scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Meg Parsons ◽  
Karen Fisher ◽  
Roa Petra Crease
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Ecological Communities ◽  
Freshwater Systems ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Conventional Management ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Freshwater System ◽  
Management Approaches ◽  
Land Use Practices

AbstractFreshwater is essential to the health and wellbeing of both human and ecological communities. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the freshwater systems are affected by ongoing degradation directly connected to human activities over the last two centuries. Recently scholars have begun to question the efficacy of established management approaches, the extent to which current land-use practices are to blame and whether continued environmental decline in our waterways is inevitable. The continued degradation of freshwater systems under conventional management approaches necessitates a rethinking of how freshwater systems are governed, managed, and restored. In this introductory chapter we explore the origins of the freshwater crisis (a manifestation of multiple environmental injustices) within a single freshwater system: the Waipā River (Te Waipā o Awa).

Accelerating Change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Stewart Mauldin
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
Cotton Production ◽  
Economic Independence ◽  
Contract Negotiations ◽  
Reduced Frequency ◽  
Ecological Event ◽  
Land Use Practices ◽  
Ecological Regime

Emancipation proved to be a far-reaching ecological event. Whereas the ecological regime of slavery had reinforced extensive land-use practices, the end of slavery weakened them. Freedpeople dedicated less time to erosion control and ditching and used contract negotiations and sharecropping arrangements to avoid working in a centrally directed gang. Understandably, freedpeople preferred to direct their own labor on an individual plot of land. The eventual proliferation of share-based or tenant contracts encouraged the physical reorganization of plantations. The combination of these two progressive alterations to labor relations tragically undermined African Americans’ efforts to achieve economic independence by tightening natural limits on cotton production and reducing blacks’ access to the South’s internal provisioning economy. The cessation, or even reduced frequency, of land maintenance on farms exacerbated erosion, flooding, and crops’ susceptibility to drought.

Deferring Crisis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Stewart Mauldin
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Environmental Impacts ◽  
Shifting Cultivation ◽  
Crop Production ◽  
Animal Husbandry ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Land Use Practices ◽  
Ecological Regime

This chapter explores the ecological regime of slavery and the land-use practices employed by farmers across the antebellum South. Despite the diverse ecologies and crop regimes of the region, most southern farmers employed a set of extensive agricultural techniques that kept the cost of farming down and helped circumvent natural limits on crop production and stock-raising. The use of shifting cultivation, free-range animal husbandry, and slaves to perform erosion control masked the environmental impacts of farmers’ actions, at least temporarily. Debates over westward expansion during the sectional crisis of the 1850s were not just about the extension of slavery, they also reflected practical concerns regarding access to new lands and fresh soil. Both were necessary for the continued profitability of farming in the South.

AFTERWORD

2000 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARA BERRY
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Conservation And Development ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Colonial Policies ◽  
Land Use Practices

The four papers in this collection bring a varied set of perspectives as well as examples to bear on several common themes. The authors describe continuities and changes in colonial policies toward Africans' access to and use of land and natural resources and discuss some of the sources of knowledge that informed colonial officials' thinking about African land use practices. Implicitly if not directly, each poses the question of whether colonial officials learned anything from their interactions with African farmers and/or herders? By bringing together evidence from different though overlapping periods of time (all of them cover the late 1940s and 1950s) and a variety of colonial contexts (colonies under French and British rule, with and without European settlers), as a group these papers invite reflection on the circumstances that led colonial officials to acknowledge, or deny, that Africans might know something about their environments and that such knowledge ought to inform the design of conservation and development schemes.

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