South Asian and Australasian Forestry Anxieties and Exchanges, 1870s–1920s
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20065199 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Beattie (0000-0002-2007-6534, University of Waikato, corresponding author), James Beattie (0000-0001-7370-3485) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Pages | 150-176 |
| Publication date | 2011-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Empire and Environmental Anxiety (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9780230309067_7 |
| OpenAlex | W2383986962 |
| ISBN | 9780230309067 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
This chapter builds upon previous ones on the influence of particular groups to examine some of the direct exchanges of environmental anxieties and policies that shaped Australasian and South Asian conservation into the early-twentieth century. Advocates of forest conservation in Australasia drew upon the same centres of environmental knowledge (notably India by the 1870s, but also Germany and France and, by the early 1900s, the US) at the same time as they accumulated local knowledge of environmental processes and problems. This chapter reveals that they constructed similar arguments to justify forest protection, demonstrating that what Richard Grove identified as an 'Edenic' narrative of conservation on tropical islands also applied to Australasia.3 An Edenic argument went something like this: Colonisation and the unfettered example of private interests, proponents of conservation argued, caused an Environmental Fall, resulting in deforestation and, with it, alternating cycles of drought and flooding that threatened agricultural production. Only state-directed scientific forest conservation and forestation, they argued, could reverse the excesses of private interests and restore agricultural prosperity to areas ruined by deforestation. Through examination of the forests-climate idea in Australasia and India, this chapter also examines the changing relationship between environmental anxieties and scientific credibility
Afforestation · Credibility · Deforestation (computer science) · Geography · Political science · Prosperity · State (computer science) · Threatened species · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Ecology · Forestry · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology
| Highly cited | No |
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