This article contributes to and expands the environmental history of recreational fishing through examining the development of recreational fishing in late colonial Luanda, Angola, 1945–1975. It draws on colonial archives, newspapers, tourism magazines, specialised fishing periodicals and oral testimonies to argue that recreational fishing developed through processes of dwelling in different coastal environments as practitioners and practices took shape in relation to their ecological conditions and possibilities. On the more accessible northern coast of Luanda, fishing was closely intertwined with everyday leisure, sociability and food provisioning, while the more environmentally heterogeneous southern coast demanded greater mobility and more specialised forms of angling. In the absence of systematic scientific research on marine ecosystems, recreational fishing relied on understandings of coastal dynamics and drew upon multiple layers of local knowledge. By foregrounding the changing relationships between recreational fishing, coastal environments and ecological processes, the article also contributes to broader discussions of human–environment interactions, tourism and coastal leisure.
This article examines how cash waqfs financed water services in Ottoman Rumelia (the empire’s Balkan provinces) from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, as a contribution to both waqf studies and environmental history. It draws on a primary-source database of 953 Rumelian endowment records, from which 165 cash waqfs linked to water provision were identified and analysed. It makes three arguments. First, these foundations formed a significant, regionally differentiated mechanism of public provision: they supported fountains and waterways above all, but also bridges, sebils and mixed service clusters. Second, their importance lay less in establishing water services than in sustaining them: by converting preserved capital into recurring income for maintenance, wages and repair, cash waqfs operated as an institutionalised mechanism of sustainability. Third, the geography of this provision followed the environmental and urban structure of the Balkans, so that mountain, riverine and port settings produced distinct service profiles.
This article examines the Colorado potato beetle in postwar Czechoslovakia as a case through which to explore the relationship between environmental processes and socialist environmental governance. While the beetle was widely framed in Cold War propaganda as an ‘American’ agent of sabotage, the paper argues that its political significance cannot be reduced to ideological projection. Rather, it emerged from the interaction between the insect’s biological characteristics and the state’s efforts to monitor, control, and eradicate it. Drawing on archival sources from agricultural and party institutions, the analysis traces how the spread of the beetle in the early 1950s was transformed from an agronomic problem into an issue of political urgency and security. It shows how systems of monitoring and mapping, mass mobilisation campaigns, and large-scale chemical interventions were deployed in response, while the beetle’s capacity for rapid reproduction and repeated re-infestation continually exposed the limits of these strategies. Conceptually, the article engages with recent work in environmental history and more-than-human approaches to examine how nonhuman life can shape perception, political interpretation, and practices of governance. From this perspective, the Colorado potato beetle can be understood not only as an object of discourse but as a persistent ecological presence that influenced both the practices and expectations of state intervention. The article further shows how the difficulties of eradication led to shifts from emergency mobilisation to more routinised forms of management, including growing attention to ecological relations and the role of the beetle’s natural predators. By foregrounding the interplay between biological processes and political rationalities, it contributes to environmental histories of state socialism and highlights how nonhuman life could reconfigure modern projects of environmental control.
This article examines a case brought before the Belfast Spring Assizes in 1886 and again in 1887, in which three coastal smallholders from Ballycastle, County Antrim, were prosecuted for theft of seaweed from shores claimed by a local landlord. Drawing upon a variety of documents produced from the trial, this article examines how Irish legal institutions managed the indeterminate foreshore environment during a period of considerable land law reform. Central to this investigation is the consideration of how evidentiary hierarchies, upheld in court proceedings and enshrined in public judgements, informed public challenges to coastal enclosure. Written evidence bases (maps, leases, rent books) were privileged over oral testimony, with the effect of reinforcing absolutist, totalising visions of property ownership. Yet, through the hearing of oral testimonies, the courtroom retained a crucial function as a theatre for airing popular counterclaims. These depositions complicated the prosecution’s vision of coastal ownership, articulating the foreshore as a terraqueous environment governed by local custom and informal systems of exchange that were underpinned by understandings of reciprocity and common rights rather than exclusive title.
ABSTRACT Anthropogenic fires constitute a throughline in the fire history of Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests of Western North Carolina; they have been used for different reasons by Indigenous and Settler communities, scientists and managers. Evidence from 8,000+ years of human presence in the region challenges hegemonic narratives in which a uniform, universal era of fire exclusion occurred. Prescribed burning has been promoted as one of the best practices for restoring safer fire regimes and healthier ecosystems. Fire managers have been working towards increasing prescribed burning operations within their jurisdictions. Rather than centring a clear suppression versus burning dichotomy or simplifying variability, this article enlists the concept of ‘culture’ to smooth out the transitions between times when human fires were absent and present, and connects twenty-first-century institutionalised fire management activities to previous people’s practices. Intentional burning has strong causal effects in contemporary managers’ and scientists’ paradigms, leading them to integrate fire into multipronged strategies for managing the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests.
