Geoscience Reference
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the development, image and identify of everyday places' (Kearns and Andrews,
2005, p. 2697).
Environmental histories are also contributing to our understanding of disease
diffusion with rising concerns over the threat of new and deadly infections, which
are being transferred from continent to continent with relative ease in an increas-
ingly globalised world. As John McNeill (1999, p. 175) suggests, however, such
threats are not necessarily new and it is possible to fi nd corollaries in past centuries.
The importing of sugar to Atlantic America in the seventeenth century, for example,
heralded a new chapter in ecological transformation and created a set of environ-
mental conditions that were conducive to the propagation of yellow fever.
Other long-standing debates over the relationship between disease and empire,
however, have also recently been reopened with an ecological twist. It is generally
accepted that 'virgin soil epidemics' - the introduction of Old World diseases to a
people and land with little or no resistance (Crosby, 1986) - triggered massive
depopulation across the New World throughout the 16th and early 17th centuries.
To take Mexico as an example, wave after wave of epidemic disease swept across
the country causing unprecedented life loss among indigenous populations. It has
recently been suggested, however, that the most serious epidemics to strike central
Mexico in the sixteenth century may have been caused by the same haemorrhagic
fever (Acuña-Soto et al., 2000). Perhaps most controversially, it has been posited
that this fever may have had a New World etiological agent, which was stimulated
by a combination of extreme drought, post-conquest changes in agricultural prac-
tices and modifi cations to local settlement and infrastructure (Acuña-Soto et al.,
2002). The expanding network of tree-ring studies is also playing a pivotal role in
exploring these new disease histories. Dendroclimatological investigations have
resulted in the identifi cation of a period of 'megadrought' in the 1550s, one of the
most severe droughts in North American history, which may have also interacted
with prevalent ecological and sociological conditions, magnifying the human impact
of infectious disease in central Mexico (Cleaveland et al., 2003; Dias et al., 2002;
Acuña-Soto et al., 2002).
War, environmental and militarised landscapes
Opportunities for exploring the environmental impacts and consequences of con-
fl ict, nature's effects on war and the landscapes of battle have recently been high-
lighted (Tucker and Russell, 2004). The nature of the relationship between warfare
and environment are often quite complex and mediated by social, economic and
political structures and intervention. Bennett's work on the environment of post
conquest Fiji, for example, illustrates how a state of emergency might have proffered
opportunities for dramatic changes to land legislation, specifi cally the appropriation
of land by the Crown which in turn had signifi cant environmental consequences for
the land and forest reserves and associated social implications (Bennett, 2001) His-
torical geographers have also been among those responsible for opening up warscapes
as spaces of investigation. Clout (2006) has recently drawn attention to the consid-
erable research completed on the landscapes of the Second World War in Western
Europe. Geographers have also spearheaded analysis of the relationship between
military confl ict, civil strife and the (re)emergence of disease in epidemic proportions
(Cliff and Smallman-Raynor, 2004).
