This chapter initially begins with a narrative concerning how the author first came to Surama Village in Guyana in 2012. After discussing the author’s path to the village, as well as the author’s positionality in the field, the chapter describes the landscape of the Makushi people in Guyana. It provides an overview of the relational modes (particularly kinship and shamanism) through which Makushi people in Surama and beyond have engaged with outsiders (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) in the past and present. The chapter then summarises historical Makushi encounters with European colonisation involving the Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as Anglican missionisation during the mid nineteenth century. It provides a brief history of Surama Village, which is the Makushi village that is centred throughout the book. The chapter closes by providing context and background for contemporary transformations among the Makushi people in Surama Village.

This chapter examines major revivals of Heimat culture in the ruins of post-war Cologne and appeals to “Heimat” as a site of new beginnings. To put this case study in context, it begins with a brief pre-history of the Nazi years and shows how the regime selectively appealed to Heimat when in the regime’s interest, while suppressing ideas about Heimat which were out of step with the regime’s goals. The chapter then examines post-war appeal to local Heimat as a vital tool for repairing local community, healing biographical rupture, mobilizing for reconstruction, and providing a sense of therapeutic community. The chapter outlines how the script of finding new life through Heimat differed significantly from that of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft, and it explains how these differences redounded to the benefit of cultural demobilization in the aftermath. This and Chapter 2, however, also highlight Heimat enthusiasts’ considerable failures. This chapter concludes by exploring one failure in particular: persistent gendered ideas about home and Heimat in which male visions of home were privileged over those of women, re-enforcing the conservative gender norms of the period.

This book begins with a close examination of Cochin’s natural environment. Barring some notable exceptions, histories of port cities have either completely neglected or failed to adequately engage with the coastal environments within which such cities are located. This has been an unfortunate omission since port cities have of course been fundamentally shaped by environmental transformations. In Cochin, the harbour’s very birth is often attributed to a flood that is said to have swept through the coast in the fourteenth century. Memories of this flood have lingered along the volatile coastline as has the fate of its most prominent casualty, the ancient city of Muziris, which is said to have been destroyed by the very same waters that gave birth to Cochin. From the colonial period onwards, therefore, the eventful history of Cochin’s coastline had begun to attract considerable interest and scrutiny. Through a focus on the discussions surrounding the port’s coastline, this chapter will examine how perceptions of the port’s environment intersected with visions for its development over the course of the late nineteenth century.

This chapter demonstrates how Sweden as a state, and in particular Stockholm as a city, has played an oversized role in the emergence of global environmental governance since the mid-1960s, with the 1972 Stockholm Conference on “the human environment” as a defining event. The chapter argues that “human” is a key word to identify the set of properties of Swedish society that can explain Sweden’s vanguard role, including strong popular movements, widespread social trust, robust social institutions, the high status of knowledge and research, and a rational positioning of Sweden as a progressive, nonaligned advocate of small state cooperation bringing advantages for both the country and its capital city. It is thus a counternarrative that is presented, in contrast to many conventional environmental narratives of decline, with theoretical and historiographical implications not only for environmental history but also for the understanding of what “environmental progress” might mean on the international level. The chapter identifies four “con”-words – contributing, connecting, convening, and contributing.

This chapter demonstrates the crucial role of geographic proximity in shaping agrarian and herding relations in the history of late Ottoman Kurdistan, including regional political economy, socioeconomic structures, and intercommunal relations. It argues that the region is marked by three distinct ecological zones, which differ from each other in terms of elevation, climate, vegetation, and both human and animal habitation. The chapter then shows the encroachment of the Ottoman state through the arrival of Tanzimat reforms and the multifaceted consequences this had in the region. Next, it illustrates a demographic portrait of the region, depicting how human beings brought different ecosystems into conversation with one another. It argues that pastoralism sustained the conversation between geographic zones into the nineteenth century, creating linkages and slippages between mountains, pastures, and plains, and defining the interaction between the three zones until these links began to weaken in the face of a series of environmental crises. The chapter concludes with a glimpse into five villages from different parts of the region.

The framing of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in relation to the postwar Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region grafted a political geography onto a broad range of ecological areas. Planners, drawing on climate models, classified the region in agro-ecological terms devised in reference to the tropics. Functionally, their logic shored up a focus on rainfed, or unirrigated, agriculture in semi-arid and arid lands. But their rendering of dry areas masked the geopolitical framing of international agricultural research in the postwar period. Born of the Cold War, ICARDA emerged from exercises of European imperialism, Great Power rivalries, and the improvisation of modern nation-states in Western Asia and North Africa. The chapter charts the imperial origins of international agricultural research in Syria, the Cold War on hunger, and CGIAR’s classification of arid regions, towards an account of (1) the geopolitical logic of international agricultural research and (2) dryland agricultural science as the ground for technological and political intervention in decolonized lands.

After the Green Revolution successfully raised wheat and rice yields in more auspicious farming contexts, attention in agricultural development turned to crops that grew on poorer soils and in regions of indifferent rainfall. When Rockefeller Foundation agronomists reached out to India with an urge to establish an international center for research on such crops in the 1970s, they found eager hosts. The foundation’s agronomists had been active in India during the 1950s and 1960s and built a community of local collaborators. Indian scientists saw the proposal for an international center as offering the next frontier in crop development. The possibility of a center also met with considerable appeal among the political establishment in India. Two prime ministers from opposite political camps, Indira Gandhi and Chaudhary Charan Singh, came to support the eventual International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) due to common ground in their respective politics of the poor and farmers’ politics. As the chapter shows, the circumstances of postcolonial India allowed for the emergence of institutionalized expertise outside the direct realm of the local state.

Chapter 1 investigates the introduction of knowledge about the conversion of river flows into electricity to China in the late Qing and early Republican periods. Despite the prominence of fossil fuel energy in the industrialized world, certain Chinese intellectuals advocated harnessing the country’s abundant river resources to produce electricity as a means of achieving full national independence. Local elites took the lead in constructing the first set of hydropower stations in southwest China, and afterwards an increasing number of Chinese elites recognized the potential of hydropower in the country. As a result, in the context of a long-term national crisis, hydropower came to be, for many people, synonymous with the strengthening of the Chinese nation.

Chapter 1 sets the scene for this book, providing the requisite background for the chapters that follow. It begins with a short overview of the military regime, focusing on repression and the gradual restoration of democratic freedoms, highlighting the role the latter played in facilitating the country’s burgeoning environmental movement. It then turns to the dictatorship’s plans for industrial growth and energy production. The chapter closes with an overview of the symbolism that surrounds big dams and an introduction to the influential generals and engineers responsible for orchestrating the dictatorship’s dam-building campaign. This chapter also lays the groundwork for the book’s first argument, that political pressures encouraged the military regime to build big dams quickly and with little regard for their social and environmental impacts.

The iconic image of the knight on horseback represents just one facet of the horse’s imprint on legal, political, and social systems developing in medieval Iberian society. This chapter argues that historical and bodily relations with horses shaped the negotiation of social status and the administration of territory during the dynamic periods of peace, conflict, and negotiation among Iberian kingdoms in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Defining the set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies making up an Iberian "culture of the horse” brings to light a fundamental tension in which the horse served as both an agent of control and a means to disrupt power relations.

This chapter focuses on the cultural transformations of Late Antiquity, using poems and letters produced between 300–600. Late Antique poets used rivers as ways of addressing changing religious, political, and religious identities, and to help them create new images of self and country. These early writers were responding to both literary and cultural rivers and to real encounters with river ecosystems. They shaped a sense of place and community alongside the rivers of Gaul, and their poetry reflects not only a sensitivity to the aesthetics of these riverscapes but also an awareness of the non-human world of river ecosystems. All told, Gallo-Roman poetry highlights an appreciation for the natural beauty of rivers, an awareness of their ecological abundance, and a recognition of the manifold ways in which human cultures, histories, and economies were drawn up in their watery webs.

The introduction takes the reader into the history of oil in the Ecuadorean Amazon in the twentieth century. Zooming out from the testimony of a former oil worker, a historical overview sheds light on the dynamics of oil extraction in the region by national and international companies. This history is analyzed from the interdisciplinary perspective of the Environmental Humanities, combining archival and oral sources, sociological and anthropological concepts, and a mixed-methods approach. From this vantage point, the changes in the rainforest brought by the oil industry can be narrated as a fundamental metamorphosis of the landscape, its ecology, and its inhabitants. Drawing from Amazonian and European notions of metamorphosis, four dimensions of this process are particularly relevant for the historical analysis: conceptual, material, toxic, and social. The metamorphosis as metaphor offers a perspective on historical change in the Amazon as a process driven by the conflictive interaction between the rainforest ecosystem and the narrative and material manifestations of the oil industry.

What would a sustainable economy look like? What would it take to live within our environmental means? Legacy answers these and other questions, setting out the key features of the sustainable economy. It explains what it would take to properly maintain different types of capital, why polluters would have to pay, why the current generation would have to fund the necessary maintenance of our natural assets and why we would have to save to invest. The message is a tough one: we are way off course in terms of meeting these conditions and we cannot escape the consequences. This book explains what we would have to do to mend our ways. In doing so, it highlights the feebleness of current approaches to net zero and biodiversity loss as well as our great neglect of the core infrastructures, and why we are not meeting our duties to the next generation. This title is Open Access.

What would a sustainable economy look like? What would it take to live within our environmental means? Legacy answers these and other questions, setting out the key features of the sustainable economy. It explains what it would take to properly maintain different types of capital, why polluters would have to pay, why the current generation would have to fund the necessary maintenance of our natural assets and why we would have to save to invest. The message is a tough one: we are way off course in terms of meeting these conditions and we cannot escape the consequences. This book explains what we would have to do to mend our ways. In doing so, it highlights the feebleness of current approaches to net zero and biodiversity loss as well as our great neglect of the core infrastructures, and why we are not meeting our duties to the next generation. This title is Open Access.

The history of environmental economics is interwined with other histories and movements. These include (1) humanitys thinking about its relationship to Nature; (2) a redefinition of economics from the study of material welfare to the study of tradeoffs, including tradeoffs between developing resources and preserving them; (3) rising consumer movements and a shift in economic focus from the producer to the consumer, which in turn facilitiated a shift from thinking about the exploitation of resources to the enjoyment of preserved landscapes; (4) developments in economic theories of externalities and public goods; and (5) the increasing involvement of economics in government policy, from agricultural and resource economics to planning government spending and regulation.

Early in the morning on 1 November 1911, dozens of fishermen gather on a little hilltop, just outside of the coastal village of Same-ura. The sun has not yet reached the horizon, and the air is freezing cold. The men are all armed with improvised weapons – flensing knives, clubs, and spears – and reek of liquor. None of them has slept this night. When hundreds of more armed fishermen appear on the main path along the coast, the men on the hilltop descend as well. A few minutes later, the two groups merge, reaching together a group of factory buildings at the end of the pier: the Same-ura whaling station. In the past half year, whalers from western Japan had caught and slaughtered more than 180 whales at this station. Subsequently, several tons of coagulated blood and oil had spilled into the nearby ocean, killing the local wildlife. The fishermen are convinced that the poor sardine catches this year are directly related to the whaling activities.

The North Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century was an oceanic borderland zone shaped by whaling and other extractive industries, and characterised by the rapid circulation of animals, people, commodities and capital. It was also a thoroughly imperial space: while Japanese, Pacific Islanders and white ‘beachcombers’ all worked aboard whalers, only the latter could leverage their citizenship to secure extraterritorial protection from imperial powers.

The history of the Bonin (J: Ogasawara) Islands illustrates this well. Until 1830 the islands had only the most fleeting history of human habitation, yet by 1863 they had emerged as a vital provisioning hub for the whaling fleet, populated by Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and Anglo beachcombers. When the Tokugawa government began colonising the islands, the beachcombers pointedly refused to naturalise as Japanese citizens, and secured diplomatic backing from their respective consulates in Tokyo. In doing so they frustrated Japanese attempts to assert territorial sovereignty over the Bonins for a generation.

Brief case studies of the Atlantic sturgeon, sustained medieval fisheries on Lake Constance, and development of intense commercial fishing for Atlantic cod identify themes and issues for an environmental history of medieval European fisheries, history as if nature matters. An interactive metabolic model for the interplay of autonomous cultural (i.e. socially learned) and natural forces provides an analytical framework for handling diverse local and regional experiences and impacts of medieval Europeans with aquatic ecosystems. Traditional historical methods fit together with interdisciplinary evidence from archaeology, archaeozoology, historical climatology, and aquatic ecology in a search for understandable consilience. Some developments during roughly 500–1500 CE may foreshadow present-day global fisheries crises.

A survey of post-Pleistocene hydrologies and living aquatic ecologies identifies key variables which shaped fish communities in European and surrounding waters into Roman times. Provides a basic introduction to key ecological concepts such as habitats, food webs, predator–prey relations, ecological ‘guilds’, and environmental tolerances of fishes. Signs of localized negative effects of Roman consumption on especially inshore and estuarine Mediterranean fishes were, however, mostly effaced following late antique disintegration of classical cultures in the West.

Chapter 1 focuses on locusts and the Arabic-speaking Shammar nomadic group between 1858 and 1890. It explains how locusts foiled Ottoman attempts to transform the Jazira into a cotton-growing heartland in the midst of the American Civil War. As locusts challenged the designs of certain humans, they also ensured that the Jazira landscape remained productive depending on how one moved within it. It was in part the landscape created by locusts that undermined Ottoman attempts to forcibly settle the Shammar during the 1860s, and made far more difficult the settlement of Chechen refugees at Ras al-Ayn this same period. And it was this same landscape of locusts that incubated a revolt in 1871, as the Shammar protested the formation of the special administrative district of Zor, created in an effort to match the desert with administrative borders with the help of the empire’s foremost reformers, Cevdet Pasha and Midhat Pasha. The revolt was crushed and ended with different branches of the Shammar attached to separate districts of the Jazira. But it did not end the power of locusts and mobility, and so people continued to imagine how to close the gap between Ottoman provinces and the environment it divided up.