This article explores hunting in interwar Greece as a window into the technocratic management of wild fauna and the rise of game as a form of economic capital. Unlike previous studies that focus on rural practices or folklore, it analyses hunting guides published between 1922 and 1940 to show how state-affiliated authors sought to transform hunting from a decentralised, subsistence activity into a regulated and profit-oriented enterprise. These guides promoted selective ecologies, favouring certain game species while calling for the eradication of predators seen as threats to agriculture and hunting yields. This shift reflected the broader ethos of the interwar Greek state, which framed hunting as both a tool of national economic management and a recreational pursuit for urban elites. The authors, often officials or advisors within state and hunting associations, used print to advance ideals of ecological control, economic calculation and social hierarchy rather than to instruct rural hunters in practical skills. The sudden boom in hunting guides coincided with post-1922 refugee resettlement and intensified agricultural modernisation, revealing how hunting became entwined with rural reconstruction, ecological engineering, and the emergence of internal tourism. By tracing the intersection of hunting, capital and state ideology, this study highlights how wild animals were valued not simply as food or game, but as resources to be managed, commodified and woven into the economic and political ambitions of interwar Greece.
During extremely cold winters in the Little Ice Age, frozen waterways impeded shipments of fresh water into the city of Amsterdam. With most of the local surface water and groundwater being brackish and polluted, such winters caused drinking-water crises among the poor. Harvesting rainwater to store it in cisterns was an effective form of climate adaptation, provided they were large enough to bridge the frost period. However, building these large underground reservoirs proved to be an enormous challenge. The great unpredictability of the weather complicated the investments and there was no consensus on the question of who was responsible for the vital drinking-water supply. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the city authorities finally undertook to build water tanks, but only under the threat of popular revolt. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .
Women’s roles in medieval economies are often difficult to trace, as their activities were inconsistently recorded in historical sources. While scholars have long acknowledged the likelihood of female participation, concrete evidence remains limited and fragmented. This article presents a unique case study of women landowners in late thirteenth-century Bologna, focusing on rural property through the lens of tax returns (known as estimi ), which record a number of tax returns filed by women. We present a sample of women’s properties, demonstrating how to analyse these records, and what types of information they yield. We deepen the study of these properties by 1) mapping the locations of properties in GIS; and 2) integrating this information with modern soil data to evaluate the relationship between land use, estimated land value and soil characteristics. With this spatial analysis, we find that properties located on soil most suited for agriculture were valued higher. In this way, the article makes contributions not only on gender and economic practices but also on the structure of landed estates and land use in the Bolognese contado , and in this way contributes to the broader environmental history of this period.
In the mid-nineteenth century, when Germany turned into the second-largest wood-importing nation in Europe, political and social tensions arose over the wood trade. In 1879, along with iron and grain, timber became one of the main commodities on which the protectionist compromise between landowners and heavy industry was based. Subsequently, Germany reformed timber tariffs several times – including railway tariffs and criteria for classifying wood types – thereby sparking heated controversies in domestic politics, academic debates among forest scientists and changes in international relations with Russia and Austria-Hungary. Timber tariffs contributed to fiscal revenue, but protectionist policies proved insufficient to curb wood imports from neighbouring countries. Investigating the evolution of protectionist policies in the field of the wood trade, their economic effects as well as their impact on German forestry, this article aims to explore the political and economic conflicts revolving around the wood trade in the age of protectionism. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
This article reconstructs the environmental history of Israel’s Makhtesh Ramon as a layered landscape on which extraction, security and conservation have been successively inscribed. Policy and planning files, government decisions, press articles and interviews reveal four phases between the 1950s and 2000s: mineral exploitation linked to state-building; militarisation and reserve creation following the 1979 Israel–Egypt peace agreement; a policy turn to protection involving environmental impact assessments (EIAs) and rehabilitation funding in the 1990s; and twenty-first-century programmes of landscape restoration, geo-tourism and dark-sky designation. This article shows how infrastructures – quarries, roads, lighting systems, outline plans, land-use designations and EIAs – created an ecology that brought new meaning and purpose to the sites involved. It also argues that conservation in Israel expanded to encompass abiotic values, industrial heritage and biodiversity, while visitor management became integral to ecological recovery. Framed as a site-based case study, Makhtesh Ramon clarifies the entanglements of governance, science and memory that shape contested desert nature.
This article investigates how nineteenth-century British writers imagined the soundscapes of ancient environments, focusing on the Carboniferous period as a case study. Often framed as the geological era that birthed coal – and by extension, industrial modernity – the Carboniferous served as fertile ground for textual reconstructions of prehistoric environments. While such reconstructions have traditionally privileged the visual, this study foregrounds the auditory, analysing depictions of silence, vegetal rustling and insect sounds in both scientific and popular Victorian writing. Methodologically, the article draws on concepts from sound studies to integrate the auditory into environmental history – proposing ‘Carboniferous silence’ as a rhetorical tool for evoking absence, estrangement and deep temporal distance. Tracing the shift from imagined stillness to the post-1860s integration of fossil-based insect acoustics, it argues that soundscapes functioned as affective and epistemological bridges between the primeval past and the industrial present. KEYWORDS
The dominance of natural forest as the main element of the environmental landscape in the eastern salient of Java decreased rapidly during the Dutch colonial era. The process occurred alongside the growth of the population – driven by immigration – and the development of food crops and commercial agriculture, as key factors pushing back forest area. Drawing upon primary and secondary materials, this article discusses the shift in orientation from conversion to conservation from c. 1800 to 1940. As the environmental consequences of deforestation became apparent, colonial authorities and scientists recognised the need for conservation. By the late colonial period, the eastern salient had developed Java’s largest conservation areas, reflecting a shift toward protecting larger ecosystems and addressing long-term sustainability. This transformation underscores a dual narrative of economic expansion through agricultural innovation and environmental degradation, highlighting the ongoing tension between development and conservation.
Over the last decades, the history of the conservation movements in Australia, Canada and New Zealand has portrayed them as elitist and scientific movements. This article sheds new light upon these movements by investigating how scientific foresters and conservationists, influenced by new notions of the political sway of the public, devoted significant attention to influence public opinion through propaganda, believing public support essential to the implementation of scientific forestry in a democracy. As this article shows, conservationists and state forest agencies published pamphlets, launched magazines, delivered lectures, and organised exhibitions, seeking to shape public opinion. However, witnessing how the depression threatened to curtail their long work, some conservationists abandoned the idea of the possibility of enacting far-reaching conservation policies under democratic governance, instead advocating for bestowing experts with dictatorial powers.
This article traces 1,500 years of human engagement with the water cycle of Kyisho, the floodplain surrounding Lhasa, Tibet. As successive states made Lhasa their capital, Kyisho’s residents and rulers had religious, political and technological imperatives to divide the plain into wet and dry zones. Early cultivators practised irrigation but avoided the sacred sites of lha lu (deities and spirits). The rulers who introduced Buddhism in the seventh century drained marshlands to build the Jokhang and Ramoché temples. Later residents constructed embankments to protect them. As the Mongol, Manchu and British empires extended their influence into Tibet, Lhasa became a centre of pilgrimage and trade, prompting its enriched elites to expand Kyisho’s embankments and their riverside estates. Drainage accelerated after 1951, following Tibet’s incorporation into the PRC and the widespread use of industrial concrete. Intensive construction in the 1990s and 2000s caused environmental degradation. This was followed by the national ‘ecological civilisation’ policy, which sealed Kyisho’s remaining wet zones to conserve them.
Squid – ten-limbed cephalopods with lifespans of only a year and migratory habits – reveal a maritime history of North Korea defined by volatility and frustration. This paper reconstructs how squid in the East Sea undermined production quotas and eluded state planning from 1945 to 1964, showing how nonhuman herd agency exposed the limits of Pyongyang’s efforts to discipline oceanic nature. Briefly celebrated in propaganda as symbols of abundance in the early 1960s, squid soon revealed the fragility of postcolonial ambition and Soviet-style development. Drawing on underused Korean and Soviet sources, the study reframes the East Sea as a frontier of multi-species interaction, where nonhuman actors disrupted human designs. North Korea’s coastline emerges as an unstable zone of extraction, improvisation and ecological uncertainty. Placing marine life at the centre of analysis brings environmental history, Cold War history and Korean studies into conversation with more-than-human histories of labour, knowledge and resource extraction.
This article examines how Russian imperial ambitions to transform the Kazakh steppe between 1840 and 1914 were shaped by and in turn reshaped understandings of climate. As Russian scientists and administrators encountered Central Asia’s continental climate, with its extremes of heat and cold, they developed theories that recast the steppe’s aridity from an immutable natural barrier into a condition that could be ‘improved’ through European cultivation and settlement. It reveals how environmental theories became instruments of empire. The resulting transformations not only made Kazakhs increasingly vulnerable to the climate, but would set off the changes that would magnify the scale and tragedy of ensuing famines. This history illuminates both the origins of Russian schemes to engineer climate – which would culminate in the Soviet era’s Great Transformation of Nature – and the broader relationship between environmental knowledge and imperial power in the nineteenth century.
While Bombay’s rains have always been an intriguing research topic, the cyclones faced by the city and its surroundings have not received much attention. The study of tropical cyclones on the east coast of the Indian subcontinent, especially those that struck the coastal regions of present-day Bangladesh, has been a focus of many environmental historians. However, the question remains whether Bombay and its surroundings were less affected in this regard. In this paper, thorough research has been conducted on the cyclones that hit the West Coast, especially Bombay, using both official sources and unofficial narratives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The extent to which West Coast cyclones differed from those of the East Coast is thoroughly examined. Finally, the paper touches on Bombay’s position in terms of ecological refugees, a growing issue in the twenty-first century.
The 1907 Konya Plain Irrigation Project redefined local ecologies and catalysed material and political changes in central Anatolia. Often overshadowed by the Anatolian Railway Company’s railway infrastructure, this study highlights Deutsche Bank’s pivotal role in environmental engineering. As the Ottoman Empire relied on foreign capital for infrastructural projects, the Konya Project emerged as a nexus of state centralisation and capitalist enterprise, reshaping Anatolia’s agricultural landscape. The project aimed to create a rationally planned, mechanised and export-oriented agricultural space, often sidelining local peasant needs in favour of state modernisation and foreign capital interests. This quasi-colonialist public–private partnership exemplifies how multinational banks influenced the transformation of natural and socio-political landscapes in rural Anatolia, marking the Konya Project as a key player in this era of state-managed environmental change.
This article addresses two hundred years of administration and land use around Almeirim, a city located on the left bank of the River Tagus near Santarém. Through legislation and other administrative documents, it reconstructs the historical progression of different kinds of land use and generates maps showing the approximate limits of the spatial scope of regulation. Three main conclusions may be drawn: first, the dynamics of the royal forests of Almeirim cannot be understood without considering the dynamics of the surrounding areas; second, the Portuguese Crown sought to conserve resources by generating multifunctional and organised spaces so as to strike a balance between the socio-economic activities carried out by the Crown, secular and religious estates, and local inhabitants; third, the Crown (among other agents) succeeded in preserving the multifunctional landscape for which it issued restrictive legislation and established a permanent administrative staff for its enforcement on the ground. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
The field of environmental history in India emerged as a response to movements against forest policies and large dams in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, anti-caste scholars and activists soon critiqued early environmental histories that portrayed colonialism as a watershed in the ecological history of South Asia without accounting for the violence of environmental exclusions along lines of caste. This review article surveys works in environmental history and engages interventions from Dalit studies to evaluate the role of caste in the colonial transformation of entangled subcontinental landscapes of forests and fields. Brahmanical and colonial demarcations of forests and fields simultaneously hinged upon oppressed caste labour while eliding Dalit and Adivasi claims to land. Taking landscape to encompass contingent webs of socio-ecological relations and contested spatial imaginaries, this article argues that the reproduction of landscapes of caste exclusion entailed material struggles over nature and the naturalisation of exclusionary landscapes. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
The article analyses the social consequences of the subsistence crisis and water scarcity in 1817, one of the most severe years of the megadrought (1812–1824) that affected northeastern Spain. Drawing on municipal records from Barcelona, Tarragona and Girona, ecclesiastical documentation and commercial correspondence from a grain trading company, it examines how hydrological stress disrupted food supply, intensified conflicts over water access and shaped relations between rural communities and urban authorities. Harvest failure contributed to rising grain prices and increased migration in a post-war context marked by institutional fragility. In response, authorities and local institutions promoted charitable initiatives, public works and regulatory measures to secure water and grain supplies. Evidence from Urgell, an agricultural region of Catalonia, illustrates the scale of agricultural losses and peasant displacement. The study conceptualises drought as a socially embedded crisis shaped by prolonged environmental stress, governance constraints and unequal resource access.
