economy

A collection of essays that, as a whole, considers strong private property rights as crucial for environmental protection.

Portraits of privatization from around the world show how the daily lives of people using what were once considered public resources are affected.

Donald Worster, Carson Fellow from February to July 2011, talks about his research concerning the impact of the discovery of the New World and its resources, both on Western Europe, and the American way of life.

Gary Martin talks about his research, which draws on case studies that he has developed through the Global Diversity Foundation (GDF) over the last decade.

In this paper, Pacheco illustrates the dynamics of frontier development in the Redenção area in southern Pará, one of the oldest agricultural frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon.

Salinity in Victoria’s irrigated districts can be understood as the result not only of environmental predisposition and technological inadequacies, but of a prevailing political philosophy which considered irrigation as a social and economic good per se.

This paper examines the interrelations of technology, environment and people by exploring the origin, design and implementation of a dam-building project intended to control water-level fluctuations and enhance the Nett Lake wild rice ecosystem at Bois Forte Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota.

This article demonstrates that monks were able to use their religious authority and their control of religious message to support and supplement their temporal powers. The control of water resources was deeply connected to monastic identity and the relationships between monks and the secular world.

The article argues that diversified subsistence and a high degree of flexibility were essential for ancient Mesopotamian societies to absorb the many risks that life in this marginal semiarid environment involved.