The Maya Forest and Indigenous Resistance during the Caste War

This article provides an environmental history of indigenous resistance during the Caste War, a major Indian revolt that took place in the Yucata?n peninsula between 1847 and 1901. It argues that the evolution of the war was bound to the material conditions of the vast Maya rainforest and the expanding built environment at this area?s commodity frontiers. In this regard, the article advances two main theses. First, that the Maya rainforest was an ideal battleground for the insurgents? guerrilla warfare but extremely challenging for regular military columns. Second, that indigenous subversion and survival rested on both commodity extraction and everyday agricultural practices carried out in the forest. In short, indigenous resistance was built on the ecology and geography of the rainforest at the contested interstices of empires and nations.

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Idyll and Industry: Rethinking the Environmental History of Grand Pré, Nova Scotia

London Journal of Canadian Studies ◽

10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2016v31.002 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Claire Campbell

Keyword(s):

Nova Scotia ◽

Environmental History ◽

Agricultural Practices ◽

World Heritage Site ◽

Modern Agriculture ◽

Industrial Landscape ◽

Heritage Site ◽

History Of ◽

Economic Landscape ◽

Annapolis Valley

In June 2012, UNESCO named the landscape of Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, a World Heritage Site, as ‘exceptional testimony to a traditional farming settlement created in the seventeenth century by the Acadians in a coastal zone with tides that are among the highest in the world’. Grand Pré is the gateway to the Annapolis Valley, a rare stretch of favourable soils and climate in a largely unarable province. From the early nineteenth century onward, ambitions to make the Valley ‘the Orchard of the Empire’ resulted in some of the most intensive rural development in Atlantic Canada. This transformed the physical, ecological and economic landscape of Nova Scotia profoundly, and became central to its sense of place in the global community. Its fields and orchards also inspired a second industry: tourism, promoting, ironically, a decidedly non- industrial picture of blithe fertility and prosperity. In recent decades, both agriculture and tourism in the region have created a new idyll, one that grafts the language of sustainability onto the pastoral image of apple blossoms, and so successfully draws attention away from the ecological costs and economic health of agriculture in the region. With its focus on pre-industrial Acadian settlement, historical commemoration at Grand Pré has the very real effect of affirming the possibility of local and sustainable agriculture in the area today. But the pré is also part of another history, another set of agricultural practices that followed the Acadians and that still frame most agricultural production in Nova Scotia. This essay offers a second public narrative for Grand Pré, one that treats the site as part of the Annapolis Valley as well as l’ancienne Acadie , part of an industrial landscape as well as an idyllic one. It is only by recognizing both histories that we can really appreciate the realities of modern agriculture and the need for sustainable alternatives.

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Sovereignty and Soil

Who Owns Haiti? ◽

10.5744/florida/9780813062266.003.0008 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Scott Freeman

Keyword(s):

Environmental History ◽

Agricultural Practices ◽

Conservation Strategies ◽

Wage Labor ◽

Agricultural Labor ◽

Soil P ◽

Foreign Intervention ◽

History Of ◽

Cooperative Labor ◽

A Site

“Sovereignty and Soil” analyses how agricultural labor and the non-adoption of soil conservation strategies becomes a site of resistance to the impositions of foreign aid. Throughout Haiti’s agricultural and environmental history, foreign intervention has laid claim to the trees and crops of Haiti, and in doing so has threatened the very stuff of sovereignty: Haiti’s soil. Not only is it important to consider the history of agricultural extraction in Haiti, it is equally important to consider the efforts of international aid that ostensibly attempt to rectify such ills. This contemporary ethnographic research details how environmental aid projects have unsuccessfully attempted to use Haiti’s collective labor groups as a site for individualized wage labor incentives. The impositions of individualized wage labor are in stark contrast to the way that Haitian cooperative labor groups work for group rather than individual benefit. Ultimately, this article documents how long held agricultural practices are continuing assertions of rural solidarity.

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Provisions in the Development Plan of Cities / Towns of Different Characters - A Comparative Study

International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology ◽

10.22214/ijraset.2021.36407 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (VI) ◽

pp. 630-634

Author(s):

Gunjan Chandrakar

Keyword(s):

Built Environment ◽

Urban System ◽

Development Plan ◽

Cultural Life ◽

The Social ◽

History Of ◽

Material Conditions ◽

Euclidean Type ◽

Ancient Monument ◽

The City

Dating back to the history of development which starts near the resources or the Euclidean type planning where only physical planning is considered the time has come where planners need to consider the social aspects as well as the character of the city while setting goals or making policies for the same. Every place has its own uniqueness it may a cool new hi-tech building or an antique ancient monument, a busy booming mall or a quiet peaceful natural scenery. The need of this study of urban system is important to understand the human values, development, and the interactions they have with their physical environment. Development plan aims to promote growth and regulate the present and future development of towns and cities. In its simplest form, it is about improving the standard of living of the residents. While planning for a city, we should not only think about development as a tool for improving the physical and material conditions of the citizens but also consider the changes in built environment of the city which forms an important part of the city character and also gives clues related to the social and cultural life in that city The richness of the values forming the identity and character of the built environment is also an expression of the richness of the social and cultural life in that city .

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