Search Results

This chapter examines the demesne farm of Wisbech Barton during the early 14th century, a period often viewed as the demographic and economic turning point of the Middle Ages. It reveals that reeves responded to the challenges of this time, including the agrarian crisis of 1315-22 and the price deflation of the 1330s and 1340s, with remarkable flexibility and proficiency. Annual changes to the acreage sown with cash crops were determined by actual and relative prices and this sensitivity to market forces helped keep farm income buoyant. Most importantly, the intensity with which land was farmed was deliberately reduced as economic conditions deteriorated, with the effect that crop yields were reduced. Soils at Wisbech may well have been less fertile on the eve of the Black Death, but the responsibility for this lay not with the overuse of land or a lack of technological knowledge, but rather with rational decision-making.

Recent observations of widespread changes in mature tropical forests such as a rise in tree growth, recruitment and mortality, and above-ground biomass, suggest that ‘global change’ agents may be affecting tropical forests far from the deforestation fronts. However, consensus has yet to emerge over the robustness of these changes and the environmental drivers that may be causing them. This chapter focuses on the second part of this debate. Ten potential widespread drivers of environmental change are identified: temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, climatic extremes (including El Niñno-Southern Oscillation events), atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, nutrient deposition, O₃/acid depositions, hunting, land-use change, and increasing liana numbers. Each is expected to leave a unique ‘fingerprint’ in tropical forests, as drivers directly force different processes, have different distributions in space and time and may affect some forests more than others (e.g., depending on soil fertility). Testable a priori predictions of forest responses are presented to help ecologists attribute particular changes in forests to particular causes. Finally, this chapter discusses how these drivers may change and the possible future consequences for tropical forests.

This chapter describes efforts to improve the fertility of California's soils. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nitrogen depletion in California's soils was a major concern. Farmers relied on two imports from Chile—nitrogen-rich Chilean alfalfa (Medicago sativa) and Chilean sodium nitrate (NaNO₃)—to meet the nutrient demands of a continuously expanding agricultural system. Chilean alfalfa was indispensable to the emergence of Northern California's profitable dairy businesses, which made California into the nation's top milk butter, ice cream, and yogurt-producing state by the end of the twentieth century. Chilean sodium nitrate was essential to Southern California's prosperous citrus-fruit industry, which served as that region's primary engine of economic growth from the 1880s through World War II.

This chapter analyzes how current human population density and land use respond to environmental gradients, with an emphasis on rainfall and soil fertility, and compares this to the responses of large resident herbivores. It identifies historic shifts that led to intensified human land use in East Africa, identifying three distinct phases: hunter-gatherer, agripastoralist, and modern commercialized societies. These three historic phases of human land use are analogous to current main land use systems in the Serengeti–Mara ecosystem: (1) parks for wildlife and ecotourism; (2) protected multiple-use areas where people and wildlife coexist; and (3) the rural/village areas, with agricultural and livestock systems managed by a variety of more or less formal land tenure systems. This sets the scene for a discussion of the resource basis of human-wildlife interactions in savannas, from which we can learn to manage these interactions better in the future.

This chapter documents the environmental constraints that led planters and farmers to adopt shifting cultivation. Most southern soils were highly acidic and lacked key nutrients, which made it impossible for planters and farmers to use continuous cultivation. Southern farmers and planters also found it difficult to raise cattle and other livestock, which constituted a crucial link in recycling soil fertility in continuous-cultivation regimes. Debilitating livestock diseases flourished in the warm southern climate, while hay, clover, and other fodder crops wilted in the South's heat and humidity. As was the case of many tropical and semitropical environments, the South's environmental constraints proved exceedingly difficult to overcome. Even the introduction of railroads, the growth of nearby cities, and the introduction of new fertilizers did little to encourage more intensive cultivation practices in the antebellum decades.

This chapter focuses primarily on archaeological evidence of agricultural development and traditional historical evidence of escalation of coercive measures leading to statehood during Phase III (c.1680–1790) of the Hawaiian state emergence model. This was a time of increased stress resulting from rapid growth that doubled population within a lifetime, increased labor required of women as well as men in cultivation and pig husbandry, reduced soil fertility, tax levies, and agricultural intensification by mulching, windrow planting, and extensive infrastructural development that reached the limits of productive land. Considered together, archaeological and traditional evidence of Hawai`i Island during Phase III, together with documented evidence from Tikopia and ancient and modern states, provides preliminary confirmation of the hard times hypothesis, which proposes that a leader of an autonomous group tends to respond to a perceived extraordinary threat to the group with extraordinary action that may transgress sociopolitical norms.

This concluding chapter briefly reviews elements of the book and suggests ways the emergence model might benefit future research. Comparison of Hawaiian primary states with an array of Polynesian nonstate societies and the state of Tonga facilitates construction of processes, conjectural stages, and hypotheses of the Hawaiian state emergence model. Elements of the model can be tested by archaeological and ethnohistoric research conducted for a wide variety of purposes throughout Hawai`i. For example, evidence of stress in fixed-field systems such as soil fertility loss or cultivation at or beyond the evident natural and technological limits may support the hard times hypothesis. Eyewitness descriptions of the Hawaiian states may provide details that are seldom accessible in the archaeological records of emergent primary states in other regions of the world, and the equifinality of Hawaiian and Tongan states may shed light on global state emergence equifinality.

The fifth chapter outlines the technological treadmill that farmers find themselves riding on when they participate in growing a monoculture crop like soyabean. Drawing upon ethnographic accounts of farmers in Ranipura on pests, weeds, fertilizers, markets, and nutrition, the chapter traces the dependencies on external agents and the dance against nature which this participation entails. The process is not only parasitic upon the future but also precarious in the present moment. The ensuing result makes farmers, perforce, constantly deal with crisis.

This chapter examines the division of labor and the process of sugar production on the plantations of Saint-Domingue. Plantations like the Ferron de la Ferronnays operation on the Cul de Sac plain had a contradictory set of imperatives: they existed to produce specialized crops for sale on world markets, which precluded the production of subsistence crops; at the same time, they had to hedge against the ever-present possibility that warfare or meteorological crisis would temporarily shutter world markets to them. This fact dictated a less technologically dynamic, more labor-intensive pattern of investment. The eighteenth-century plantation was poised between two forms of organization: it resembled the nineteenth century factory, but in other respects it resembled a much older social form: the latifundia of the ancient world, which were organized around the need for self-sufficiency and stability that the plantations of the Antilles rarely achieved.

Over time, the myth of the peasant origins of the organic farming movement has come to prominence amongst those who advocate organic farming methods, with the belief being that, through his writings on organic farming, Howard had bequeathed to the West the ancient wisdom of the East. This chapter traces the origins of the organic farming protocols to Albert Howard, rather than pre-industrial peasant agriculture among the Hunza. It highlights that the Indore Methods of composting solved a practical need to raise soil fertility without the cost of chemical fertilizers, and draws attention to the unique accomplishments of Albert and Gabrielle Howard at Indore.