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Author: Nkjwo (page 3 of 7)

Podcast 64: Tin: a historical perspective on a networked resource

January 24, 2015 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

The history of human civilization is closely linked to the exploitation of mineral resources. It is no coincidence that the periodization of prehistory and antiquity has been chosen according to the main metals in use: stone, bronze and iron. It shows the centrality of the exploitation and production of these mineral resources in human history. Since the Industrial Revolution metals have become global commodities, including tin. The importance of tin increased with the invention of canned food in the 19th century, and during the 20th century with the rise of the electronics industry. Both of these factors made tin a strategic resource not seen since the days that it was used in the production of bronze for weaponry.

The heart of the Cornish tin-mining district, looking from Dolcoath Mine
(on an unusually smoke-free day), ca. 1890. Source: Wikimedia Commons

A new edited book entitled Tin and Global Capitalism, 1850-2000: A History of the “Devil’s Metal”, explores the evolution of the global tin industry, from mining through the trade networks and the politics surrounding the strategic importance of tin. Interrogating the rhetoric of “strategic” raw materials is important in order to understand the social, political, and environmental effects of displacement of communities, environmental degradation and pollution, and ‘resource conflicts’.

This edition of the podcast explores these themes with the editors of Tin and Global Capitalism: Andrew Perchard, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Business in Society at Coventry University; Mats Ingulstad, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Historical Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU); and Espen Storli, Associate Professor in History at the NTNU.

Websites mentioned
History and Strategic Raw Materials Initiative
Details of the book on the publisher’s website

Music credits
“Where You Are Now” by Zapac, available from ccMixter
“Nightride” by remaxim, available from ccMixter
“Unfriendly Me” by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD), available from ccMixter

Podcast 63: Climate variability and population dynamics in prehistoric Australia

October 26, 2014 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

Aboriginal men of Bathurst Island, Northern
Territory. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The first people to settle in Australia, ancestors of present day Aboriginals, arrived in Australia about 50,000 years ago. They took advantage of the lower sea levels that were the norm throughout the last 100,000 years and were the result of a cooling global climate – part of the last ice age cycle. The first people who entered Australia encountered a cooler and drier continent than at present. From about 35,000 years ago global temperatures and water availability declined even further culminating in the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), about 21,000 years ago. At this time, the Australian continent entered its driest and coolest period since modern humans colonized it. By 12,000 years ago the climate warmed rapidly, sea levels rose and climate began to ameliorate.

How did populations in Australia respond to these climate fluctuations? This episode of the podcast explores this question with Alan Williams, an archaeologist and graduate student in the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University in Canberra, and an Aboriginal Heritage Team Leader at AHMS Pty Ltd. Alan’s research explores the responses and adaptations by Aboriginal people to climate change through time.

Further reading

Williams, A.N. (2012) The use of summed radiocarbon probability distributions in archaeology: A review of methods. Journal of Archaeological Science, 39: 578-589.

Williams, A.N. (2013) A new population curve for prehistoric Australia. Proceedings of the Royal Society B,280: 20130486.

Williams, A.N., Ulm, S., Smith, M.A., Reid, J. (2014) AustArch: A Database of 14C and Non-14C Ages from Archaeological Sites in Australia – Composition, Compilation and Review (Data Paper). Internet Archaeology 36, doi:10.11141/ia.36.6

Williams, A.N., Atkinson, F., Lau, M., Toms, P. (in press) A Glacial cryptic refuge in southeast Australia: Human occupation and mobility from 36,000 years ago in the Sydney Basin, New South Wales. Journal of Quaternary Science.

Williams, A.N., Ulm, S., Turney, C.S.M., Rodhe, D., White, G., Cook, A.R. (submitted) The Establishment of Complex Society in Prehistoric Australia: Demographic and Mobility Changes in the Late Holocene.

Williams, Alan N., Ulm, Sean, Cook, Andrew R., Langley, Michelle C., and Collard, Mark, “Human refugia in Australia during the Last Glacial Maximum and Terminal Pleistocene: a geospatial analysis of the 25-12 ka Australian archaeological record”, Journal of Archaeological Science, 2013, 40 (12). pp. 4612-4625. See also: “How aboriginal Australians coped with the last ice age.”, ScienceDaily, 23 September 2013.

Williams, A.N., Ulm, S., Goodwin, I., Smith, M.A., “Hunter-Gatherer Response to Late Holocene Climatic Variability in Northern and Central Australia”, Journal of Quaternary Science, 2010, 25(6): 831-838.

Most of these and other papers can be requested from Alan Williams’ Academia.edu page.

Music credit
“Homesick” by keytronic, available from ccMixter

Podcast 62: Who is responsible for global warming?

September 22, 2014 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

Who is responsible for global warming? That is a question that has dominated recent climate negotiations, most notably the failed 2009 climate convention in Copenhagen. Developing countries were putting the responsibility for historic carbon emissions and thus global warming on the developed nations. Developed nations on the other hand demanded that developing countries reduced their carbon emissions. The developing countries refused this because they felt that the rich nations had to reduce their carbon emissions and allow developing nations to continue to emit carbon in the quest for economic development. The rich nations in turn argued that we are all in it together and that from now on developing nations will be the greatest carbon emitters. The deadlock over historic carbon emissions remains to this day.

A recently published article entitled “Counting carbon: historic emissions from fossil fuels, long-run measures of sustainable development and carbon debt” attempts to uncover whether the developing countries have a point about the historic responsibility for carbon emissions by the developed nations or whether this question is more complex altogether. The lead author of the Counting Carbon paper, Jan Kunnas, an independent researcher from Finland who was until recently affiliated to the University of Stirling in Scotland, discusses the question of historic responsibility of carbon emissions on this episode of the podcast.

Further reading
Jan Kunnas, Eoin McLaughlin, Nick Hanley, David Greasley, Les Oxley, Paul Warde, “Counting carbon: historic emissions from fossil fuels, long-run measures of sustainable development and carbon debt”, Scandinavian Economic History Review.

Jan Oosthoek, “The IPCC and the Ozone Hole: a Warning from History”, Globalizations, March 2008, Vol. 5, No. 1, 63-66. Download paper.

Music credits
“Where You Are Now” by Zapac, available from ccMixter

Podcast 61: The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress

August 13, 2014 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

Australia is a country of extremes: it can be extremely hot and dry but also wet and prone to very big floods and its soils are poor and thin. Regardless of these extremes farmers have carved out livelihoods in his hostile environment. It is the story of how Australian farmers have tried to grow food and cotton, and conserve the environment, with all the environmental ignorance, the violence and courage that marked this endeavour. A new book entitled The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress. An Environmental History journeys to the inland plains of Australia and tells the story of how the arrival of modern agriculture promised ecological and social stability but instead descended into dysfunction.

This episode of the podcast features Cameron Muir, a researcher at the Australian National University and author of The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress. This fascinating book brings together the fields of environmental, cultural and agricultural history as well as political history. It is a true tour de force that starts in regional Australia but also touches on the global food system.

Websites mentioned
Book companion website
Details of the book on the publisher’s website

Music credits
“Over and Outback” by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD), available from ccMixter
“River” by Jeris, available from ccMixter
“2013/B” by unreal_dm, available from ccMixter

Podcast 60: Origins, entanglements and civic aims of the early forestry movement in the United States

May 26, 2014 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

Birdsey Grant Northrop. Source: Peck, Ellen Brainerd, “The Founder of Arbor Day”, The New England Magazine, Vol. XXII (new series), No. 3, May, 1900, pp. 269-275

While the origins of forestry in the United States have been the topic of sustained interest amongst environmental and forest historians, the history of the early forestry movement itself remains neglected. This is partly due to the manner in which later professional foresters often air brushed their “forest sentimentalist” predecessors out of the story and forest historians focused their narratives on of the development of forestry science and the modern Forestry Service, isolating that institution’s history from the broader social movement in which it originated. This broader movement advocated forestry not just as a means to produce timber for an increasingly industrialized nation but also as a vehicle of social reform and religious awakening. One of the pioneers in this movement — and a key advocate of Arbor Day, village improvement and forestry education — was Connecticut educator Birdsey G. Northrop. This episode of the podcast explores the alternative origins, entanglements and civic orientation of early forestry in the US through Northrop’s forgotten tour of Europe’s Forestry Schools in the summer of 1877. This journey and the impact it had on American forestry is a theme studied by the guest on this episode of the podcast, Jay Bolthouse, a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences at the University of Tokyo.

Literature mentioned
Richard Grove, “Scotland in South Africa: John Croumbie Brown and the roots of settler environmentalism”, in: Tom Griffith and Libby Robin, Ecology & Empire. Environmental History of Settler Societies (Melbourne University Press, 1997), pp. 139-153.

Harold Steen, The U.S. Forest Service : a History (Forest History Society in association with University of Washington Press, 2004)

Greg Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge University Press, 2002)

James Beattie, “Natural history, conservation and health: Scottish-trained doctors in New Zealand“, 1790–1920s. Immigrants & Minorities, 29 (2011) 3, 281-307

Jan Oosthoek, “Worlds Apart? The Scottish Forestry Tradition and the Development of Forestry in India“,Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 3 (2010) 1, 69-82

Music credits
“Where You Are Now” by Zapac, available from ccMixter
“Greensleeves Jazz” by Doxent Zsigmond, available from ccMixter
“One Way” by Rey Izain, available from ccMixter

Podcast 59: A sustainable common future? The Brundtland Report in historical perspective

February 20, 2014 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway, addressing the UN General Assembly on Environment and Development, 19 October 1987. Source: UN Photo

The term sustainability and phrase sustainable development were popularised with the publication of Our Common Future, a report released by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987. Also known as the Brundlandt report, it introduced the widely quoted definition of sustainable development: “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The report argued that economic development and social equity were necessary in order to protect the environmental and that the goals of economic well-being, equity and environmental protection could be reconciled if social and environmental considerations were systematically integrated into all decisions affecting the economy. Since the publication of the Brundtland report sustainable development has been widely accepted as a guiding principle, and yet the concept remains elusive and implementation has proven difficult. This is caused by the fact that economic development, social equity, and environmental protection are contradictory areas that are difficult to be reconciled. As a result the report is seen by many as a landmark in environmental politics and diplomacy while others decry it as a missed opportunity.

In a newly published book entitled Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future. A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development Iris Borowy critically examines the history and impact of the Brundtland Commission. The book explores how the work of the Commission brought together contradictory expectations and world views in the concept of sustainable development as a way to reconcile these profound differences.

This episode of Exploring Environmental History examines these contradictions as well as the historical context of sustainability with the author of Defining Sustainable Development, Iris Borowy. She is a researcher at the Institute of History, Theory and Ethics in Medicine of RWTH Aachen University, in Germany.

Sites and literature mentioned
Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future. A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Routledge, 2013.

Original report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future, from un-documents.net

Christian Pfister, “The “1950s Syndrome” and the Transition from a Slow-Going to a Rapid Loss of Global Sustainability”, In: Frank Uekoetter (ed.), The Turning Points of Environmental History (Pittsburgh, 2010), pp. 90-118. Download paper.

Music credits
“Where You Are Now” by Zapac, available from ccMixter
“Piano 8 by AT” by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD), available from ccMixter
“Life Isn’t Everything” by Hans Atom, available from ccMixter

Podcast 58: Environmental Humanities: something new under the sun?

January 18, 2014 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

Environmental Humanities are rethinking the
place of humanity in the environment.
Source: Elias Schewel/Flickr.

Solutions to environmental issues such as climate change, toxic waste, deforestation and species extinction, have been mainly framed as scientific, technological and economic problems. The slow progress of dealing with these issues has made us realise that science and technology do not have all the answers. Increasingly the humanities are called upon to provide perspectives on the environment and natural world that includes humans and human cultures. In response the environmental humanities have emerged as a new research arena that aims at infusing a humanities perspective into complex issues surrounding environmental problems and questions of the place of humans in the environment itself and of what the human actually is.

The Hawaiian Crow or Alalâ
Source: Wikipedia

In this edition of the podcast Thom Van Dooren, Senior Lecturer in the Environmental Humanities at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, explores what the environmental humanities are and why it has so rapidly emerged in recent years. Thom’s current work focuses on the philosophical and ethical dimensions of species extinctions. In the second half of the podcast Thom discusses his work on the Hawaiian Crow or Alalâ, which is extinct in the wild, and how this research connects the humanities with ecology, biology, and ethology.

Sites mentioned in the podcast & relevant links
Blog by Thom Vandooren
Environmental Humanities at the University of New South Wales
Journal Environmental Humanities
Environmental Humanities Now
Ecological Humanities
Thom Vandooren, “Science can’t do it alone: the environment needs humanities too“, The Conversation, 2 October 2012.
Jennifer Hamilton, “Explainer: what are the environmental humanities?“, The Conversation, 3 December 2013.

Music credits
“Where You Are Now” by Zapac, available from ccMixter
“Ch’i Burger” by panu, available from ccMixter
“Extinct” by unreal_dm with vocals by Kara Square, available from ccMixter

Podcast 57: Events in the collective environmental memory of humanity

December 18, 2013 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

What are the most important events in the collective environmental memory of humanity? In the spring of 2013 a group of environmental historians from around the globe was confronted with this very question. They were asked to nominate one event that, in their opinion, should be part of this collective memory. This was part of a survey for a special issue of the journal Global Environment on environment and memory. The twenty-two entries that were returned provide an interesting window in what professional environmental historians regard as world changing environmental events that should be remembered by all of us. The events suggested are a colorful mix including animals and bombs, dust and climate, organic and mineral resources, the old conservation movement and the new post-1970 environmental movement. In spatial terms, events were scattered over all five continents as well as the entire globe.

The guest on this episode of the podcast is Frank Uekotter, the organiser of the collective environmental memory survey. He discusses what the spatial and temporal distribution of the entries as well as the obvious silences and omissions tells us about our historical imagination and the present direction and focus of the discipline of environmental history.

Article discussed
“What Should We Remember? A Global Poll Among Environmental Historians“, Global Environment, 11 (2013), pp 184-214. Compiled and introduced by Frank Uekötter.

Sites mentioned in the podcast & relevant links
Global Environment (old site)
Global Environment (White Horse Press site)
Environment and memory project at the Rachel Carson Centre, Munich
University staff profile Frank Uekotter

Music credits
“Where You Are Now” by Zapac, available from ccMixter
“1973” by Doxent Zsigmond, available from ccMixter
“nervoso con las guitarras” by norelpref, available from ccMixter

Podcast 56: The power of the wild

November 24, 2013 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

Wanderer above the sea of fog
contemplating the power of
nature. Separate or part of the
wild? Painting by Caspar David
Friedrich (1774–1840).
Source: Wikipedia.

The power of the wild is an idea that has been important in western thought as a place of refuge or separation where we can feel the power of nature. It is a place where humans are not in control and their power is limited.

Using nature as a category of power creates a dichotomy between humans and nature, which is problematic because humans are very much part of eco-systems in which we live. Is it then valid for historians to invoke models of power dynamics to study past interactions between humans and nature?

This was one of the questions considered at a workshop held at Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, England in April 2013. The participants of the workshop also examined if a nature reserve like Wicken Fen can be made wild again, a process called re-wilding. In episode 53 of this podcast series Dolly Jørgensen argued that no re-wilding is needed but that the wild is all around us, even in urban settings.

In this episode of the podcast Paul Warde, reader in history at the University of East Anglia, argues that the experience of the wild is hard to find in an urban environment, even an urban park or in a nature reserve in densely populated England. The question is then if rewilding of an heavily dominated human landscape like Wicken Fen is possible and can be returned to a “wild state”. This desire of rewilding Wicken Fen also led to the question whether such a rewilded area would be truly wild.

Links & sites mentioned in the podcast
Dolly Jørgensen, Reflections on rewilding, Return of Native Nordic Fauna, 30 September 2013. Includes the video mentioned in the podcast.

The Places that Speak to us project website

Paul Warde, The Anthropocene: finding ourselves back in the wilderness. Reflections on the workshop on Re-wilding and Wild Desires at Wicken, 18-19 April 2013

Music credits
“Truth and Fact (Orchestral)” by Zapac, available from ccMixter
“Into The Garden” by Loveshadow, available from ccMixter
“Etincelle” by Oursvince, available from Jamendo

Podcast 55: The nature of South African environmental history

November 18, 2013 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

An imaginary scene depicting of the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in Table Bay showing the land, its people and the environment that the Europeans so totally misread. The European settlers were not able to mange the South African environment within its limits because they misinterpreted the nature of African nature and it created a legacy that still endures. (Painting by Charles Bell, 1813-1882). Source: Wikipedia.

On 14 and 15 November 2013, the 44th symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities was held at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. This year the meeting focused on the burgeoning field of the environmental humanities and the symposium was entitled The question of nature. The first two sessions of the symposium were devoted to an important component of the environmental humanities: environmental history.

The symposium opened with a keynote address by leading environmental historian Jane Carruthers, Emeritus Professor at the University of South Africa. Her talk, entitled “The question of nature, or the nature of the question?”, explored the nature and purpose of environmental history in South Africa. In this episode of the Exploring Environmental History Podcast professor Carruthers argues that the European settlers were not able to manage South Africa’s environment within its limits because they misinterpreted the nature of African nature and it created a legacy that still endures. She explores why and how environmental history has an urgent role to play in addressing this legacy and should contribute to discussions about issues such as environmental and social resilience and sustainability as well as social justice. Jane Carruthers argues that environmental historians are well equipped to raise questions related to environmental and social issues particular to emerging countries such as South Africa.

Links and sites mentioned in the podcast
Jane Carruthers, “Environmental History For An Emerging World”, Conservation and Society (2013), Download from the journal’s website.

Website Jane Carruthers

Programme 44th Symposium of the Australian Academy for the Humanities

Music credits
“Where You Are Now” by Zapac, available from ccMixter
“Lhasa” by Nic Bommarito, available from The Free Music Archive

Podcast 54: The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report: a historical perspective

October 2, 2013 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

On 27 September 2013 the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its highly anticipated summary for policymakers, in advance of its fifth assessment report that will be published in early 2014. This special episode of the podcast, explores briefly the origins of the organisation that produced this landmark report and, in more detail, the difficult international negotiations that have used the IPCC’s findings since its inception. This historical overview ends with the question whether we can learn anything from previous problems of atmospheric pollution, in this case the Great London Smog and the ozone hole, to tackle global warming.

The podcast concludes with a brief interview of historical climatologist Dagomar Degroot and his response to the summary of the fifth assessment report from the perspective of climate history. Dagomar is a PhD Candidate in environmental history at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Relevant web resources
Dagomar Degroot, Understanding the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, HistoricalClimatology.com

Maggie Koerth Baker, “The value of talking about values. It’s time to be explicit about how our beliefs affect what we think should be done with the science of climate change“, Ensia, 25 September 2013.

Met Office, The Great Smog of 1952

Jan Oosthoek, “The IPCC and the Ozone Hole: a Warning from History“, Globalizations, March 2008, Vol. 5, No. 1, 63-66.

Music credits
“Forward” by Northbound, available from Free Music Archive
“Alice In the City” by Doxent Zsigmond, available from ccMixter
“Improvisation On Friday…” by Alex, available from ccMixter

Podcast 53: Desire for the Wild – Wild Desires? The trouble with rewilding

September 27, 2013 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

A foal in the Konik pony herd at Wicken Fen.
Photo: Dolly Jørgensen.

It is undeniable that human influence is now felt in almost every ecosystem, region and ocean of the world. As a result wilderness or wild nature is becoming less abundant. In response to this less wild world, landscape and ecosystem restorations are undertaken all over the globe. One of these places is the wetland area of Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, England, where the National Trust is attempting a landscape scale restoration. This programme is not just about restoring but also “rewilding” the landscape. A big part of the Wicken Fen restoration involves the introduction of large grazers: Konik ponies and Highland cattle.

In April a workshop was held at Wicken Fen entitled Desire for the Wild – Wild Desires? Re-wilding in a world of social, environmental and climate change. This workshop considered what “wild” and “rewilding” of nature means and what history can contribute to efforts to rewild and restore landscapes and ecosystems.

Map of Wicken fen and location.
source: Ordnance Survey, One-inch
to the mile maps of England and Wales,
New Popular Edition, 1945-1947, sheet 135.

The guest on this podcast is is Dolly Jørgensen, a historian of Science and the Environment based at Umeå University in Sweden. Dolly presented a paper at the workshop on how rewilding has been an argument meaning different things to different academic sub-groups, all with a different historical notion of ‘when was wild’. Dolly deconstructs the different meanings of rewilding, and also follows the trail to find wildness all around us.

This podcast is the first of two episodes exploring the Desire for the Wild – Wild Desires? workshop.

Literature mentioned & further reading
William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”, In: William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), pp. 69-90.

Josh Donlan, et al., “Re-wilding North America”, Nature, Vol. 436 (18 August 2005), pp. 913-914.

Josh Donlan, et al., “Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Agenda for Twenty‐First Century Conservation”,The American Naturalist, Vol. 168, No. 5 (November 2006), pp. 660-681.

Caroline Fraser, Rewilding the World. Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009)

George Monbiot, Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding (London: Allen Lane, 2013)

Ian D. Rotherham, The Lost Fens: England’s Greatest Ecological Disaster (The History Press, 2013)

Relevant web resources
The Return of Native Nordic Fauna – A Research Blog by Dolly Jørgensen

Dolly Jørgensen, Reflections on rewilding, Return of Native Nordic Fauna, 30 September 2013. Includes the video mentioned in the podcast.

The Places that Speak to us project website

Paul Warde, The Anthropocene: finding ourselves back in the wilderness. Reflections on the workshop on Re-wilding and Wild Desires at Wicken, 18-19 April 2013

Carl Elliot Smith, Rewilding: should we introduce lions and Komodo dragons to Australia?, ABC RN Radio, Wednesday 3 July, 2013. Listen also to Future Tense to find out more about the strand of conservation theory known as rewilding.

George Monbiot, My manifesto for rewilding the world, The Guardian, 28 May, 2013.

Also listen to episodes 38 and 40 of Exploring Environmental History Podcast. Both explore the Wicken Fen Vision and the history of the Fens of Cambridgeshire.

Music credits
“Where You Are Now” by Zapac, available from ccMixter
“Cm 105 bpm” by Admiral Bob, available from ccMixter

The Places that Speak to Us Project and the production of this podcast was funded by the AHRC Landscape & Environment Programme.

This podcast was simultaneously published on the Histories of Environmental Change website.

Podcast 52: Scientific and environmental diplomacy and the Antarctic

September 17, 2013 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

A view from space of Antarctica. Source: NASA

Antarctica is a unique continent because is mostly covered in ice and, importantly, it is the only continent that has never been settled by humans until scientific bases were established in the 20th C. This makes it an international space which has implications for the environmental regulatory regimes that have developed over time as well as the way we view the continent. Without a popular tradition of natural history, or amateur ornithology, or locals dependent on wild resources from which a conservation ethic might emerge, it was trained, international biologists who led the development of nature protection and conservation in Antarctica.

The guest on this podcast episode is Alessandro Antonello, a PhD candidate in the School of History at the Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences, in Canberra, Australia. In this podcast he explores the scientific, environmental and diplomatic aspects of Antarctic history, in particular from the inception of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959. He also examines changing conceptions of the Antarctic in the second half of the 20th century and places this in a wider historical context.

Further reading
Marcus Haward and Tom Griffiths (eds.), Australia and the Antarctic Treaty system: 50 years of influence, UNSW Press, 2011.

Acronyms used
AMCAFF: Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora
SCAR: Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research
CCAMLR: Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources
CSIRO: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
CCAS: Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals
IGY: International Geophysical Year (1957)

Music credits
“Where You Are Now” by Zapac, available from ccMixter
“2012Piano” by snowflake, available from ccMixter

Podcast 51: The Scottish forestry experience and the development of forestry in India

April 4, 2013 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

Since at least the 18th century Scotland has been the centre of forestry knowledge in Britain. Many foresters and botanists trained on Scottish estates went into the colonial service in during the 19th century and what they brought with them was a unique set of forestry skills. This paper examines the influence of Scottish foresters on the development of empire forestry in British India. Scottish-trained foresters aided the adaptation of continental forestry models, mainly German and French, to the Indian conditions, drawing on their experience gained in Scotland. Returning from their service in India they went on to advocate the creation of a forestry service in Scotland, which resonated with landowners who believed that forestry would make the Highlands more productive.

This podcast is the registration of a seminar talk given by Jan Oosthoek in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, 22 March 2013.

Music credit
“Where You Are Now” by Zapac Available from ccMixter

Podcast 50: Conquering the Highlands. History of the afforestation of the Scottish uplands

March 26, 2013 / Nkjwo / Comments Off

Large forest plantation in the Scottish
Highlands. Photo: Jan Oosthoek

By the end of the nineteenth century, Scotland’s woodlands were reduced to about six per cent of land cover. Over the course of the twentieth century, foresters worked to establish timber reserves in the Scottish Highlands, creating forests on marginal lands that were not easily adapted to forestry following millennia of deforestation. Using a variety of techniques and strategies drawn from modern forestry practices, the Scottish uplands were afforested in the twentieth century, tripling the forest cover. The creation of new forests to serve strategic and economic interests, however, altered the ecology of the Scottish uplands and eventually came into conflict with the interests of environmentalists in the late twentieth century.

This fascinating history of the afforestation of the Scottish uplands is explored in a new book by environmental historian Jan Oosthoek called, Conquering the Highlands: A History of the Afforestation of the Scottish Uplands. This episode features an interview with the author Jan Oosthoek of this book and he talks about the largest environmental transformation of the Scottish Highlands in the 20th century.

Links & sites mentioned in the podcast
Download Conquering the Highlands as a free e-book from the ANU Press website.
Buy a print copy of Conquering the Highlands from Amazon.
Nature’s Past podcast

Music credits 
“Lark in the Morning. The Atholl Highlanders” by Sláinte
Available from freemusicarchive.org

“Scotland the Brave” by Shake That Little Foot
Available from freemusicarchive.org

Environmental History Resources

Author: Nkjwo (page 3 of 7)

Podcast 64: Tin: a historical perspective on a networked resource

Podcast 63: Climate variability and population dynamics in prehistoric Australia

Podcast 62: Who is responsible for global warming?

Podcast 61: The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress

Podcast 60: Origins, entanglements and civic aims of the early forestry movement in the United States

Podcast 59: A sustainable common future? The Brundtland Report in historical perspective

Podcast 58: Environmental Humanities: something new under the sun?

Podcast 57: Events in the collective environmental memory of humanity

Podcast 56: The power of the wild

Podcast 55: The nature of South African environmental history

Podcast 54: The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report: a historical perspective

Podcast 53: Desire for the Wild – Wild Desires? The trouble with rewilding

Podcast 52: Scientific and environmental diplomacy and the Antarctic

Podcast 51: The Scottish forestry experience and the development of forestry in India

Podcast 50: Conquering the Highlands. History of the afforestation of the Scottish uplands

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