Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
for Africa. As Grove (2001) anticipated, and as work by Moon (2005) has demon-
strated, the centre of gravity of environmental history research is also shifting east-
wards towards Russia and the Middle East.
According to the 'Introduction' of the recently published
Encyclopaedia
on the
subject, however, environmental history should be,
by defi nition, a global endeav-
our. After all, environmental issues, be they climate change, land degradation,
deforestation or pollution, are trans-national and unfold without respect to political
or administrative borders. Most research, however, remains wed to the idea of the
nation state or has been conducted at the case study level, often with a political
boundary, nation or region as a geographical delineation. Although there is obvious
scope for more regionally focused environmental histories, there have been calls for
more cross-border or cross-national regional, comparative and global studies of
environmental history (Steinberg, 2004, p. 266; Lekan, 2005). The last few years
has seen an increase in the number of such syntheses (e.g., Beinart and Coates, 1995;
McNeill, 2000; Hughes, 2001; Richards, 2003).
A focus on environmental features, including plants, animals, mountain ranges,
rivers or forests and climate, and of processes such as climate change, deforestation,
soil erosion or pollution, might help broaden the fi elds of vision beyond the spatial
confi nes of the political or administrative boundary. Rising concerns over the impli-
cations of global warming and fears of escalating human vulnerability to natural
calamities and extreme events together form one such highly topical issue which
'cuts to the heart of the debate about the relationship between nature and culture'
(Steinberg, 2004, p. 275). The study of climate history and historical climatology,
1
long-term climate reconstruction, and explorations of the impact of past climate
change and particularly extreme weather events on communities thus represent
important growth areas in environmental history.
Advances in dendroclimatology and the analysis and dating of materials held in
ice, sea and lake cores, have all been used to glean invaluable insight into longer-
term climate trends in different parts of the world. Building on earlier climate
history work of the French
Annales
School of History, and associated most notably
with the work of Braudel and Le Roy Ladurie (1972), interests in climate-society
interactions over the historical time period have also grown signifi cantly over the
last few decades (see, for example, Lamb, 1982; Grove, 1988; Barriendos, 1997;
Pfi ster and Brazdil, 1999; Jones et al., 2001; Brazdil et al., 2005). This pioneering
work is not only providing detailed regional climate histories but is also affording
important insights into how societies have been affected by, coped with and have
responded to climatic variability and anomalous weather events and weather-
related events in the past. Investigations of past climate change and extreme weather
and weather-related events are in turn encouraging a growing interest in the timing,
frequency and implications of historical natural disasters, from weather related
events to historical earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and storms (Kempe and Rohr,
2003).
Environmental processes and products have also formed the focus of interesting
transboundary environmental histories. Work on histories of deforestation
(Williams, 2004), of particular species (Griffi ths, 2001) and of global commodities
(e.g.,
Salt
[1998] or
Cod
[2002], both by Kurlansky) serve as examples of themed
studies through which more global or synthetic environmental histories might be
explored. Recent 'eco-biographical' work targeting attention on specifi c geographi-
cal and topographic features, landmarks and water courses are also beginning to
