We examine the historical political ecology of the 1946–47 red tide on the West Florida Shelf, USA, as a turning point in the scientific understanding of the harmful algae blooms (HAB) associated with Karenia brevis, as well as in their frequency and severity. When the HAB appeared in late 1946, there was no consensus about what it should be called, let alone its cause. The slow and inadequate federal and state response, limited by the nascent state of public support for scientific research, frustrated local residents and officials. By the time the HAB finally ended in the fall of 1947, scientists—with crucial support from a small cadre of citizen scientists led by Jay N. “Ding” Darling—had identified, named, and described the phytoplankton, located the mechanism responsible for the morbidity of marine animals in a toxin emitted by the organism, and tentatively identified the proximate factors leading to its seemingly anomalous proliferation. Historical data validate many of their hypotheses regarding the latter, including both natural weather anomalies (heavy rains, high temperatures) and anthropogenic inputs associated with Florida’s postwar economy and ecology (expansions of phosphate mining and sugar farming, increases in sewage effluent accompanying population growth).
Over the past 170 years, water management in Switzerland has undergone a profound transformation. What began as a localized, event-driven practice shaped by immediate needs and local initiative—such as efforts to ensure flood protection—gradually evolved into a complex, multi-level system shaped by cantonal and federal regulations. These regulatory developments reflect shifting policy priorities across a broad range of water-related interests, including flood protection, agriculture, nature conservation, energy production, fisheries, and safe drinking water, that risk conflict in their implementation if not consciously coordinated. This article investigates the historical development of water policy and management in the Swiss case study of Alptal valley (local level) in the Canton of Schwyz (regional level) from 1848 to 2021. Drawing on archival and legislative documents, we examined the drivers of change and how interests in protection from water, water use, and protection of water have been differently prioritized over time. The findings show an increase in policy integration at the cantonal level, aligning diverse water-related interests under a more coordinated and holistic approach. We also identify a growing tension: as regional (cantonal) integration deepens, local self-governance structures such as the Wuhrkorporation Alp risk disintegration. These findings underscore the historical and ongoing challenge of balancing top-down integration with bottom-up historical practices with valuable local knowledge. Understanding this dynamic is crucial not only for appreciating how Swiss water management has evolved, but also for informing future responses to pressing multi-interest driven challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, as well as food and water security.
This paper focuses on how the interaction among cyclonic disturbances, water infrastructure, and population health crises is intricate in the case of colonial Bengal between 1864 and 1942. Based on archival documents such as administrative reports, medical statistics, district gazetteers, and contemporary accounts, this paper illustrates that cyclonic storms led to cascading health crises due to the destruction of water supply infrastructure, the salinisation of fresh water sources, and the spread of waterborne diseases. This analysis indicates that there were systematic trends of colonial administrative inadequacy in its response to these complex environmental and health emergencies, characterised by inadequate investment in rural infrastructure, delayed medical interventions, and reactions favouring urban centres and the dominant classes. This study sheds light on how natural disasters were transformed into human disasters through colonial systems of governance, examining cyclonic events such as the disastrous storms of 1864, 1867, 1869, 1874, 1876, 1897, 1919, and 1942. The paper adds to the literature on environmental history, colonial medicine, and disaster studies. It provides information applicable to modern problems of climate change and disaster preparedness in South Asia, with respect to population health.
While fortification walls primarily aimed to protect against invaders and demarcate city boundaries, their construction posed significant challenges for Greek architects and engineers. These walls obstructed water management routes that relied on topography and gravity for flow, such as long-distance Greek aqueducts. These long-distance water sources sustained larger settlements when nearby sources, such as wells and cisterns, were insufficient to meet water demand. While this prevented fresh water from coming in, it also prevented the expulsion of waste and rainwater that collected along the walls, especially in cities built on slopes. To address these issues, Greek architects and engineers devised a system of underground passages, isolated sewers, and breaches in city walls, which created both defensive and structural vulnerabilities. This article highlights the architectural features of northern Greece during the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, showcasing distinctive hydraulic elements found exclusively in the region’s fortifications.
This article traces the history of flood events in Holstebro, Denmark, over the past 150 years, revealing a persistent pattern of maladaptation, fragmented governance, and collective forgetting. Drawing on municipal archives and newspaper reporting, the article reconstructs 64 flood events and analyses their socio‑political and ecological implications. It argues that flood management in Holstebro has been hindered by a failure to acknowledge the Storå river as a socio‑natural system characterized by multiple, shifting ontologies. Rather than fostering resilience, successive interventions reinforced vulnerability by separating hydraulic, ecological, and social concerns, and by allowing flood experiences to fade from public memory. The article contributes to river history and disaster studies by showing how floods shape society not only through destruction, but through absence in memory, with implications for inland river towns facing recurrent flooding under climate change.
The Ottoman Empire expanded from northwest Anatolia to large areas of the Middle East, north Africa and southeast Europe in the 250 years after 1300 CE, and continued until the early 20th century. Water management was a significant issue in the empire, not least because it covered many dryland areas. Taxation systems supporting the Empire were directly related to crop production and hence water management played a central role, although responsibility for it seems to have been devolved to local actors, leading to debates on the overall organization of the Empire. In this study, we address questions of how water was managed in the Konya Plain of Central Türkiye, which came under Ottoman rule from 1468 CE, in order to assess whether relative proximity to the Imperial centre and local conditions affected the approaches taken. We use records from Şer’i (Sharia) and Örf’i (customary) laws to evaluate the ways in which water management was regulated. There are eleven Konya şer’iyye registers dating from 1595 to 1922, and five sets of kanannume or ledgers of customary law dating to the 16th century CE. We use comparative evidence from taxation registers from the 16th and 19th centuries, as well as information obtained from remote sensing and landscape analysis. Structures for managing water such as artificial channels, wells, storage structures and watermills are commonly mentioned in the records. Only the very largest structures or systems relating to pilgrimage routes were managed directly by the state by delegation to a mirab or “watermaster”. Most features were managed locally by individuals, villages, religious foundations or artisanal guilds. Precedence was an important part of dispute resolution supervised by a judge (kadı), and allocations of water by turns (nöbet) which seem to have been already in place before the Ottoman period. There was also a specific style of management called suğlas based on local intensive irrigation with dams to store and divert water, which were more productive and taxed more highly than other irrigated land, which was in turn taxed more highly than non-irrigated land. The management of water in the Konya Plain had important similarities and differences from known practices elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. Of the former, the delegation to local controls and precedence for pre-Ottoman practices are amongst the most important, together with the use of a legal system for local dispute resolution. The extent of the suğlas and the importance of the mirab seem to be key differences with other well-studied areas. The practice of water management was highly resilient in this water-sparse region, based on local delegation that seems to support the hub-and-spoke model of how the Ottoman Empire operated.
The 1983 flood along the Colorado River corridor pushed the Glen Canyon Dam to its breaking point and embodies Charles Perrow’s conception of a normal accident while also revealing limitations in his treatment of ecological dynamics. Fueled by a powerful El Niño arising in the Pacific Ocean, an abrupt and late season snow melt in the Rockies, and errors in forecasting basin-wide runoff, Lake Powell surged eight feet above full pool and just seven feet from the crest of the dam standing 710-feet high. This necessitated emergency releases through the spillway tunnels which triggered cavitation of the concrete lining and the underlying sandstone abutting the dam. Extending Perrow’s theory of normal accidents by integrating Andrew Pickering’s neo-materialist thought, I introduce the concept of “hydro-materiality” to foreground the distinctive and variable properties of water interacting with hydraulic infrastructure. Hydro-materiality illustrates the active, efficacious characteristics of water, the trans-scalar dynamics ranging from the Pacific to localized hydrology, and the liabilities of a dualist managerial framework envisioning the dam as a closed or bounded system insulated from, while also containing, the vagaries of nature. Flooding at the Glen Canyon Dam illustrates that catastrophic risk can arise due to the complexity and tight coupling derived of large-scale infrastructure and hydro-materiality in its various phase transformations and emergent, unpredictable characteristics. It is a catastrophic potential that is exacerbated when organizational actors are committed to a dualist, probabilistic, and technocratic frame of reference failing to recognize the materiality and performativity of water.
This article is a transnational history of anthropogenic alterations to the St. Clair waterscape shared by the United States and Canada. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the three connected waters with the appellation “St. Clair” – river, delta, and lake – have been repeatedly engineered to facilitate deep-draft shipping as well as alter water levels in the Laurentian Great Lakes. After dredging and channel creation began in the 1840s, new canals were dug through the St. Clair Delta – the world’s largest freshwater delta. In the early twentieth century, there was a great deal more dredging and channelization, as well as mining of the riverbed for sand and gravel. Two major channelization projects took place in the 1930s and 1960s. Since then, maintenance dredging has continuously kept the shipping channels at sufficient depth. Dredged material was repeatedly formed into new infrastructure, such as islands, dikes, and confined disposal units. All this had severe consequences for the St. Clair’s aquatic ecology and lowered the levels of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. At various times engineers and officials therefore sought to modify the St. Clair’s waters in ways that could influence not only navigation but also the levels of these two Great Lakes. To do so, experts relied on hydraulic scale models to plan control works such as submerged weirs or sills, and this study explores their approach to “disguised design”. My analysis of modelling and hydraulic processes reveals how the St. Clair was transformed into a hybrid envirotechnical system that blended the natural and the artificial.
During the first century BCE and first century CE, hundreds of stepped water installations were built and used as Jewish ritual purification baths in households across the southern Levant. While archaeological research has shown that most of these pools gradually fell out of use during the second century CE, the reasons for this change remain unclear. Paleoclimatic and archaeological analyses suggest, however, that the abandonment of stepped pools coincides with a period when the southern Levantine climate would have rapidly grown more arid. To examine how a climatic shift impacted the (ritual) usability of stepped pools, we developed the first detailed rainwater harvesting model for stepped pools and tested it using different climate scenarios onto Stepped pool 85.3226 at the site of Sepphoris, northern Israel. We observed that under more arid climate conditions the stepped pool was annually usable 1–5 months less than under wet climate conditions, with the pool being only 60
Located on a high hill with no rivers or natural springs, the city of Perugia, in the center of Italy, has had access to water from ancient times through a system of wells and cisterns. The water supply changed in the second half of the thirteenth century with the construction of a 4-km aqueduct and a monumental fountain in the center of the city. Along with these two architectural works, wells and cisterns to catalyze rainwater or water circulating deep continued to be the nerve of the city’s water system. Public authorities exercised strict control over water resources to the point of making water a public good. No wells could be built without permission from the city’s public authorities, which imposed a series of laws guaranteeing the division of water between uses for human consumption and manufacturing activities. Water from the center of the city could be used only for human consumption while water used in economic activities or agriculture was that of the periphery. In the Middle Ages in Perugia, political power imposed a water hierarchy to ensure the use and distribution of water.
Since their inception, human civilizations have settled around water resources and developed indigenous water management strategies. However, owing to population growth and rapid urbanization over the last century, these traditional systems have declined. One such example is the case of Jaipur City, which was planned in the eighteenth century. This study examines the evolution and decline of traditional water management systems (TWMS) in Jaipur, one of the earliest systematically planned cities in post-medieval India. Using a combined macro- and micro-level approach, the research integrates historical analysis with primary field surveys of 35 traditional water structures conducted between April and May 2023. The results show a clear transition from decentralized, community-managed systems such as traditional water structures (stepwells, kunds, and tankas) and lakes to centralized, piped water supply networks, driven first by colonial engineering interventions and later by post-independence urban expansion. This research contributes a chronological and spatial understanding of Jaipur’s hydrological transformation, identifying key phases of neglect and policy misdirection that led to the loss of traditional water systems. It highlights the urgent need to reintegrate these heritage structures into modern water management frameworks as decentralized recharge systems and cultural assets, essential for improving urban water resilience in arid and semi-arid regions.
Until the 1950s, Schistosomiasis was prevalent for more than 150 years in She County of Anhui Province, with three general disease trends. First, starting from a base of limited and scattered cases of Schistosomiasis before the middle Qing dynasty, the disease expanded rapidly from the middle to the late Qing (1736–1912), and subsequently reached pandemic proportions by the mid-20th century. Second, Schistosomiasis spread from the low-lying areas to higher terrain. Third, the disease spread mainly from downstream to upstream in each of the four main rivers that flow through the county. Although present in Huizhou Prefecture since the Ming and early Qing Dynasties, over these 150 years, the most virulent area of Schistosomiasis was in She County, its core region. There was an intimate connection between water control efforts, agricultural productivity, and Schistosomiasis prevalence in She County. From the perspective of disease history, this region became the area of an “evil plague” in the middle of Qing Dynasty, causing loss of population, a decline in labor supply, and a consequent and significant in-migration.
Leipzig, like many cities worldwide, is navigating a complex process of ecological modernisation amidst an accelerating polycrisis, characterised by the imminent collapse of the Holocene climate niche and severe ecological degradation, exemplified by its deteriorating floodplain forest. Successive extremely hot and dry years since 2018 have heightened the urgency of this process as they have been profoundly affecting both residents and the increasingly fragile silvo-riverine ecosystem with which the city has historically co-evolved. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2024) with municipal water managers, environmental scientists, conservationists, and historians, I explore how water has been and continues to be repeatedly endowed with new meanings and functions within Leipzig’s urban metabolism. Specifically, this paper traces how historical practices of river and forest management, originating from a period when Leipzig was envisioned as an industrial port city, continue to shape its contemporary urban-regeneration efforts aimed at reinventing and branding the city as a “water city”, as well as ongoing initiatives to restore its urban nature. Building upon Simon Schaupp’s theoretical framework of metabolic politics (2024), I propose the concept of the ‘ecological modernisation of the environment’ to analyse how water is re-mobilised as a versatile agent in preparing the city to address the intensifying impacts of the widening metabolic rift driven by capitalist production. I will demonstrate that contemporary water management, despite appearing innovative in addressing local manifestations of the climate and biodiversity crises, remains entangled with fantasies of maintaining control over Leipzig’s urban nature.
The medieval city of Leipzig was built at the confluence of the rivers Weiße Elster, Pleiße and Parthe. These rivers played a crucial role in the development of watermills through a network of millraces and weirs. Using the city of Leipzig as a case study, we have examined the landforms and land-use of the floodplain, the river economy, and the riverine landscape elements. We have developed and applied an adapted retrospective method in QGIS that combines historical maps of the seventeenth century with late-medieval written sources through toponyms. These field names indicate a gradual change from woodland pastures to open grasslands in the vicinity of the city. Notably, monasteries owned most of the present-day riparian forests in the Middle Ages. The analysis of the riverine landscape elements reveals an advanced system of anthropogenic alterations that had developed by the seventeenth century. The adapted retrospective approach offers a valuable framework for mapping late-medieval human-river interactions.
This research reconstructs for the first time the design procedures and thought processes of the Roman engineers who in the first and second century CE built two water-lifting wheels with compartmented rims. The optimization process of these wheels is examined, from that described by Vitruvius to the models with compartmented rims at Dolaucothi Rio Tinto. For the latter two, analysis demonstrates how the number of compartments was determined, why the mouth of the compartments is adjacent to the anterior septum and distant from the outer edge of the wheel, why the mouth of the Dolaucothi wheel has the shape of an entire shield and why that of Rio Tinto half shield with a cut corresponding to the internal diameter. Finally, the theoretical efficiency index of the two wheels are calculated and two possible operating modes of the Rio Tinto wheel are described.
This article examines the emergence of river basin development within Colombian regional governance. It traces the creation of the Corporación Autónoma Regional del Valle del Cauca—a regional authority modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority—from the formulation of its basin program in 1954 to the approval of the Calima Dam in 1960. Drawing on board minutes, reports, and expert accounts, it shows how distinct epistemic practices and ways of knowing were brought into relation through the production of the basin as a spatial scale, a jurisdiction, and a framework for territorial planning and development. Yet the basin form was also a site of contestation, as landowners, peasant communities, state officials, and financial institutions challenged the program’s common notions of economic development, governance scale, and regional authority. In doing so, the article contributes to scholarship on the co-production of hydrological knowledge, economic expertise, and the modern state in Latin America by providing a critical historical account of a river basin governance program conceived and implemented during the early years of Cold War development.
This article—connecting urban, social, and environmental history—analyses the close interplay between the Moskva River and Moscow. It deals with the Muscovites’ interaction with their “spatial habitat”, their interventions in nature and the lasting impact of contingent natural hazards or even worse natural calamities. When the snow melted, the Moskva regularly flooded the city. Against this background, the article pursues the measures taken by various actors such as flood victims, the city board and city council, the Tsarist government and civil society institutions. In addition to the reasons for the unprecedented extent of the flood, which was based on a coincidence of climatic, anthropogenic and ecological factors, the article discusses how experts debated future flood prevention measures and, finally, what practical conclusions were drawn in Moscow to prevent future natural disasters. The article argues that concerted action by many different institutions and political actors would have been necessary to successfully combat flooding in Moscow. However, this cooperation did not materialise due to structural obstacles within the Tsarist Empire: The Tsarist state considered flood defence not as a function of the central state administration, but rather as a responsibility of underfinanced local self-governments, and moreover refused to subsidise such measures.
