Peter A Coates

Environment and history: the taming of nature in the USA and South Africa

1. Introduction: Comparative analysis, the historical background and the nature of environmental history 2. Hunting and animals: from game to wildlife 3. Timber and trees: from felling to forestry 4. Agriculture: exploitation unlimited and limited 5. Nature reserves and National Parks: revaluing and renaturing the wild 6. From conservation to environmentalism and beyond

Editorial Postscript: The naming of strangers in the landscape

Chestnut blight and mitten crabs from China, phylloxera from the eastern United States, musk rats from North America, gypsy moths from Eurasia, Canadian water weed and Colorado beetles. These are just some of the exotic biota, great and small, whose transatlantic histories the British animal ecologist, Charles Elton, related in his seminal text, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (Elton, 2000 (orig. 1958)). Despite earlier studies of the transformation of New Zealand’s life forms and landscape through the transplantation of Eurasian non-natives (Clark, 1949; Guthrie-Smith, 1921), Elton is the first scholar with whom the subject of species transfer and biotic intermixing is readily associated. Elton’s book is remembered, not least, as a classic early warning of the deleterious consequences of certain exotics that launched the study of bio-invasion. Elton recalled that his interest in foreign flora and fauna was sparked during his boyhood in the bustling, cosmopolitan seaport of Liverpool before the First World War. Continuing the grand tradition of exotic introductions established by imperial Greeks and Romans (related here by Hughes (2003) and McNeill (2003))—if on a more modest and informal scale—sailors from around the world brought a wealth of faunal curiosities to the city. One of Elton’s favourite haunts was a shop in which these strange and wonderful living exotica were displayed (Elton, 1955). My own emerging preoccupation with what the botanical historian Edgar Anderson has called the ‘transported landscape’ (Anderson, 1967, p. 9) can perhaps also be traced to my boyhood in this area. Growing up in the days when nobody worried about children roaming the woods alone all day, I explored the same seashore and dunes blanketed in sand-stabilizing Corsican pine that Elton had tramped half a century earlier. More relevant to the contents of this special issue of Landscape Research, however, are the creatures I encountered on the Lancashire coast just north of Liverpool. Formby Point, now a National Trust nature reserve, is one of the last English strongholds of the native red squirrel, a national icon (thanks to Beatrice Potter’s tale of Squirrel Nutkin) whose status is as embattled as that of its Italian counterpart. These various essays span transported landscapes and their non-human denizens from the Classical world to Germany and South Africa in the 1930s. As my co-editor has pointed out, many introductions were uncontroversial and the acquisition of floral and faunal citizenship was an effortless process (see Kjaergaard’s account of clover’s benign conquest of Europe (Kjaergaard, 2003)).

Emerging from the wilderness (or, from redwoods to bananas): recent environmental history in the United States and the rest of the Americas

This essay charts and reflects on developments in the environmental history of the Americas over the past decade, arguing that the field has become more inclusive and complex as it tackles a broader spectrum of physical environments and moves beyond an emphasis on destructiveness and loss as the essence of relations between humans and the rest of the natural world. New approaches to traditional subjects such as conservation and national parks are examined too. While paying due attention to the United States, it also highlights progress in Canadian environmental history and (English language) coverage of Central and South America.

Eastenders go west: English sparrows, immigrants and the nature of fear

The Tortilla Curtain (1995), a novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle, juxtaposes the existence of southern Californias affluent whites and non-white underclass by relating the stories of two couples whose lives become irrevocably entangled following a fateful automobile accident. The period flavour derives from racial tensions that culminated in the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the passage, two years later, of Proposition 187, a package of prohibitive measures to curb the influx of “undocumented” immigrants from Mexico. Delaney Mossbacher, the books main character, is a freelance nature writer with orthodox liberal views – a caricatured Sierra Club member. He contributes a monthly, Annie Dillard-esque nature column (“Pilgrim at Topanga Creek”) to an outdoor magazine. He lives in an upscale hilltop community designed in impeccable Spanish mission style – the product of white flight – apparently safe from the Mexican hordes that have broken through the border (the brittle “tortilla curtain” of the novels title) and are overrunning the flatlands.

From hazard to habitat (or hazardous habitat) The lively and lethal afterlife of Rocky Flats, Colorado

Rocky Flats (RF) is a former nuclear weapons manufacturing complex in Colorado, 26 km northwest of downwind Denver, at the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains’ Front Range. At RF, between 1952 and 1989, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and its successors manufactured plutonium triggers. After remediation (1996–2005), 4000 acres of buffer zone were transferred to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), to manage as Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge (2007). Drawing on research materials from local libraries and archives, this essay explores the ‘weapons to wildlife’ (W2W) conversion of a militarized environment in Denver’s ‘Gunbelt’. The various phases in RF’s demilitarization (closure, cleanup, transition to wildlife refuge and refuge management planning) are examined with reference to recognition of biodiversity value, debate over the ex-plant’s future, and options for running a refuge still in an arrested state of development – closed to the public for want of funding. A further aim is to bring to the attention of physical geographers a growing body of scholarship by human geographers on environmental contamination at former nuclear sites and debates over remediation and post-industrial uses – and to contribute the additional perspective of an environmental historian.

Developing the rivers of East and West Africa: an environmental history

expensive; the gains were too alluring to outweigh the risks. Moon’s wise book contains a number of lessons for us. Science can improve our understanding of the dynamics of factors of production, including their natural limitations, but it cannot force us to choose between short-term gain and longer-term ‘sustainability’. Those choices are ultimately political and personal ones, to which people bring their own reasons. The stuff of politics is that, given the best available information, people will debate courses of action based on their different visions of ‘benefit’ and their different understandings of risk. Interestingly, Moon’s epilogue is a musing on this very problem: recalling his summertime visit to the Askania-Nova zapovednik (nature reserve), Moon, very much in the spirit of the ending of a famous article by Yi-Fu Tuan, relates that he enjoyed the experience of the feather grass steppe but also appreciated the cool of the forest park there. With the exception of a very few typos (‘loosing fertility’ [p. 283], ‘Grigorii’ [should be ‘Georgii Frantsevich’] Morozov, [p. 174, 314]), Moon’s book is a wonderful and thoroughly researched analysis of the (not yet finished) processes of the scientific understanding of and agricultural adaptation to an environment that was once foreign to Russian farmers, but now iconic of them.

Reviews : Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonisation und Kalter Krieg. Die Kulrur mission der USA in Österreich nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Vienna, Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1991; 433 pp.; no price given

Khrushchev visited Tito. In discussing terminology in his introduction the author raises the chestnut of the definition of the ’dictatorship of the proletariat’ which might, indeed, be acceptable as a Soviet label; but he goes on to speculate about the pie in the sky of a political system in which the proletariat is the ruling class and what would happen if the moon were made of cheese and ’the class division characteristic of a capitalist society vanishes’ (30). We would have an ’obshchenarodnoe