animals

Allen, Robert C., and Ian Keay. “Bowhead Whales in the Eastern Arctic, 1611–1911: Population Reconstruction with Historical Whaling.” Environment and History 12, no. 1 (Feb., 2006): 89–113. doi:10.3197/097634006776026791. As early as 1611 bowhead whales resident between the east coast of Greenland and the island of Spitzbergen were the subject of intensive commercial hunting effort by Dutch, German and British whalers. By 1911 there was no significant, permanent population of bowhead whales living in these waters.

The aim of this study was to analyse the swift land-use transition, from nomadic to agricultural, in the last colonised landscape of northern Sweden. Using historical documents and maps together with modern maps and a field survey, the authors wanted to link land-use patterns as strongly as possible to landscape features and ecosystems.

Chiarappa, Michael J. “Overseeing the Family of Whitefishes: The Priorities and Debates of Coregonid Management on America’s Great Lakes, 1870–2000.” Environment and History 11, no.2 (May, 2005): 163–94. doi:10.3197/096734005774434566.

The authors present a comprehensive analysis of marine mammal utilisation for Trinidad and Tobago.

In this article whaling and walrus hunting and their impact on the environment is reconstructed. Annual catch records and shipping logs made it possible to calculate the original size of the populations and to reconstruct their original migration in the Greenland Sea.

This essay considers medieval long distance trades in grain, cattle, and preserved fish as antecedents to today’s globalised movements of foodstuffs.

As the British entered the Mizo hills (part of the Indo-Burmese range of hills, then known as the Lushai hills) to chase the headhunting tribal raiders and try to gain control over them by securing a foothold in the heart of the hills at Aizawl, they witnessed an amazing ecological phenomenon: a severe famine apparently caused by rats.

In this article, which considers the settlement of the high-rainfall forests of Eastern Australia, it is argued that the main pests were indigenous not exotic.

Olwig asserts that the discipline we now know as environmental history owes a great deal of its impetus to the emergence at the beginning of the nineteenth century of a socially engaged and environmentally committed interdisciplinary ‘proto-discipline.’

Fourteen environmental historians investigate the rhetoric and realities of exotic, introduced, and ‘alien’ species.