Journal for the History of Environment and Society

Scholars of globalisation tend to write about humans. They are interested in the movements of (and long-distance connections between) people, products, ideas and money. My contribution, however, explores how a more-than-human history of globalisation could look like. It does so by highlighting the ways in which the globalisation process has changed the interaction between humans and undomesticated animals throughout the twentieth century. First, I probe how infrastructures of globalisation (ranging from railroads to pipelines) have influenced the movements of undomesticated animals. Second, I investigate the ways in which humans have tried to get to grips with these movements – through scientific study, media representations and various management regimes. The contribution concludes by launching the idea that the twentieth century saw a gradually developing ‘world natureculture’. Modernist ambitions of control over non-human life forms largely shaped this development. Yet, I also draw attention to the ideas, practices and technologies that have sought to attune human and non-human movements in a shared choreography. These might offer a useful starting point for rethinking the interaction between human and non-human life forms for the future.

Late Holocene dunes migration is intricately linked to climate change and anthropogenic actions. Along the Portuguese coast, large-scale sand drifts occurred between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, sometimes associated with the Little Ice Age (LIA) period, characterised by long-term cooling across the north Atlantic region. Primary historical sources, coupled with scientific data about paleoenvironmental conditions and OSL ages were used to analyse the spatial and temporal extent of the sand drift occurrences and explore their impact on coastal communities. Covering the period of the past millennium, the study describes the main drivers for drift events in Portugal. The results show the intensification of sand drift episodes after 1500 AD, which can be attributed to both natural forcing factors and human activities (e.g., agriculture and intensive deforestation). It is also clear that human pressure on dunes was dominant after 1800, when dunes fixing strategies through afforestation programmes were seen as the best solution to control sand encroachment. The negative impact of the drift-sands was an important trigger for the management of coastal areas and determinant for the implementation of a set of environmental policies in Portugal. Through a geohistorical perspective, the paper discloses the human-nature interactions over time, and the long-term efforts of governments to control natural processes, contributing to large-scale landscape transformation of the Portuguese coastal dunes.

Wondering how medieval people perceived their environment has long moved scholars onto untamed research paths. A strong focus on scholastic writings as sources has left an unfinished picture of medieval societies’ perceptions of nature. Pilgrimage accounts written by lay authors offer a rare opportunity to explore other perspectives on nature, although of course in a setting which was profoundly shaped by religious experience and tradition. Through the example of Arnold von Harff, travelling between 1496 and 1498 in the Mediterranean, I propose methods to recognise the different coexisting attitudes towards the natural world, theorised by David Herlihy, in secular writings. Combining discourse analysis with literary GIS, I suggest some explanations as to why travellers would switch between attitudes along their journey, and how spatio-temporal parameters influenced their decisions. As a result, we understand that fear was only one of von Harff’s many attitudes to the natural world, and that his ability to stage different aspects of his identity was firmly determining his perception(s) of nature. By interpreting the landscapes in the Eastern and Western Mediterranean differently, von Harff could learn from and about the environment, suggesting that secular travel was commendable along the allegedly strict pilgrimage roads.

This paper investigates the relationship between environment and sovereignty in France’s Antarctic territory, Terre Adélie. Using the story of the French effort to build an airstrip in Terre Adélie, I show how sovereignty performances are rooted in strategic and political dynamics. For over a decade, the airstrip was held up as both the critical ingredient for securing French presence in Terre Adélie and a gateway for France to become a world leader in Antarctic science – but it was ultimately terminated as France’s strategic considerations in the Antarctic changed. By tracing the interactions of sovereignty dilemmas, environmental issues, and political considerations (both domestic and international), I show that the French championing of the environment in Antarctica since the late 1980s has strong political rationales.

This article combines environmental and political history approaches, and explores the relationship between the environment and the political with regard to regime-building processes. In doing so, it proposes a procedural and process-oriented approach to the analysis of Italian liberal and fascist regimes (1860s-1930s) from the perspective of environmental politics and management. Based on the empirical case of the Pontine Marshes, the article addresses the question of whether distinctive liberal and fascist features existed in relation to the environment and proposes three areas worthy of further investigation that bridge the distance between environmental and political history. The first of these areas being the decision-making process over the environment; the second, the systems of environmental knowledge production that a regime accepts and deploys in environmental management; the third, the principles behind environmental intervention or non-intervention.