Event, Process and Pulse: Resituating Floods in Environmental Histories of South Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohan D'Souza
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Livelihood Strategies ◽  
Perceptual Shift ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Geomorphological Processes ◽  
Conceptual Shift ◽  
Complex Relationships

The notion of the flood in South Asia is no longer solely characterised as the archetypal natural disaster. This perceptual shift, as this article will point out, draws from a conceptual shift within the field of environmental histories of South Asia. In the course of exploring and debating ideas about environmental change, environmental historians have drastically reconsidered the role and impacts of flooding in South Asia through three distinct narrative frameworks: (i) extreme hydraulic events; (ii) geomorphological process; and (iii) biological pulses. Environmental history as a field has thus helped to flesh out and radically revise our understanding of flooding, which has changed from previously being seen as an ahistorical calamitous event to instead providing contexts for revealing complex relationships between geomorphological processes, biological pulses and livelihood strategies. The notion of the flood in South Asia, consequently, is now acknowledged as an ecological force that is mediated by social, cultural and political interventions rather than exclusively borne out as an effect of nature.

The digital citizen: working upstream of digital and broadcast archive developments

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-152
Author(s):  
Kim Hammond ◽  
George Revill ◽  
Joe Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Research Council ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Funded Project ◽  
Digital Broadcast ◽  
Environmental Histories

This chapter explores the potential and significance of digital broadcast archives (DBAs) and associated tools for supporting civic engagement with complex topics. It draws on a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, Earth in Vision, which worked with a sample of 50 hours of environment-themed broadcasts drawn from over five decades of BBC television and radio archives. The project critically examines the potential of such broadcast archive content as a resource for the making and debating of environmental histories in the context of imagining and planning for environmental futures. It builds on the principles of co-production and social learning and aims to support more plural and dynamic accounts of environmental change. The overarching question the project addresses is how digital broadcast archives can inform environmental history and support public understanding of, and learning about, environmental change issues.

Reflections on the Public Interpretation of Regional Environmental History In Western Pennsylvania

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Chris J. Magoc
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Natural Resource Extraction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Western Pennsylvania

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.

scholarly journals Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950–2000

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iva Peša
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Environmental Aspects ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Central African Copperbelt ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Forestry Policies

Since the early twentieth century, the copper-mining industry on the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt has moved millions of tonnes of earth and dramatically reshaped the landscape. Nonetheless, mining companies, governments and even residents largely overlooked the adverse environmental aspects of mining until the early 1990s. By scrutinising environmental knowledge production on the Central African Copperbelt from the 1950s until the late 1990s, particularly regarding notions of ‘waste’, this article problematises the silencing of the environmental impacts of mining. To make the environmental history of the Copperbelt visible, this article examines forestry policies, medical services and environmental protests. Moreover, by historically tracing the emergence of environmental consciousness, it contextualises the sudden ‘discovery’ of pollution in the 1990s as a local and (inter)national phenomenon. Drawing on rare archival and oral history sources, it provides one of the first cross-border environmental histories of the Central African Copperbelt.

The Challenge of Oral History to Environmental History

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Williams ◽  
Mark Riley
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Environmental Practices ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Colonial Archives ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Key Interventions

Oral history has much to offer environmental history, yet the possibilities and promises of oral history remain underutilised in environmental history and environmental studies more broadly. Through a reflection on work in environmental history and associated disciplines, this paper presents a case for the strength and versatility of oral history as a key source for environmental history, while reflecting on questions of its reliability and scope. We identify three major insights provided by environmental oral history: into environmental knowledge, practices and power. We argue that, rather than being a weakness, the (inter)subjective and experiential dimensions of oral accounts provide a rich source for situating and interrogating environmental practices, meanings, and power relations. Oral history, moreover, provides a counterweight to a reliance on colonial archives and top-down environmental accounts, and can facilitate a renewal - and deepening - of the radical roots of environmental history. Furthermore, as a research practice, oral history is a promising means of expanding the participatory and grassroots engagement of environmental history. By decentring environmental expertise and eroding the boundaries (both fictive and real) of environmental knowledge production, oral environmental histories can provide key interventions in pursuit of a more just, sustainable world.

The environmental history of Australian rivers: a neglected field of opportunity?

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul I. Boon
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Historical Ecology ◽  
Numerical Data ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Perceptions And Attitudes ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Australian Community ◽  
History Of

Historical ecology documents environmental change with scientific precepts, commonly by using statistical analyses of numerical data to test specific hypotheses. It is usually undertaken by ecologists. An alternative approach to understanding the natural world, undertaken instead by historians, geographers, sociologists, resource economists or literary critics, is environmental history. It attempts to explain in cultural terms why and how environmental change takes place. This essay outlines 10 case studies that show how rivers have affected perceptions and attitudes of the Australian community over the past 200+ years. They examine the influence at two contrasting scales, namely, the collective and the personal, by investigating the role that rivers had in the colonisation of Australia by the British in 1788, the establishment of capital cities, perceptions of and attitudes to the environment informed by explorers’ accounts of their journeys through inland Australia, the push for closer settlement by harnessing the country’s rivers for navigation and irrigation, anxiety about defence and national security, and the solastalgia occasioned by chronic environmental degradation. Historical ecology and environmental history are complementary intellectual approaches, and increased collaboration across the two disciplines should yield many benefits to historians, to ecologists, and to the conservation of Australian rivers more widely.

Missing Links? Business History and Environmental Change

2009 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hartmut Berghoff ◽  
Mathias Mutz
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Business History ◽  
Ecological Implications

AbstractBusiness and the natural environment, economy and ecology, are commonly perceived as being irreconcilable opposites. This article evaluates the variables of this opposition and asks for differentiated concepts from business and environmental history. In doing so it analyzes the existing literature in both subdisciplines and looks at why they have been relatively isolated from each other. The authors advocate approaches that integrate business and environmental history and take ecological implications of business as serious as the commercial implications of dealing with nature.

The Environmental Fall of the Roman Empire

Daedalus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Harper
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Environmental Variability ◽  
Ice Cores ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
History Of ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
Climate Proxies

Global environmental history is currently being enriched by troves of new data, and new models of environmental variability and human impact. Earth scientists are rapidly expanding historians’ knowledge of the paleoclimate through the recovery and analysis of climate proxies such as ice cores, tree rings, stalagmites, and marine and lake sediments. Further, archaeologists and anthropologists are using novel techniques and methods to study the history of health and disease, as revealed through examination of bones and paleomolecular evidence. These possibilities open the way for historians to participate in a conversation about the long history of environmental change and human response. This essay considers how one of the most classic of all historical questions–the fall of the Roman Empire–can receive an answer enriched by new knowledge about the role of environmental change.

scholarly journals Perception of Environmental Change Relationship to Labor Migration in the Chitwan Valley

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Miller
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Labor Migration ◽  
Sampling Method ◽  
Family Study ◽  
Household Level ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
Chitwan Valley ◽  
Low Efficiency ◽  
Farming Households

This research examines environmental change, in terms of agriculture production, influence on outmigration from the Chitwan Valley in Nepal. As the first part of a longitudinal study, a maximum variation sampling method was used to gather data on farming households' perceptions of environmental change and labor migration. While collecting field data, verbal consent was obtained from research participants and their identities protected. This study uses the measures of environmental change, social capital, and environmental history to analyze risk formation and amplification along migrant networks. Additionally, using t-tests, this data was compared to a sample from the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS) to observe change in perception and labor migration over time. The analysis concludes that perception of environmental change interacts with socio-cultural processes in ways that intensify household level migration. In addition, environmental change is one of the main factors causing low efficiency in agriculture production, leading households to diversify occupation and income through labor migration.

scholarly journals Horizontality, Negotiation, and Emergence: Toward a Philosophy of Environmental History

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-258
Author(s):  
Diogo De Carvalho Cabral
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
Natural Entities ◽  
The World ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
The Way

In this article, I intend to creatively synthesize both the empirical findings and the theoretical formulations put forward by self-proclaimed environmental historians, as well as those by the scholars who preceded and influenced them. Establishing a dialogue with the broader field of Environmental Humanities, especially posthumanism, I propose three principles for writing environmental histories: horizontality, negotiation, and emergency. Horizontality refers to the inexistence of a given and absolute 'ground' for human life. We walk, build our houses, earn a living, and develop ideas and cultures, not on top of an ontological floor, but attending to and being attended by the bodies surrounding us, some of them animated and some not, some solid and some liquid and gaseous. To inhabit is to make oneself available to be inhabited. Mutual habitation weaves assemblages that are both the continent and the content of life. Negotiation alludes to the human conversation with a larger world, both animated and inanimate, about coexistence. Humans never get everything they want, just the way they want it, from their relationships with nonhumans. Though people rarely recognize this, the only way history can be made is through compromise with the rest of the biosphere. This means that humans are continuously becoming, as they and their activities couple themselves with other natural entities and their activities. Emergence, therefore, is the radical geo-historicity of all earthly things, whose character is never given beforehand but constituted as they make their way through the world.

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