Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia

Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia PDF Author: Emmanuel Kreike
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047444205
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Descriptions of the late 1800s landscape in the Ovambo floodplain in north-central Namibia closely match the area’s late 1900s appearance, suggesting that little change occurred between the pre-colonial baseline and the postcolonial outcome. Yet, paradoxically, colonial conquest, population pressure, biological invasions, new technology, and economic globalization caused both dramatic deforestation and reforestation in less than a century. The paradox stems from the fact that the prevailing global environmental models obscure and homogenize the process of environmental change: different and contradictory interpretations are dismissed as alternative readings or misreadings of the same process. Deforestation and Reforestation, however, argues that the paradox highlights the need to reframe environmental change as plural processes occurring along multiple trajectories that may be dissynchronized and asymmetrical.

Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia

Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia PDF Author: Emmanuel Kreike
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047444205
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Descriptions of the late 1800s landscape in the Ovambo floodplain in north-central Namibia closely match the area’s late 1900s appearance, suggesting that little change occurred between the pre-colonial baseline and the postcolonial outcome. Yet, paradoxically, colonial conquest, population pressure, biological invasions, new technology, and economic globalization caused both dramatic deforestation and reforestation in less than a century. The paradox stems from the fact that the prevailing global environmental models obscure and homogenize the process of environmental change: different and contradictory interpretations are dismissed as alternative readings or misreadings of the same process. Deforestation and Reforestation, however, argues that the paradox highlights the need to reframe environmental change as plural processes occurring along multiple trajectories that may be dissynchronized and asymmetrical.

Environmental Change and African Societies

Environmental Change and African Societies PDF Author: Julia Tischler
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004410848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The volume Environmental Change and African Societies contributes to current debates on global climate change from the perspectives of the social sciences and the humanities. It charts past and present environmental change in different African settings and also discusses policies and scenarios for the future. The first section, “Ideas”, enquires into local perceptions of the environment, followed by contributions on historical cases of environmental change and state regulation. The section “Present” addresses decision-making and agenda-setting processes related to current representations and/or predicted effects of climate change. The section “Prospects” is concerned with contemporary African megatrends. The authors move across different scales of investigation, from locally-grounded ethnographic analyses to discussions on continental trends and international policy. Contributors are: Daniel Callo-Concha, Joy Clancy, Manfred Denich, Sara de Wit, Ton Dietz, Irit Eguavoen, Ben Fanstone, Ingo Haltermann, Laura Jeffrey, Emmanuel Kreike, Vimbai Kwashirai, James C. McCann, Bertrand F. Nero, Jonas Ø. Nielsen, Erick G. Tambo, Julia Tischler.

Environmental Infrastructure in African History

Environmental Infrastructure in African History PDF Author: Emmanuel Kreike
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107328233
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Environmental Infrastructure in African History offers a new approach for analyzing and narrating environmental change. Environmental change conventionally is understood as occurring in a linear fashion, moving from a state of more nature to a state of less nature and more culture. In this model, non-Western and pre-modern societies live off natural resources, whereas more modern societies rely on artifact, or nature that is transformed and domesticated through science and technology into culture. In contrast, Emmanuel Kreike argues that both non-Western and pre-modern societies inhabit a dynamic middle ground between nature and culture. He asserts that humans - in collaboration with plants, animals, and other animate and inanimate forces - create environmental infrastructure that constantly is remade and re-imagined in the face of ongoing processes of change.

Understanding Namibia

Understanding Namibia PDF Author: Henning Melber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190257628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Since independence in 1990, Namibia has witnessed only one generation with no memory of colonialism - the 'born frees', who voted in the 2009 elections. The anti-colonial liberation movement, SWAPO, dominates the political scene, effectively making Namibia a de facto one-party state dominated by the first 'struggle generation'. While those in power declare their support for a free, fair, and just society, the limits to liberation are such that emancipation from foreign rule has only been partially achieved. Despite its natural resources Namibia is among the world's most unequal societies and indicators of wellbeing have not markedly improved for many among the former colonized majority, despite a constitution enshrining human rights, social equality, and individual liberty. This book analyses the transformation of Namibian society since Independence. Melber explores the achievements and failures and contrasts the narrative of a post-colonial patriotic history with the socio-economic and political realities of the nation-building project. He also investigates whether, notwithstanding the relative stability prevailing to date, the negotiation of controlled change during Namibia's decolonization could have achieved more than simply a change of those in control.

The Nature State

The Nature State PDF Author: Wilko Hardenberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351764632
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This volume brings together case studies from around the globe (including China, Latin America, the Philippines, Namibia, India and Europe) to explore the history of nature conservation in the twentieth century. It seeks to highlight the state, a central actor in these efforts, which is often taken for granted, and establishes a novel concept – the nature state – as a means for exploring the historical formation of that portion of the state dedicated to managing and protecting nature. Following the Industrial Revolution and post-war exponential increase in human population and consumption, conservation in myriad forms has been one particularly visible way in which the government and its agencies have tried to control, manage or produce nature for reasons other than raw exploitation. Using an interdisciplinary approach and including case studies from across the globe, this edited collection brings together geographers, sociologists, anthropologists and historians in order to examine the degree to which sociopolitical regimes facilitate and shape the emergence and development of nature states. This innovative work marks an early intervention in the tentative turn towards the state in environmental history and will be of great interest to students and practitioners of environmental history, social anthropology and conservation studies.

Environment, Knowledge, and Injustice in Lesotho

Environment, Knowledge, and Injustice in Lesotho PDF Author: Christopher Conz
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847013309
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Shows that a fraught historical process was at work in which Basotho drew on local and global sources of knowledge and how this small nation surrounded by South Africa can serve as a valuable case-study for wider conversations about 'progress' and 'modernization' in the Global South. Both place-based environmental history and global intellectual history, this book explores the politics of environment, agriculture, poverty, development, and science in Lesotho. Drawing on diverse experiences with this landlocked, mountainous nation, and based on bilingual archival and oral history research in Sesotho and English, the book examines how Basotho intellectuals, farmers, migrant workers, chiefs, experts, and politicians formed vernacular ideas of tsoelopele (progress) amid the structural violence of colonialism and capitalism in southern Africa. Rather than a unidirectional flow of 'enlightened' knowledge from Europe to Africa, the study shows that a fraught historical process was at work in which Basotho drew on local and global sources of knowledge, from ancestral agricultural practices to colonial soil science and from African American missionaries to African nationalists in Ghana. Basotho ideas about tsoelopele, it is argued, informed the many political, social, and environmental innovations that enabled survival within a sea of white supremacy and that underpin approaches to development in independent Lesotho. Throughout, the book shows how this small nation surrounded by South Africa can serve as a valuable case-study for wider conversations about 'progress' and 'modernization' in the Global South.

Blacksmiths of Ilamba

Blacksmiths of Ilamba PDF Author: Crislayne Alfagali
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110788152
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This study analyzes the establishment of an iron foundry in the interior 18th-century of Angola. It was a fruit of the Portuguese Enlightenment, which encouraged investment in manufacturing, particularly of iron, a metal indispensable for military and technological purposes. However, the plans faced the resistance of African blacksmiths and founders who refused to learn foreign techniques and work processes. By emphasizing Central African agency, the book highlights the successful strategies of historical actors who scholars have largely ignored. Based upon a wide variety of sources from Brazilian, Portuguese, and Angolan archives, the book reconstructs how Africans were taken to work at the foundry and the important role they played in developing the form of production employed there. By emphasizing continuities with African technology and the quality of the iron produced, it counters interpretations of the project as an example of the failure of the Portuguese Enlightenment. The analysis demonstrates the circulation of knowledge about iron production, thus revitalizing debates that have posited knowledge transmission as unidirectional. It also highlights the relationship between local political leaders and the colonial government, in addition to elucidating the processes by which workers were organized.

Landscape, Environment and Technology in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Landscape, Environment and Technology in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa PDF Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136657657
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
This volume explores the concepts of "environment" and "landscape" in colonial and postcolonial discourse about Africa, analysing the points of convergence and conflict between Western notions of pastoral Africa and the introduction of colonial technology, scientific ideas, and capitalist agriculture.

In the Shadow of Good Governance

In the Shadow of Good Governance PDF Author: Gerhard Anders
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047444124
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
In the Shadow of Good Governance traces the implementation of the good governance agenda in Malawi from the loan documents signed by the representatives of the government and the Bretton Woods institutions to the individual experiences of civil servants who responded in unforeseen ways to the reform measures. Ethnographic evidence gathered in government offices, neighbourhoods and the private homes of civil servants living in Malawi’s urban and peri-urban areas undermines the common perception of a disconnect between state institutions and society in Africa. Instead, the book presents a comprehensive analysis of civil servants’ attempts to negotiate the effects of civil service reform and economic crisis at the turn of the 21st century.

What is Environmental History?

What is Environmental History? PDF Author: J. Donald Hughes
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745688446
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
What is environmental history? It is a kind of history that seeks understanding of human beings as they have lived, worked, and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the changes brought by time. In this new edition of his seminal student textbook, J. Donald Hughes provides a masterful overview of the thinkers, topics, and perspectives that have come to constitute the exciting discipline that is environmental history. He does so on a global scale, drawing together disparate trends from a rich variety of countries into a unified whole, illuminating trends and key themes in the process. Those already familiar with the discipline will find themselves invited to think about the subject in a new way. This new edition has been updated to reflect recent developments, trends, and new work in environmental history, as well as a brand new note on its possible future. Students and scholars new to environmental history will find the book both an indispensable guide and a rich source of inspiration for future work.