Rural & Environmental history
More general subjects:
The Formation of Agricultural Governance
The Interplay between State and Civil Society in European Agriculture, 1870-1940
This book unravels how the agricultural sector and the rural world in Europe became more and more organised within capitalism in the years 1870-1940 and this with the aim of tackling the important challenges of the time. The focus is not so much on the myriad of individual farmers’ actions but on the collective efforts undertaken through the interplay between the state and the agricultural civil society.
A wide variety of actors from landowners associations farmers’ unions cooperatives scientific institutions and researchers to farmers themselves (or civil society) played a critical role in the process of drafting a policy agenda developing agricultural policies and were instrumental in implementing them in close relationship with the state. The result was a metamorphosis from mobilisation and representation of agrarian interests to a form of self-government or co-government of the agricultural sector at the national level which would only reach its highest point after the Second World War.
These issues are explored by established rural historians covering a period of seven decades (1870-1940). The papers provide a wide geographical perspective from the north of Europe to the Mediterranean.
The Battle for Rya Forest: A Case Study of Conservation and Modernisation in Sweden, 1910–1960
Rya Forest is a small area of green space in Gothenburg surrounded by an industrial district in connection with the port. This broadleaf forest was protected in 1928 based on the first Swedish Nature Conservation Act of 1909. In the decades that followed Gothenburg underwent rapid urban expansion and modernisation which generated conflicts of interest that culminated in the late 1950s when plans were launched to place a sewage treatment plant in Rya Forest. An extensive public debate took off and one daily newspaper even called the matter “the major nature conservation issue of this generation”. This article examines the history of the nature reserve with particular focus on the controversy over the treatment plant. Discourse analysis reveals diverging ideas about nature society tradition and progress. Rya Forest nature reserve is also an example of how the law of 1909 could be repealed in favour of industry and infrastructure. Furthermore the case illustrates a growing awareness among conservationists of how seemingly wild landscapes actually have been shaped by human land use and also how postwar modernisation meant new challenges for conservation organisations regarding the balance between local and national efforts.
Front Matter ("Contents")
Building the Social Cascade: Connecting Culture, Disaster, and Persecution in the 1730s
This article presents a framework to map connectivity between seemingly independent crises using as an example a moral panic and a “natural disaster” in the 1730s. The first was a wave of sodomy trials and executions in the Dutch Republic. The second was the infamous shipworm epidemic which catalysed a water management crisis and short-lived existential panic. This paper argues that the sodomy persecution and the shipworm disaster were integral components of a “social cascade”. Rather than background conditions social-ecological and cultural conditions in the Dutch Republic established pathways and set the bounds for causal connections that knit social environmental and cultural crises together. The cultural perception of crises and its interaction with an evolving metanarrative of decline supplied the causal link. The social cascade framework enriches our understanding of crisis connectivity and encourages new interpretations of the relationships between disaster environmental change and culture.
Globalising Animals
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.
Augmented Regimes
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.
Environment and Sovereignty in the Antarctic
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.
The Encroaching Dunes of the Portuguese Coast
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.
Front Matter ("Contents", "List of Illustrations", "Editorial")
Cannot See the Wood for the Trees?
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.
Undoing the Discipline: History in the Time of Climate Crisis and COVID-19
COVID-19 gives a fresh urgency to research trajectories around climate and environment in historical research. We use examples from African Japanese and medieval European environmental history to chart new ways to mobilise collaborative research into the planetary past in academic and public discussions. Our main points are first that COVID-19 has underlined the entanglements between human and planetary life which historians must better account for. Secondly it is pertinent to decentre knowledge production. COVID-19 and climate crisis are both global phenomena. Yet patterns of knowledge production that propose ‘universal’ frameworks and solutions obscure highly unequal power relations. We call for more plural histories - in time space and species - to confront the complex crises of our times.
What Could Carbofascism Look Like? A Historical Perspective on Reactionary Politics in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Political reactions to the COVID-19 crisis in the USA Brazil and elsewhere have revealed the power of a proto-ideology which articulates environmental destruction with the sacrifice of human health to preserve a segregationist project of modernity. This essay suggests that this political trend which denies ecological connections and promotes a carbon intensive society could correspond to the notion of ´carbofascism´ coined by the environmental historian J.-B. Fressoz. It addresses this trend in a historical perspective to discuss its ideological filiation with past fascisms and provide a hypothesis for the causes of its emergence. Carbofascism is possibly a product of the deep historical entwinement of modern democratic regimes with anthropocentric principles and the growth of fossil fuels. The coronavirus pandemic represents a turning point in which the integrity of human and non-human life is tested against the lingering toxicity of our patterns of energy dependency making the transformation of carbon democracy into ecodemocracy urgent.
Leviathan in Crisis
Long-term European experience with the plague and other epidemics has established a set of governance practices to limit the spread of disease such as quarantine lock-down of public life and reduction of economic activities etc. They have now returned during the COVID-19 crisis. However it seems that the memory of European confrontations with pandemics has been lost among a majority of citizens. This has opened a door for social myths and conspiracy theories to enter the debate. Doubts about the legitimacy of restrictions on free movement (travel social distancing) and individual choice (the wearing of masks) have been nourished particularly by the political right. Reviving our knowledge of past experiences with disease may be useful in this context. Tracing the history of the plague in Europe not only unveils a remarkable story of learning how to control the spread of a disease before its etiology was fully understood; it also reveals a co-evolutionary relationship between state power and disease which is driven by the expansion of executive power into the area of public health. Returning to the present COVID-19 crisis one can observe not only how the state of emergency is being used by autocrats and right-wing populists to undermine democratic institutions. One can also observe fatal government failure in countries like the United States where trust in state power has been undermined by various groups in the recent past.
Cholera, Corona and Trust in Numbers
This essay is a historical reflection on epidemiological statistics and the ways in which these represent health in a collective way. It compares the use of such statistics in the current COVID-19 epidemic with the use of numbers during the cholera outbreaks of the nineteenth century. Its main point is that health statistics have been (and still are) fundamental to the establishment of a notion of ‘public health’ and to the construction of epidemics as social events. At the same time such statistics - located as they are at the intersection of science media and politics - struggle to take into account people’s often very different individual experiences of coping with disease. While today more varied health data is circulated to a wider audience and at a far higher speed than in the past the format of constructing an epidemic through statistics is still very much present including some of the limitations inherent to this approach (e.g. generalizations about social groups).
Viruses, Practices and Perception
The current pandemic strikingly reveals that the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus is inextricably intertwined in human practices. It is transmitted through everyday routines and understood though practices of scientific research. While praxeology as a theoretical approach is often used in historical research to analyze social phenomena it also provides a useful perspective on socio-environmental change such as the spread of diseases. With a focus on human practices this essay rejects notions subsumed under buzzwords like ‘New Materialism’ or ‘Post-Humanism’ which attribute ‘agency’ to entities such as viruses. Instead it contends that while viruses do evolve beyond human control and have a significant impact on society this impact is not only tied to human activities but that humans are able to actively alter the course of the pandemic by reflecting on the nexus between practices and viruses. This article illustrates these mechanisms with examples from the current pandemic and the longer history of hygiene in the nineteenth century.
The “Normative Forces” of Difference: Ecology, Economy and Society during Cattle Plagues in the Eighteenth Century
One of the recurring themes in the public perception of containment policies during the current COVID-19 pandemic are the supposedly uneven and everchanging measures taken up by international national and local authorities. This is especially the case in countries with a federal structure like Germany. Not surprisingly historical containment policies and strategies of coping with epidemics have been varied too and were also discussed intensely. This short essay will analyse the communication between farmers artisans merchants physicians and local as well as higher level administration during outbreaks of cattle plague in eighteenth century Northern Germany / Denmark. The duchies of Schleswig and Holstein geographically located between the Baltic and the North Sea are especially well suited for such a study because of their characteristically distinct regional differences in geomorphology and the varied economic practices property rights and political organisation which directly or indirectly resulted from one another. Environmental factors clearly influenced administrative measures as well as public responses or demands regarding these policies.
COVID-19, Climate, and White Supremacy: Multiple Crises or One?
This essay asks whether there is a connection between the three crises that are currently reverberating globally the climate crisis the COVID-19 crisis and the ‘crisis of white supremacy’. The latter resurfaced violently at first in the US with the murder of the African-American citizen George Floyd on May 25 at the hands of US police. This contribution argues that the parallel occurrence of these three crisis-like processes which unfold on divergent time scales is not a coincidence and that they are indeed connected. Using approaches from historical disaster research and the history of environmental entanglements the essay highlights the vulnerability of specific population groups that has grown over the historical longue durée both in the context of the climate crisis and in the context of the pandemic. In a second step the contribution embeds the climate and corona crises as partial crises in the larger context of the Anthropocene. By going back to the colonial prehistory of this new ‘Age of humans’ the essay shows how extreme resource exploitation and the accompanying destruction of nature - as a precondition for today’s climate change and zoonosis-induced pandemics - are intertwined with white superiority thinking and systemic racism.
The Human Body Must Be Defended: A Foucauldian and Latourian Take on COVID-19
Ecologists and environmentalists have tried to interfere in the debate about the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim of transcending the approaches of virologists and epidemiologists. While the views of virologists and epidemiologists are often limited to the virus as an isolated organic element those of ecologists and environmentalists mostly connect it to environmental issues such as the destruction of wild life habitats. This is valuable but a broader view is also necessary with regard to how the virus is received and dealt with. This essay will frame the scientific and political responses to SARS-CoV-2 within a long-term perspective not by simply pointing at the historical precedents of the quarantine and hygienic measures but by historicizing and denaturalizing the scientific and political rationales behind them. As this inevitably includes the way in which science and politics interact I will have recourse to the work of both Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault which enables the conceptual and analytical framing of the virus and the rationalities of governance related to it to be unpacked. While Latour’s ideas help explain why the virus is framed as an isolated natural organism which threatens to invade the human body from the outside Foucauldian concepts reveal the specific forms of governance and political subjectivity involved - which are predicated on discourses of danger and ‘security dispositives’. Jointly these views explain why in contrast to the ideas of climatologists the models of virologists and epidemiologists are followed almost unconditionally.
Environmentalism after the Pandemic
The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the explosive emergence of environmentalism accompanied by increasingly influential scientific regulative and managerial roles for the environmental sciences. Since then there has been a comprehensive increase of awareness and understanding of a whole spectrum of global to local environmental and socio-cultural dilemmas. Environmentalism has experienced a complicated set of tendentious relations with the various forms of capitalism. We argue here that any transformation to truly sustainable futures requires either a transformative integration of green growth within a modified capitalism or a progressive shift to radically new ways of experiencing and living around sustainable localism. The pandemic has brought the world extraordinarily almost to a halt. It has offered a unique opportunity to consider debate and possibly implement sustainable livelihoods in myriads of different cultural and political settings via progressive social political and economic reforms. By reconceptualising historical ideas of environmentalism into a new set of global to local arrangements post-pandemic we can begin to shape and to live into sustainability ideally across the whole planet. It is vital to progress with hope and through the yearnings of young people and not with despair and through degeneration by clinging onto the old ways.
At the Edge of Resilience: Making Sense of COVID-19 from the Perspective of Environmental History
Natural disasters nearly always catch societies by surprise even though in hindsight historians invariably conclude that being caught off-guard in this way was in fact unfounded as both the existence of the natural hazard which caused the disaster and the societal conditions making communities vulnerable to the hazard were clearly present before the event. Both experts and the general public also again in hindsight suddenly discover that similar hazards and disasters had previously occurred in the past. In many cases however the memory of these precursors had faded or seemed irrelevant because the context had changed so dramatically. When future historians come to write the history of the COVID-19 pandemic currently unfolding therefore it will probably resemble the history of other major natural socio-natural or socio-techno-natural disasters - whether pandemics earthquakes tsunamis or nuclear catastrophes (Van Bavel et al. 2020). In retrospect COVID-19 will become a subject which seems quite familiar to environmental historians used to unravelling the complex and hazardous entanglements of society and nature. What can environmental history offer at this moment however when the disaster - crisis or hazard - is still unfolding?