scholarly journals Notions of Nature, Notions of Humanity

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Hicks

The history of Canadian parks systems, within the realm of environmental history, has been deeply affected by contemporary social, environmental, and political beliefs. The rhetoric of human domination over nature and the inherent separation of the two was entrenched throughout historical works on Canadian parks in the early to mid- twentieth century. The liberalization of history within the past forty years has served to shift this trend. The inclusion of scientific knowledge in historical research, the limitation of past prejudices and biases concerning nature and humanity, and the questioning of political policies affecting nature have aided in the growth of a body of historical research and interpretation that questions past perceptions of the natural. The historiographical exploration of parks history offers researchers an exciting opportunity to identify historical factors impacting the practice of environmental history while also discerning and encouraging future trends in environmental history. Using recent historical publications on Canadian parks history as examples, this paper seeks to both uncover the historical factors impacting past historical practice and acknowledge the major philosophical and practical shifts in historical practice that have fostered an exciting new body of work in environmental history. In questioning what it means to be human, what it means to be Canadian, and what the relationship between humanity and nature is and can be, increasingly nuanced historical work offers readers and historians new realms of exploration – both philosophically and practically.

2009 ◽  
pp. 303-317
Author(s):  
Luigi Piccioni

- The birth of Italian environmental history in the late 80s is due to the works and research of professional and non-professional historians. Its recent growth, fed for the first time by young researchers, and its gradual institutionalization could take place neglecting or even ignoring the numerous and sometimes excellent studies published by non-professionals. The cases of the merceologist Giorgio Nebbia and the botanist Franco Pedrotti appear exemplary in this regard. Both of them being eminent scholars in their own fields and pioneers of the italian environmentalist movement, they dedicated a considerable part of their scientific production to historical research. Nebbia has devoted himself to the history of the relationship between society, commodities and natural resources and to the story of "ecological contestation" while Pedrotti has re- searched mainly in the fields of protected areas and in post 2nd World War Italian environmentalism. This essay aims to highlight the contribution given by Nebbia and Pedrotti to Italian studies in the field of environmental history and to the spread of interest in this subject.Parole chiave: Italia; storiografia; storia ambientale; ambientalismo; aree protette; archivi.Key words: Italy; historiography; environmental history; environmentalism; protected areas; archives.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Eleanor Jane Rainford

<p>‘Ka mua, ka muri’, Walking backwards into the future, is a Māori proverb that aptly describes the findings of this thesis. That we should look to the past to inform the future is arguably the purpose of history, yet we have to walk back far enough. Tracing back from the present, this thesis will address what has driven political, economic, environmental and social change within the South Wairarapa region from 1984 to the present day. The region has experienced significant changes to its physical and social environment over the past thirty years. Many modern historians have attributed the key changes of this period, such as agricultural intensification, diversification, rising unemployment and environmental degradation, to the economic re-structuring of the Fourth Labour Government. This thesis will argue that these changes, and neoliberal reform itself, are consequent of much longer historiographical trends. Examination of the historical context and legacies of the intensification of dairy farming, rise of the viticulture industry, and the relationship between Ngāti Kahungunu and Rangitāne o Wairarapa and their whenua, reveals complexities in the history of the region that histories of neoliberal change commonly conceal. The identification of these long running historiographical trends aides understanding of the historical context in which neoliberal reform occurred, and provides alternative narratives for the changes that have occurred over the past thirty years. Furthermore, it suggests alternative trajectories for how viticulture, agriculture and Te Ao Māori may walk into the future.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Eleanor Jane Rainford

<p>‘Ka mua, ka muri’, Walking backwards into the future, is a Māori proverb that aptly describes the findings of this thesis. That we should look to the past to inform the future is arguably the purpose of history, yet we have to walk back far enough. Tracing back from the present, this thesis will address what has driven political, economic, environmental and social change within the South Wairarapa region from 1984 to the present day. The region has experienced significant changes to its physical and social environment over the past thirty years. Many modern historians have attributed the key changes of this period, such as agricultural intensification, diversification, rising unemployment and environmental degradation, to the economic re-structuring of the Fourth Labour Government. This thesis will argue that these changes, and neoliberal reform itself, are consequent of much longer historiographical trends. Examination of the historical context and legacies of the intensification of dairy farming, rise of the viticulture industry, and the relationship between Ngāti Kahungunu and Rangitāne o Wairarapa and their whenua, reveals complexities in the history of the region that histories of neoliberal change commonly conceal. The identification of these long running historiographical trends aides understanding of the historical context in which neoliberal reform occurred, and provides alternative narratives for the changes that have occurred over the past thirty years. Furthermore, it suggests alternative trajectories for how viticulture, agriculture and Te Ao Māori may walk into the future.</p>


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Frederick Eldridge

This paper is an adaption of a longer investigation of the relationship between politics and poetry in the Palestinian context, focusing on the work of Mahmoud Darwish. For this selection, I have adapted the sections pertaining to the efficacy of poetry in the context of historical events–specifically the traumatic history of the Palestinians. It is my argument that artistic practices like poetry act primarily as a means of narrative creation that skillfully integrate the experiences of the poet and thus negotiate the experiences of the listeners in order to create new meaning. This dialogue between audience and poet creates a persuasive and novel movement within the conceptual field; thinking about something in terms of something else (metaphor). This has the effect of making the poet an intractable source of historical meaning. The questions of the past, a dizzying array of dissonant occurrences, fractured experiences, and selected memory, find cogency within the poetic form. This artistic formation only gains this cogency through a precise system of cognitive faculties, which are shared by both poet and audience. The poetry of Mahmoud Darwish acts as a means of understanding history in the context of the present; creating an integrated narrative-history, which has important implications on experience, implicating present action through a ‘reading’ of the past.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (55) ◽  
pp. 293-313
Author(s):  
Pablo Álvarez Domínguez

Abstract In the past two decades, the museology of education in Spain has been one of the most attractive, productive avenues of educational historical research. With new focuses, education museums have come to be understood as essential resources for research and teaching in this area. A study of the relationship between the Museology of Education and History of Education offers a field of research which feeds into the study of Spain’s historical educational heritage. This article approaches the Museology of Education as the most promising research area for historiographers of education in Spain. From the very start, it sets out the main actions, activities and projects in museology taking place in the country, which demonstrate how historical educational science has taken ethnohistory in a new direction.


Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.


Author(s):  
Will Kynes

This chapter introduces the volume by arguing that the study of biblical wisdom is in the midst of a potential paradigm shift, as interpreters are beginning to reconsider the relationship between the concept of wisdom in the Bible and the category Wisdom Literature. This offers an opportunity to explore how the two have been related in the past, in the history of Jewish and Christian interpretation, how they are connected in the present, as three competing primary approaches to Wisdom study have developed, and how they could be treated in the future, as new possibilities for understanding wisdom with insight from before and beyond the development of the Wisdom Literature category are emerging.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bárbara Moguel ◽  
Liseth Pérez ◽  
Luis David Alcaraz ◽  
Socorro Lozano-García ◽  
Luis Herrera-Estrella ◽  
...  

&lt;p&gt;For decades, paleoecological studies in lake sediments have focused on reconstructing the environments of the past and explaining phenomena linked to climatic variations. Recent advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing have allowed access to environmental DNA (eDNA) and ancient sedimentary DNA (sedaDNA) as a new and efficient proxy for past and present biodiversity. The basin of Mexico (BM) is located in the central part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt at 2,200 m a.s.l.; with the southern portion harboring the Chalco sub-basin. Lake Chalco is one of the last remaining natural aquatic ecosystems within the ever-expanding urban area surrounding Mexico City. The paleoenvironmental history of this lake has been previously characterized using sedimentological and geochemical proxies, as well as preserved microfossils (diatoms, pollen) with a temporal framework based on multiple radiocarbon dates. However, information for the remaining taxonomic groups and metabolic pathways remained unexplored. Here, we present the first metagenomics-based study for the Holocene in a high-altitude lake in Central Mexico &amp;#8211;Lake Chalco. We explored the relationship between the lake&amp;#8217;s paleoenvironmental condition and estimations of taxonomic and metabolic profiles across the sedimentary sequence (2.5 meters long). Multiple biological and abiotic variables revealed three main environmental phases: 1) a cool freshwater lake (FW1: 11,500-11,000 cal years BP), 2) a warm hyposaline lake (HS2: 11,000-6,000 cal years BP), and 3) a temperate, subsaline lake (SS3, &lt;6,000 cal years BP). We describe the structure of the microbiota community and taxonomy richness turnover in the three Holocene paleoenvironmental phases. During the past 12 000 years BP the most abundant domains in Lake Chalco sediments were Bacteria, followed by Archaea, and Eukarya (36,722 genera). The analysis of functional proteins showed high biodiversity with a total of 27,636,243 proteins identified, but it was only possible to annotate 3,227,398 of them. Also, we identified several genes associated with some relevant pathways, such as methanogenesis. Altogether, this study allowed us to reconstruct the natural history of lake Chalco and its surroundings.&lt;/p&gt;


2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Chris J. Magoc

This essay attempts to counter the scarcity of efforts to address issues of natural resource extraction and environmental exploitation in public history forums. Focused on western Pennsylvania, it argues that the history of industrial development and its deleterious environmental impacts demands a regional vision that not only frames these stories within the ideological and economic context of the past, but also challenges residents and visitors to consider this history in light of the related environmental concerns of our own time. The essay explores some of the difficult issues faced by public historians and practitioners as they seek to produce public environmental histories that do not elude opportunities to link past and present in meaningful ways.


Author(s):  
Timothy Cooper

This article explores embodied encounters with the Sea Empress oil spill of 1996 and their representation in oral narratives. Through a close reading of the personal testimonies collected in the Sea Empress Project archive, I examine the relationship between intense sensory experiences of environmental change and everyday interpretations of the disaster and its legacy. The art­icle first outlines the ways in which this collection of voices reveals sensory memories, embodied affects and narrative choices to be deeply entwined in oral representations of the spill, disclosing a ‘sensory event’ that created a powerful awareness of both environmental surroundings and their relationship to everyday social processes. Then, reading these narratives against-the-grain, I argue that narrators’ accounts tell a paradoxical story of a disaster that most now wish to forget, and reveal an ambivalent legacy of environmental change that is similarly consigned to the past. Finally, I relate this social forgetting of the Sea Empress to the wider history of environmental consciousness in modern Britain.


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