History and the Militarized Landscape

The environmental history of war, especially its impacts on landscape, encompasses a much broader scope than the conflicts and the historiography of the late twentieth century. Ideas on the social and environmental processes of conflict draw from a much longer, global discourse. This chapter uses the ancient-to-modern conflict landscape of central Vietnam to argue for a multi-layered, broader analysis of the environmental history of conflict.

Wild Beasts in the City

Early settlers, pastoralists and hunters, demonstrated an extensive ecological knowledge of the local landscape as of animal behaviour. India rulers used hunts and captive wild animals in the court to underline their bravery, military prowess and valour. The local fascination with shikar (hunting) rubbed off onto British elite, who participated in gruesome farces of urban ‘hunts’, against large wild cats imported in cages from the forests surrounding Bengaluru. Uncaged wildlife were perceived as vermin, leading to an intensive period of targeted kills in the 19th century. These histories influence our framing of the wild beast as the ‘other’: a being to be valorized in battle, conquered in a hunt, trapped in a cage, butchered for trophies, and exoticized in print, but not capable of co-existing with humans. Solutions are unclear, and would be simplistic to propose. But the need to foster a new ethic of urban conservation appears clear.

Anthropogenic Landscapes of the Central Himalayas

This chapter traces the impact of human activities on the Central Himalayas and trans-Himalayas over almost four millennia. It shows how the shifts in the use of natural resources was linked to the emergence of new political configurations and changing landscapes. Foragers inhabited the middle and lower Himalayas from the Paleolithic, whereas pastoral activity is visible on the Upper and Trans-Himalayas. The mining of gold, copper and iron led to metallurgy, tools and trade. Stone buildings, water reservoirs and the cultivation of barley, millet, and rain-fed rice supported population increase and produced terraced farming which eventually led to the clearing of the malarial valley floors and facilitated introduction of paddy. This is the agrarian landscape of today, suffering from severe stress and growing depopulation.

Narratives from Indian Seas

While terrestrial conservation in India strives to achieve a historical stasis built on a strong preservationist Edenic ecology, coastal and marine systems have always been multi-use environments whose management has had to embrace the dynamic realities of historical contingencies. The author discusses two case studies from the Lakshadweep Archipelago documenting how near-historical processes have sculpted the ecology of these coupled social-ecological systems. The first shows how the resilience of coral reefs to climate change was epiphenomenally enhanced by a pelagic fisheries development programme that deflected fishing away from reefs. The second documents the unforeseen consequences of effective green turtle conservation – leading to major conflict with local fishers and a decline in seagrass ecosystems.

Going, Going, Gone

Israel’s remarkable biodiversity can be attributed to its unique geographical location at the juncture of three continents, its extreme climatic variability and half a century of interventions to ensure protection of habitat. For the country’s first fifty years, its progress in setting aside reserves and protecting myriad, damaged animal populations led to a reversal in the decline of individual species and ecosystems, making the country a model of applied conservation biology. Recently, however, there has been a steady loss of animal and plant populations, with one third of Israel’s 100 mammal species defined as threatened. This chapter considers the range of drivers behind the recent deterioration in ecological indicators, with a focus on the impact of the country’s extraordinary growth in human numbers on the natural world.

‘Natural’ No More?

Rivers in fast-changing and expanding Indian cities have become contested natural features. Though central to such human settlements for long, which have depended on them for water security, livelihoods, biodiversity and cultural life, more recently they face threats from new urbanization of their flood plains, water pollution, and loss of biodiversity as the city encroaches upon them. Based on a case study of the river Yamuna flowing through the mega city of Delhi, the article brings forth the limited understanding of such natural features in urban planning and the public discourse in general. It explores in detail the changing landscape, its implication on the long-term sustainability and the wider implications of their destruction in urban settings.

History Eats Its Young

Africa is a vast and diverse continent, with a rapidly growing economy, and a significant role to play in the contemporary and future global order. This chapter argues that Africa’s deep past matters too, especially the continent’s socio-environmental longue durée. It shows why the neglect of a deep past and the idea of unchanging nature and people in nature is political. It focuses on the first nation (San/Bushmen) to illustrate the pernicious dangers of short-termism and argues that a long-term view of the past shatters the myth of discrete ethnicities and disrupts notions of human homogeneity. Deep history makes the story of human impact on the climate and environment more nuanced and complex. All this makes one reconsider much more than just Africa in history: but the very idea of beginnings and endings, the non-linear movements of people and effects of nature, the ways early peoples remade ecologies right down to the present day.

A Historical Ecology of Cattle in Mozambique

The historical ecology of cattle in Mozambique illustrates the intricate and long-term relationship between people, cattle, and landscapes, and the ecological skills of farmers and herders. Africa’s long history of cattle breeding is a history of careful selection for specific traits and of hybridization between breeds and of breed conservation. Despite variations in cattle numbers due disease, droughts and confiscations of cattle, herders have managed to replenish their herds relatively quickly. Herders have been able to respond to shifting market demands and the informal local cattle market has remained strong. The relative stability of cattle prices in relation to other currencies suggests that ‘cattle economy’ is governed by a different logic compared to other potential stores of wealth. The ecological knowledge and economic strength of local cattle rearing needs to be taken into account both in development and landscape planning.

South Asia’s Coastal Frontiers

This chapter explores the environmental history of coastal South Asia. The coast has been a liminal zone—ecologically, culturally, and economically. This chapter argues that the social and ecological history of coastal South Asia, over the longue durée, allows us to reintegrate histories of oceanic commerce, with terrestrial histories of the state’s expanding power over nature. The chapter explores two intertwined strands of coastal environmental history under colonial rule: the history of coastal fisheries, and the expanding environmental footprint of coastal India in an age of imperial globalization. The chapter concludes by examining the acceleration of coastal transformation from the 1970s, accompanied by rising environmental consciousness.

Provincializing the Anthropocene

The proposal that we have entered a new geological period, the Anthropocene, has gained currency both inside and outside of scientific circles. It is, therefore, worth understanding where this idea comes from and how the science behind it has developed. This article discusses both the nature of empirical support for the Anthropocene proposal as well as the analytical apparatus supporting and surrounding it. To a surprising extent, the notion of an Anthropocene represents an effort to expand homogenized European historical experiences, frameworks and chronologies onto the rest of the world. This focus has serious consequences, for example in the carbon budgets calculated to accompany early agricultural transitions. Not only that deciding whether or not a new geological period is called for is, at present, unnecessary, but even more that there is something very troubling about earth system science built out so fundamentally from the history and ecology of one small part of the world.