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Chapter Three looks at work on the Otago goldfields, emphasising particularly the daily practices and randomness of gold deposits in Otago. It locates the work of goldmining within local natural environments that made the rushes fluid and unstable events. As gold seekers encountered new weather patterns, geological formations, and ecologies, they utilized ethnic networks and adapted labour practices from the Victorian goldfields to local contexts. Meanwhile, they drew on Chartist language as they fought with the Provincial Government over the meaning of the gold rushes and the nature of the gold-rush population.

The cumulative ecological changes from the fur trade, mining, logging, and farming on Lake Superior were profound. While contemporary observers understood that these rapid changes might cause problems, it was rare to recognize that Lake Superior’s geological context and history made the watershed particularly vulnerable to sudden ecological change. After the retreat of the ice, the Canadian Shield’s thin soils and high resistance of its rocks to weathering had ensured that Lake Superior was biologically unproductive and slow to accumulate sediments. Lake Superior’s geographic context meant that its waters were very cold, and that coldness shaped its ecology in profound ways. Lake Superior’s enormous size, which made planners hope that dilution might be the solution to pollution, actually worked against them. Lake Superior is large enough and cold enough that when thermal bars form, as mentioned above, they hold pollution where people and fish are more likely to encounter it.

Human migration has been a factor in environmental disruption along the United States–Mexico border both historically and in modern times. This chapter examines the impact of human migration as well as the impact of modern-day border security forces in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is a federally protected wilderness area in southern Arizona on the U.S.-Mexico border. The root causes of environmental disruption in the region are often blamed on modern undocumented immigrants. However, U.S. border security forces also create significant environmental disruption and degradation. Through an examination of the environmental history of human migration in the region, we see that people have long used this region as a travel corridor. A longer-term historical analysis offers a more comprehensive understanding of human migration and environmental disruption along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Chapter Two places the Otago gold rushes within the Tasman World by considering the links between Otago and Victoria during the gold rushes. It discusses the impacts of the contraction and industrialisation of the Victorian goldfields on facilitating migration to Otago. It further analyses the two-way traffic of people, information and commodities that wedded the Otago and Victorian goldfields into a single economic and social trans-Tasman community. Gold seekers also transplanted social networks in Otago, where they dug and drank alongside Victorian mates. Meanwhile, the Otago and Victorian press competed for itinerant gold seekers. Despite the attempts of the Otago newspapers, few had any attachment to Otago and their experiences in Otago were a temporary sojourn rather than permanent settlement.

This chapter examines the history of commons with examples from India, Mongolia and England. Different approaches to the commons from Garrett Hardin, ElinorOstrom and Marx are discussed. The relationship between property rights and ecological sustainability is outlined.

Chapter 1 describes Faith in Place’s origins and development within the context of the American environmental movement and with attention to strategic decisions its leaders made to help their organization survive and ultimately flourish. Although Faith in Place originated with priorities, activities, and participants that were quite similar to numerous other environmental groups, Faith in Place’s first ten years involved a series of strategic decisions in which leaders developed measures to differentiate their work from mainstream environmentalism. Strategic decision-making led to a coalition distinct for its racial diversity.

This chapter outlines an international environmental history of whaling in the South Seas (the Southern Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans). Pelagic (ie., deep-sea) whaling was not discretely national. “American” whaling, as traditionally understood, existed as part of a broader ecological and economic phenomenon which included whalers from other nations. Application of “American,” “British” and other national labels to an ocean process that by its nature crossed national boundaries has occluded a full understanding of whaling’s international nature, a fullness which begins with whaling community diaspora spread across the North Atlantic from the United States to Britain and France, and which extends to the varied locations where whalers hunted and the yet other locations to which they returned with their catch. Ocean archives—the Saint Helena Archive, the Cape Town Archive Repository, and the Brazilian Arquivo Nacional—and a reinterpretation of published primary sources and national whaling historiographies reveal the fundamentally international nature of “American” pelagic whaling, suggesting that an undue focus on US whaling data by whaling historians has likely underestimated the extent of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century pelagic whaling.

This introduction considers the ‘environmental turn’ taken in the humanities, and particularly in historical study, suggesting ways in which these developments might animate the future study of nineteenth-century Ireland. Question of agency and the relationship between human and non-human nature are addressed. Also considered is how current environmental concerns, and climate change in particular, should lead us to think anew about the past, rendering familiar subjects unfamiliar. Particular attention is paid to how Ireland’s past might be located within larger global processes, attracting the interest of scholars from throughout the world. It then introduces the individual contributions in the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate how a change in optic can significantly change how we think about Ireland’s recent past.

This chapter introduces the concept of the forest management divergence to analyze the separation of timber production from the protection of forest biodiversity that has occurred globally in the second half of the twentieth century. It argues that contemporary ecological and forest policy problems, such as the production of cheap wood fibre from developing tropical countries and conflicts over logging in native forests, must be seen as a result of this process. The chapter emphasizes that plantations and protected areas developed out of an earlier conservation model, which integrated environmental management with production. The conservation model spread globally from the mid 19th century until the mid 20th century, before gradually falling into decline due to the growth of plantations and protected areas from the 1980s until today. The chapter frames the global history of forest management as an interaction between human attempts to regulate forests and the constraints that shaped the outcome of these events. It suggests that many historians have given too much emphasis to the history of forestry ideas without recognizing the limitations that shaped forest management outcomes. Finally, the chapter defines the terms “plantation,” “semi-natural forest,” and “native forest” as they are used in the book.

The introduction established the main argument of the book, which is that the U.S. Navy’s charts and its chart-making throughout the nineteenth century were integral to the expansion of American oceanic empire even as such effort exposed the limits of science practice, seafaring, and war-making in a dynamic, dangerous marine environment. The Navy and the broader American maritime world’s encounter with the ocean, mediated through science, was integral to the way mariners, navigators, and naval officers thought of an emerging maritime empire first in commercial terms and, by the late nineteenth century, in new geo-strategic terms. The introduction also places the larger work within the historiographies of military, maritime, and naval history as well as environmental history and the history of science and cartography, seeking to establish historiographical and methodological bridges among these sub-fields.

Chapter five documents the post-Civil War developments. It focuses on how General Franco’s ideological-political mission was predicated upon cultural and material national territorial integration, the eradication of regionalist aspirations and a concerted discursive and physical process of cultural and material national(ist) homogenization and modernization. Attention is paid to the political enrolling of diverse interests and social actors (peasants, capital, engineers, scientists) in a hegemonic assemblage that supported the hydraulic transformation of the country. In addition, the mobilization of water in a particular socio-political discourse, and integrated within a supporting cultural vision, is documented. Finally, the chapter shows how Spain’s geo-political isolation and limited economic-financial capacity prevented the full implementation of the program during the first decade and a half of fascist rule.

India is clearly at a crossroads with fierce contest over the fate of its forests. Claimants of this space include those who see forests as the last redoubt of endangered life forms and others who see access to them as birth right of under-privileged peoples. The roots of the conflicts lie in the distant past. Till as recently as 1800 much of India was forest, whether secondary or primary, with cultivated arable being only islands in a sea of green. Polities embraced incorporated such lands, their resources, and peoples in complex ways. Today, as in the past, forest issues are linked to larger questions of polity and economy. The shape of the forests hinges on the outcomes of hard political choices. Even as global factors loom larger than ever, national and regional politics will play a critical role. It is this creative space for rainbow alliances and coalitions of interest that may well hold the key to the endurance of forests in the coming century. Science as well as history may yet have a role to play: to help create new opportunities while transcending the worst of the past.

This chapter focuses on the attempts, during the first decades of the 20^th century, to modernize Spain through the planning and implementation of large-scale hydraulic infrastructures. The chapter explores the dynamics of the early water modernization process by considering the role of the state on the one hand and the visions of the engineering community on the other. Particular attention is paid to the role and contested politics of the effort to establish River Basin Authorities. The chapter argues that during the first decades of the 20^th century, hydraulic modernization failed as a result of both internal political conditions and entrenched power positions of a traditional elite as well as the problematic political-economic of Spain in a context of international liberalization and mounting internal socio-environmental conflict. The chapter concludes by arguing that the particular imaginary of modernity, based around state-led large infrastructural works, the need for an ‘iron surgeon’, a charismatic and authoritarian leader, to implement such national project, and the fear that lack of modernization would lead to social and political disintegration set the scene for the post-civil war Fascist hydro-modern project.

This chapter excavates the origins of Spain’s early-twentieth-century modernization process as expressed in debates and actions around the hydrological condition at the turn of the 20^th century. After the loss of empire in 1998, a variety of social and political actors argue for the need to ‘regenerate’ Spain if it was going to prosper in a post-imperial context. The production of a new society and thus a new geography revolved very much around the hydrological condition, and included the making and implementation of a new hydraulic paradigm. The end of empire shifted the gaze of the 20^th century modernizers to the internal condition of Spain and the need to change radically its socio-physical configuration. Hydraulic modernization was originally formulated as a national project to distribute water more justly and economically efficient. However, the early 20^th century attempts to restructure the national State and to re-organize the hydraulic landscape failed. The chapter explores the multiple actors, processes, ideas, dreams and practices that laid the foundations for this new modernizing vision and substantiate the fundamental role that mobilizing water played in these attempts to launch Spain onto a path of national modernization.