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This article traces the decolonization of Britain’s informal empire over the teak trade in Thailand in the mid-twentieth century. It argues that British influence over the teak industry, which dated to the second half of the nineteenth century, began to wane in the 1920s due to the gradual nationalization of teak leases. Still, British firms and the Foreign Office remained dominant in the export industry in the 1920s and 1930s because of Britain’s lobbying and geopolitical authority. The Japanese invasion of Thailand in 1941 during the Second World War caused British firms to lose access to their leases and equipment. Bilateral negotiations between the Thai government and British firms after the war ended led to logs and leases being returned to British firms, but the Thai government did not renew long term leases in the 1950s despite protests from British business and government. The Thai elite looked to Americans for defense support, and they supported nationalization to expand Thai and Thai-Chinese economic authority. Britain’s military and economic authority in Thailand had eroded rapidly and, within a decade, British firms had lost control over Southeast Asia’s teak trade. This article is part of the “Crossroads of Indo–Pacific Environmental Histories” special issue of Pacific Historical Review.

This article offers a historical framework for understanding changes to human perceptions and efforts to manage invasive alien plants and weeds in South Africa from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. The article argues that South African legislation and policy for managing invasive alien plants and weeds has historically been limited because people have held contradictory values about plants, many private land owners have lacked resources and have not been compelled to follow government legislation and because policy has reflected the interests of a small group of farmers or scientific experts who have had limited influence on most private land owners and traditional land users. Successful control efforts often relied on technical expertise that was applied controversially or could be implemented on government land without extensive public consultation or social conflict. The creation of a national framework for invasive alien plants through the Working for Water Programme in 1995 and National Environmental Management of Biodiversity Act (no. 10) of 2004 (NEMBA) has increased public awareness, but the Programme and NEMBA remain limited by many of the same institutional and social constraints that experts and institutions faced in the past. In conclusion, the article draws on history to provide insights to contemporary challenges.

Human perceptions of nature and the environment are increasingly being recognised as important for environmental management and conservation. Understanding people's perceptions is crucial for understanding behaviour and developing effective management strategies to maintain, preserve and improve biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. As an interdisciplinary team, we produced a synthesis of the key factors that influence people's perceptions of invasive alien species, and ordered them in a conceptual framework. In a context of considerable complexity and variation across time and space, we identified six broad-scale dimensions: (1) attributes of the individual perceiving the invasive alien species; (2) characteristics of the invasive alien species itself; (3) effects of the invasion (including negative and positive impacts, i.e. benefits and costs); (4) socio-cultural context; (5) landscape context; and (6) institutional and policy context. A number of underlying and facilitating aspects for each of these six overarching dimensions are also identified and discussed. Synthesising and understanding the main factors that influence people's perceptions is useful to guide future research, to facilitate dialogue and negotiation between actors, and to aid management and policy formulation and governance of invasive alien species. This can help to circumvent and mitigate conflicts, support prioritisation plans, improve stakeholder engagement platforms, and implement control measures.

This article offers a qualitative case study of how COVID has changed an existing international education partnership between the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in South Africa and Western Sydney University (WSU) in Australia which involves collaboration with the not-for-profit Nsasani Trust and focuses on sustainability. Before COVID, both universities ran joint student mobility programs in the Kruger National Park (KNP) and were developing further plans for staff mobility and co-developed postgrad programs involving residency in both countries. These plans changed as a result of the COVID pandemic, which started in early 2020. Societal responses to the COVID pandemic, including national border closures, have forced academics, administrators and students to reconsider how internationalisation programs function during and after the pandemic. Using a qualitative case study based on personal experience, we argue that pre-existing university-to-university connections built before COVID will sustain linkages, but that the previous structure of engagement – based on physical mobility – can shift to new arrangements that can be run fully digitally or used to support limited mobility when international travel resumes in the future. We position the UJ-WSU relationship in the historical context of internationalisation to both highlight the enduring nature of international engagements and suggest that changes are required to make international education sustainable.

Collected rainfall records by gauges lead to key forcings in most hydrological studies. Depending on sensor type and recording systems, such data are characterized by different time-resolutions (or temporal aggregations), ta. We present an historical analysis of the time-evolution of ta based on a large database of rain gauge networks operative in many study areas. Globally, ta data were collected for 25,423 rain gauge stations across 32 geographic areas, with larger contributions from Australia, USA, Italy and Spain. For very old networks early recordings were manual with coarse time-resolution, typically daily or sometimes monthly. With a few exceptions, mechanical recordings on paper rolls began in the first half of the 20th century, typically with ta of 1 h or 30 min. Digital registrations started only during the last three decades of the 20th century. This short period limits investigations that require long time-series of sub-daily rainfall data, e.g, analyses of the effects of climate change on short-duration (sub-hourly) heavy rainfall. In addition, in the areas with rainfall data characterized for many years by coarse time-resolutions, annual maximum rainfall depths of short duration can be potentially underestimated and their use would produce errors in the results of successive applications. Currently, only 50% of the stations provide useful data at any time-resolution, that practically means ta = 1 min. However, a significant reduction of these issues can be obtained through the information content of the present database. Finally, we suggest an integration of the database by including additional rain gauge networks to enhance its usefulness particularly in a comparative analysis of the effects of climate change on extreme rainfalls of short duration available in different locations.

The epilogue re-assesses Alfred Crosby’s thesis of “ecological imperialism” in the light of new scientific and historical findings in order to establish a coherent understanding of global ecological and biological change during the past 500 years. It draws on concepts from evolutionary theory and ecology—including “niche construction,” “propogule pressure,” “vector,” and “invasion”—to argue that perhaps Crosby’s most important point, that Europeans established themselves best in environments where they could grow and use familiar crops and animals, is still correct. The epilogue argues for closer interdisciplinary cooperation of the historical and ecological sciences to explain the biological and ecological reordering of the world in the context of globalization.

Background This article traces the history of scientific ideas connecting forest cover with rainfall to inform ongoing debates about whether forests are net users or producers of water in the hydrological cycle. Scholars of the supply-side school argue that forests are net producers and magnifiers that increase rainfall at regional scales. Supply-side scholars seek to challenge the dominance of demand-side thinking. The demand-side school emphasizes that trees are net users of water within a catchment that decrease overall water available for other users. This scientific debate has significant implications for the development of policies to manage forests and water. Results Scientists have debated the question of whether forests improve or worsen water balance for over two hundred years. Connections between forests and rainfall gained prominence in scientific circles during the second half of the nineteenth century and again during the past three decades. The popularity of forest-rainfall connections has paralleled societal and scientific interest in anthropogenic climate change and deforestation. Theories connecting forests with rainfall peaked in popularity in the 1850s to 1880s, a period when scientists expressed alarm that deforestation caused regional declines in precipitation. Forests were understood to create rain within a locality and region. Scientific consensus shifted by the early twentieth century to the view that forests did not play a significant role in determining rainfall. The forest-rainfall connection reemerged in the 1980s alongside advances in climate modelling and growing fears of anthropogenic global warming and tropical deforestation. Using new data and theories, supply-side advocates have once again placed a strong forest-rainfall connection into scientific prominence. Conclusion Supply-side management policies have a checkered history that should elicit caution, while demand-side policies, which are based on almost a century of hydrological research, should not be overturned quickly in regions that face potential water scarcity before more research is conducted.

Decolonization influenced the rise of environmental activism and thought in Australia and South Africa in ways that have been overlooked by national histories of environmentalism and imperial histories of decolonization. Australia and South Africa’s political and cultural movement away from Britain and the Commonwealth during the 1960s is one important factor explaining why people in both countries created more, and more important, public indigenous botanic gardens than anywhere else in the world during that decade. Effective decolonization from Britain also influenced the rise of indigenous gardening and the growing popularity of native gardens at a critical period in gardening and environmental history. Most facets of contemporary gardening—using plants indigenous to the site or region, planting drought-tolerant species, and seeing gardens as sites to help conserve regional and national flora—can be dated to the 1960s and 1970s. The interpretation advanced here adds to historical research tracing how the former Commonwealth settler colonies experienced effective decolonization in the same era. This article expands the focus of research on decolonization to include environmentalism. The interpretation of the article also augments national environmental histories that have hitherto downplayed the influence of decolonization on the rise of environmentalism. Putting decolonization into the history of the rise of environmental thought and action sheds light on why people in contemporary Australia and South Africa are so passionate about protecting indigenous flora and fauna, and so worried about threats posed by non-native invasive species.

This article analyses the life and ideas of Margaret Rutherford Levyns (nee Michell), a South African botanist who worked from 1918 to 1946 as a lecturer in botany at the University of Cape Town and continued to write about the Cape flora (known today as the Cape Floristic Region) until her death in 1975. Until the early 1960s, Levyns maintained a neutral scientific and moral understanding of invasive species, defined here as ‘ecological liberalism’, that reflected her gendered experiences as a botanist, her prevailing ideas of ecology, the lingering ideals of Cape liberalism, and her extensive research into the phytogeography and taxonomy of the Cape flora. Levyns began to shift her views on non-native invasive species only after retirement. By using Levyns as a lens onto the period, this article distinguishes between a prevailing Cape ecological liberalism from the 1890s to the 1950s that shifted towards a more critical stance on invasive alien species in the 1950s and 1960s.

This article examines how invasions within a discrete geographic, cultural, and ecological context disproportionately shaped awareness of invasions in other places. Such “model invasions” have been valuable for catalyzing national and international interest in biological invasion since the 1980s. Specifically, this article traces how scientific and public perspectives of invasive introduced trees evolved in South Africa during the twentieth century. It argues that concerns about the impact of invasive introduced trees first developed in the Mediterranean-climate region of the southwestern Cape Province during the 1940s and 1950s before emerging elsewhere in South Africa during the 1970s and early 1980s. Though there has been a nation-wide convergence in scientific and public views of invasive trees since the 1980s, there are still stark geographic and cultural knowledge divergences that hinder the effectiveness of contemporary invasive tree management efforts. This study suggests that geographical knowledge imbalances between regions should not be overlooked when historicizing or planning environmental management schemes at national scales.

Finding ways to conserve limited water supplies while promoting economic development has been, and will continue to be, one of South Africa's most enduring environmental challenges. South Africa's forestry sector has sat – often controversially – at the crossroads of policy debates regarding both water conservation and economic development. This historical analysis examines how conflicts surrounding exotic afforestation led to the establishment of the Jonkershoek Forestry Research Station in 1935. It demonstrates how research findings from Jonkershoek formed the basis of a comprehensive national catchment management strategy that tried to harmonise the afforestation of exotic forests, the preservation of indigenous vegetation and the rights of downstream water users. This framework dominated water conservation policy discussions and outcomes from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. This programme fell into decline when catchment management was handed over to provinces in the late 1980s and a raft of new pos...

This article analyses the dynamics and legacy of the divisive South African debate over the hydrological and ecological impact of exotic timber plantations that erupted before, during and after the Fourth Empire Forestry Conference, held throughout the country in 1935. It examines the geographies, environments and networks that caused forestry critics, spearheaded by the ecologist John F.V. Phillips, to challenge South Africa's afforestation programme at the Conference. Phillips' spirited criticisms of forestry helped to establish an interdisciplinary research programme studying the impacts of exotic trees from forestry, ecological and hydrological perspectives in the Jonkershoek Valley, outside of Stellenbosch, that ran from 1935 to 1995. The findings of this pioneering and globally significant interdisciplinary research programme shaped South African environmental policies related to forest hydrology, biodiversity management, invasive species control and fire dynamics until the late 1980s and early 1990s. This research is still utilised, albeit in fragmented forms, in present-day national water, forestry and environmental legislation.

This article examines the unexplored history of South Africa's first school of forestry. It argues that leading South African politicians and foresters created a school of forestry in the country because they wanted a school where South Africa's future forestry officers could gain practical and theoretical experience of forestry in local conditions rather than going to Britain, Europe or India, where environmental conditions differed. The school was touted proudly as the first school of forestry in South Africa and the southern hemisphere. But the school, which the South African College and the Cape Colony's Forestry Department directed jointly, ran into political and staff problems and closed only five years after its opening. This article shows how the school's closing was the result of inter-colonial political tensions and institutional problems that were exacerbated by the migration of power from Cape Town to Pretoria following the Act of Union in 1910.

Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan Peter Wynn Kirby Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011 xii, 199 pp. + notes, refs, index; figures ISBN 978-0-8248-3428-9 hb http://www.uhpress.hawa...

Edward Harold Fulcher Swain (1883–1970) developed a unique idea about the importance of forests, advocating the creation of a new society based upon forests, and he pursued policies to implement his unique vision of forestry when he served as the Director of Queensland's Forestry Board from 1918 to 1924 and the Forestry Commissioner for New South Wales from 1935 to 1948. Swain's beliefs developed out of a combination of his Australian experiences and connections with foresters in the British Empire and America. When he could not convince Australian elites about the need to create a forest-based society, he asked foresters at the 1947 Empire Forestry Conference in London to assert the primacy of forestry in land management in the British Empire. Many foresters positively received parts of Swain's argument, but his ideas could never be fully implemented in the British Empire because of the dominance of agrarian doctrines of development in post-Second World War colonial planning and the rapid process of deco...

SummaryThis article argues that because of the perceived and real biological characteristics of the different species of the genusEucalyptus, imperialists and settlers, and later governments and the elites of developing nations, planted eucalypts widely and created new socio-ecological systems that encouraged and reinforced divergent patterns of economic, social, and ecological development. Planting eucalypts changed local ecologies and encouraged a movement towards market-based capitalism that benefited settlers, large landowners, urban elites and middle classes, and capital-intensive industries at the expense of indigenous groups living in and near forests. This article analyses the globalization of eucalypts in four broad phases: first, an enthusiastic expansion and planting from 1850–1900; secondly, failure in the tropics from 1850–1960; thirdly, increased planting and success rates in the tropics from 1960–2000, and fourthly, a growing criticism of eucalypts that began in the late nineteenth century and blossomed in the 1980s during an intense period of planting in India and Thailand.

Nineteenth-century Europeans visiting Southeast and South Asia eulogised teak trees (Tectona grandis) for their value and beauty. Diplomatic diaries, travel memoirs, literary descriptions and geography books for children described the teak as a universal sovereign of the sylvan world, the regal “lord” of the forests. With dwindling supplies of oak in Britain, British elites saw teak as a vital component of the country's global naval supremacy in the nineteenth century. The fear of a dwindling supply of teak during the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries encouraged the creation of forestry departments and laws in British India that attempted to preserve the finite amount of teak in the sub-continent. Yet the finite ecologies of India and Burma could not supply all the teak required to fuel expanding demand. Britain would have to look beyond its formal empire in Asia to find more teak.

Scholars studying the globalization of Australian trees have previously emphasized the rapid natural propagation of Australian trees outside of their native habitats, believing their success to be a reversal of "ecological imperialism" from the "new world" to the "old world." This article argues that the expansion of Australian trees should not be viewed as a biological phenomenon, but as the result of a long-term attempt by powerful states and state-sponsored scientists to select and breed Australian species that could grow in a variety of climates and ecological conditions. Five non-biological factors largely determined the success of these attempts to grow Australian trees: the abundance or paucity of natural forests, state power, the amount of scientific research directed to planting Australian trees, the cost of labor, and the ability to utilize hardwood timbers and bark. This paper compares the use of Australian trees in Australia, India, and South Africa to demonstrate that biology was not the determining factor in the long-term success of many Australian genera and species.

A variety of debates that surrounded the opening of the Australian Forestry School at Canberra in 1927 illuminate the divergent beliefs about forestry education and conservation policy that many British imperial and Australian foresters and politicians held during the 1910s-1940s. A controversial English-born forester, Charles Edward Lane Poole, lobbied for the School's creation and headed it for many years. The Commonwealth Government supported the School throughout the 1920s-1940s amidst a variety of financial hardships and state criticisms. Many leading foresters throughout the British Empire who were born outside of Australia supported the School. But many professionally trained foresters and Australian politicians who had been born in Australia were more ambivalent or critical of the School. This article traces these contentious debates throughout the years leading up to and following the creation of the Australian Forestry School.

The history of forestry in British India has evoked a wide range of responses from environmental historians. Debates often centre in particular on the ethic of the bureaucratic organisation responsible for managing the government-controlled forests of India: the Indian Forest Service. Born on the subcontinent and rooted in the European scientific tradition, the Indian Forest Service model, or “empire forestry” as it came to be called from the 1920s onward, has been described as a first step in the world-wide environmental movement or, alternately, as the culprit responsible for widespread deforestation of the subcontinent. This article will address a key aspect of the debate over the Indian Forest Service (hereafter referred to as the IFS) that has profound implications for our understanding of the relationship -between imperialism and forestry conservation. By examining the tension between conservation-minded foresters who battled against timber companies and economically focused imperial bureaucrats, we answer the following question: did the IFS develop a legacy of deforestation throughout the subcontinent between 1855 and 1947? We conclude that the IFS did not develop a dominant ethic of resource exploitation, nor did the IFS rapidly accelerate the rates of deforestation during the colonial period. Rather, the IFS provided a powerful and persuasive counterweight to gentleman capitalists and economically oriented administrators who strenuously battled for more extensive exploitation of forest resources.

This innovative interdisciplinary study focuses on the history, science, and policy of tree planting and water conservation in South Africa. South Africa’s forestry sector has sat—often controversially—at the crossroads of policy and scientific debates regarding water conservation, economic development, and biodiversity protection. Bennett and Kruger show how debates about the hydrological impact of exotic tree planting in South Africa shaped the development of modern scientific ideas and state policies relating to timber plantations, water conservation, invasive species control, and biodiversity management within South Africa as well as elsewhere in the world. Forestry and Water Conservation in South Africa shows how scientific research on the impact of exotic and native vegetation led to the development of a comprehensive national policy for conserving water, producing timber, and protecting indigenous species from invasive alien plants. Policies and laws relating to forests and water began to change in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a result of political and administrative changes within South Africa. This book suggests that the country’s contemporary policies towards timber plantations, guided by the National Water Act of 1998, need to be reconsidered in light of the authors’ findings. Bennett and Kruger also call for more interdisciplinary research and greater emphasis on integrated policies and management plans for forestry, invasive alien plants, water conservation, and biodiversity preservation.