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The environmental history of Australian rivers: a neglected field of opportunity?
- Source :
- Marine and Freshwater Research. 71:1
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- CSIRO Publishing, 2020.
-
Abstract
- Historical ecology documents environmental change with scientific precepts, commonly by using statistical analyses of numerical data to test specific hypotheses. It is usually undertaken by ecologists. An alternative approach to understanding the natural world, undertaken instead by historians, geographers, sociologists, resource economists or literary critics, is environmental history. It attempts to explain in cultural terms why and how environmental change takes place. This essay outlines 10 case studies that show how rivers have affected perceptions and attitudes of the Australian community over the past 200+ years. They examine the influence at two contrasting scales, namely, the collective and the personal, by investigating the role that rivers had in the colonisation of Australia by the British in 1788, the establishment of capital cities, perceptions of and attitudes to the environment informed by explorers’ accounts of their journeys through inland Australia, the push for closer settlement by harnessing the country’s rivers for navigation and irrigation, anxiety about defence and national security, and the solastalgia occasioned by chronic environmental degradation. Historical ecology and environmental history are complementary intellectual approaches, and increased collaboration across the two disciplines should yield many benefits to historians, to ecologists, and to the conservation of Australian rivers more widely.
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
Resource (biology)
National security
Ecology
Environmental change
business.industry
010604 marine biology & hydrobiology
Ecology (disciplines)
Environmental ethics
010501 environmental sciences
Aquatic Science
Oceanography
01 natural sciences
Literary criticism
Environmental history
business
Environmental degradation
Historical ecology
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
0105 earth and related environmental sciences
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 13231650
- Volume :
- 71
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Marine and Freshwater Research
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........2e92bb2f59415e6a00f0560538db87a1
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1071/mf18372