations of the biblical deluge give us an idea of various modes of perceptions of natural disasters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In analysing these interpretations we learn much about early modern European ways of thinking about nature, mankind and the relationship between both.
With the help of extensive quotations, this paper shows that the writings of Francois Mitterrand contain many professions of his love for nature, and reflections on the bond between man and nature.
The authors propose and discuss four ‘intersections’ that have potential as loci of interdisciplinary engagement: mutual understanding; spatial scale and locale; time and change; and the environment and agency.
This paper builds a history of the rise of ecological awareness of the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia through the cultural perceptions of fish-eating birds.