Environment and History

Wild Smoke

2022-10-19T09:59:45-07:00

Almost every year, ash from forest fires drifts from fires in north-western Canada into northern Europe, altering forecasts on both continents, settling in Antarctic ice, and turning the skies over the world’s major cities an apocalyptic orange. As smoke drifts from the forests into nearby communities and distant urban centres, it becomes the medium through which most people experience forest fire, leaving traces on memories and bodies. Although wildfires and their associated plumes are getting worse, people have a long and dynamic relationship with forest fire smoke which can be understood through the lens of air pollution and forestry history. Using British Columbia, Canada as a case study, I argue that the difficulty of separating wildfire smoke from other types of air pollution has worked to the advantage of land managers interested in supporting the forestry industry, with negative impacts for northern communities.

Race, Environment, and Crisis

2022-01-24T05:31:35-08:00

In August 1969 Hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast. We argue that the disaster caused by the Hurricane was an outcome of the entanglement between human and non-human agents. As a non-human agent, Hurricane Camille thrust the prevailing socio-economic situation in the segregationist South into the spotlight, with all its political and cultural ramifications – much to the annoyance of the local political elite that had long sought to isolate southern politics from civil rights and desegregation agenda. Consequently, it (re)invigorated and furnished the civil rights movement and the politics defining that era with new arguments and approaches that would have been impossible to develop from the perspective of human agency alone. By examining both local and national press discourses relating to the crisis caused by Hurricane Camille in the state of Mississippi in August 1969, we argue that historical agency should not be seen in purely anthropocentric terms but as an entanglement between human and non-human events.

How bogs made for borderlands

2021-10-07T06:42:08-07:00

Border scholars have radically turned away from the notion of ‘natural borders’ dictated by nature and now broadly agree that all borders are ‘artificial’ human constructs. We argue that significant causal relations between physical factors and borders nevertheless exist. We analysed the relation between distinct natural features and historical border development, using the notion of affordances and the example of raised bogs in the medieval and modern eastern Low Countries. Bog landscapes functioned as both barriers and passageways to humans through the spatiotemporal variability of these opposite affordances. At the scale of local settlement territories, large bog landscapes had the coercive power to function as borderlands separating adjacent communities. Such coercion was absent on the larger spatial scale of princedoms. The growing economic importance of peat was a crucial driver for border demarcation at both scales since the late Middle Ages. Path dependency and diplomatic risk calculation explain the long persistence of bog boundaries across successive polities.

‘GROWING A WORLD WONDER’

2022-08-31T09:26:47-07:00

This article offers a historical critique of the Great Green Wall Initiative of the Sahel and the Sahara (GGW) – an audacious project to stop the southern encroachment of the Sahara Desert by constructing a wall of trees across the continent. By situating the GGW within the longue durée of the Sahel’s environmental history, it examines how the narratives of environmental decline that underpin the initiative are not only misguided, but draw on racialized interpretations born out of the transatlantic slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, and the neoliberal market economies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I argue that narratives of environmental decline have served as a dynamic framework to rationalize the exploitation of the Sahel’s environments. The GGW is the most recent attempt by the West to exploit Africa’s environments and has helped transform narratives of environmental decline into the fetishized commodities of a global neoliberal economy.

Changing Course.

2022-10-07T07:53:03-07:00

Transformations in river management that manifest diverse forms of (increased) human interference, witness to hydraulic ingenuity whilst instigating an ecosystem disturbance, are usually explained as successive water regimes. Researchers then analyse factors that triggered regime shifts and moreover, to measure the complexity thereof, discuss (un)successful attempts of policymakers in juggling conflicting interests. Few studies, however, centre on small-scale river systems that are nevertheless characterised by fragmented policy in which multiple stakeholder parties (wish to have) had a say. We analyse, based on a close reading of archival and (published) records, the evolution of post-war water management in the Demer valley (Flanders) and conclude that it broadly fits the water regimes approach of Wolf etal. (2021). Agricultural interests prevailed until the 1970s, notwithstanding an early exploration of the valley’s recreational potential, whereupon experts and nature organisations put forward an alternative approach that eventually led to changing policies in the early 1990s.

Biodiversity in the Late Middle Ages

2022-05-06T07:38:26-07:00

This article provides a systematic overview of the species of wild birds that lived in the fourteenth-century County of Holland, now the Netherlands, on the basis of archaeological and historical sources. It argues that scholars should devote more attention to the Late Middle Ages (1300-1500) as a historical baseline for the study of biodiversity, and demonstrates the value of using medieval financial administration (accounts) as a source for such research. The article identifies 43 species of birds and makes some preliminary remarks about population dynamics. It can also serve as an example to conduct similar research on other geographical regions.