Case Studies

Question 1

When was Chernobyl, how did it heighten sensitivity to the environment?

Answer 1

26 April 1986 - Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine heightened concern about how nuclear particles travel on the wind, how they go into the soil and affect food, what they mean for the future health of children growing up and how the plants and animals that remain have responded to the traces of nuclear explosions in the environment.

Question 2

How did Carson describe the environment in Silent Spring?

Answer 2

“the environment”, as Carson put it, a fragile “web of life” subject to contamination, and assault, its “integrity” subject to “disturbance”, become “corrupt” and threatened to be “engulf[ed]”.

Question 3

George Orwell, 1948

Answer 3

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from loudspeakers, but the earth is still going around the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

Question 4

What did 1957 see?

Answer 4

International Geophysical Year of 1957, which encouraged much international collaborative research, particularly on the oceans and polar regions across the icy frontiers of the Cold War

Question 5

What did the 1965 US Environmental Pollution Committee report?

Answer 5

Restoring the Quality of our Environment: focused on pollution but also embraced public health, potential ecological effects, impacts on soil and water, and even possible climate change driven by carbon dioxide emission.

Question 6

What was an early attempt at cybernetics?

Answer 6

The 1950s work of Yale Mintz at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) to develop an early General Circulation Model (GCM) of the atmosphere and oceans were characterised in an obituary as “heroic efforts… during which he coordinated an army of student helpers and amateur programmers to feed a prodigious amount of data through paper tape”

Question 7

Comment on the conference Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, 1955

Answer 7

Brainchild of William L. Thomas, Carl Sauer, Marston Bates, and Lewis Mumford.

The conference was organised in three parts, covering the past, the present and the future.

The centrepiece was the singular phenomenon: ‘man’.

40% of the attendees came from the earth sciences, 28% from the biological sciences, 12% the social sciences and humanities, and 20% from applied fields such as planning.

Not explicitly “environmental”. The word was not employed much. Activists and intellectuals still regarded themselves as “conservationists”, not “environmentalists”.

Question 8

What did 1948 see in Russia?

Answer 8

Implementation of Joseph Stalin’s “Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature”: responding to the 1946-47 disaster of drought and subsequent famine that saw half a million deaths. A series of dam and irrigation projects, designed to protect the future of agriculture on the Russian steppes and plains, ultimately wreaked new havoc, including the desiccation of the Aral Sea.

Question 9

Quote Truman

Answer 9

“The real or exaggerated fear of resource shortages and declining standards of living has in the past involved nations in warfare… Conservation can become a major basis of peace.”

Question 10

What did Cassandras do in 1923?

Answer 10

Cassandras had raised fears of oil exhaustion after the surge of demand during the First World War, which had led to the setting aside for the future the protected region of the Naval Petroleum Reserve in Alaska in 1923.

Question 11

What did Aldo Leopold encourage in terms of history?

Answer 11

‘Think like a mountain’ ie. narrate history from the point of animals, eco-systems and other non-human entities.

Question 12

Describe changes in George Tindall’s history

Answer 12

• 1984 -> disease as a contributing but relatively minor factor in the colonists’ displacement of natives
• 2010 -> “By far the most significant aspect of the biological exchange,” they wrote, “was the transmission of infectious diseases from Europe and Africa to the Americas. European colonists and enslaved Africans brought with them deadly pathogens that Native Americans had never experienced…”
• 1984 -> Only a few sentences on the dust bowl. “In 1933, widespread drought in the wheat belt reduced production and removed any need to plow up growing wheat.”
• 2010 -> “a decade-long drought during the 1930s spawned an environmental and human catastrophe known as the dust bowl.”

Question 13

Walker - Animals and the Intimacy of History

What is important about the site of Carneige’s death?

Answer 13

• Carnegie’s mangled body outraged McKean, the Field & Stream journalist, precisely because the young man was “human,” not an “animal” such as a moose or caribou.
• His anxieties exposed the carefully policed divide between humans, who have long fancied themselves as outside nature, and other animals.

Question 14

Walker - Animals and the Intimacy of History

How does William McNeill regard humans?

Answer 14

Plagues and Peoples, disease transfer as a kind of predation on humans by microparasites, microscopic meat-eaters that stalk the human herd.

McNeill writes that, “one can properly think of most human lives as caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators

Question 15

Walker - Animals and the Intimacy of History

Detail Joshua Blu Buhs’s history of ants.

Answer 15

The Fire Ant Wars argues that fire ants exploited what historians call the “bulldozer revolution” in the American South, following humans as they disturbed the landscape. The ant, because it evolved in the floodplains of South America, thrived in areas of upheaval. Buhs submits that fire ants “exploited this revolution to spread across the region. Thus it was a combination of the ant’s natural history and human action that caused the insect’s irruption.”

Question 16

Walker - Animals and the Intimacy of History

How does Walker treat dogs?

Answer 16

Obviously, he writes, the “sharing of infection increases with the degree of intimacy that prevails between man and beast.”Man’s best friend, the dog, has bestowed on the human species more (p. 58) infectious microparasites than any other domesticated creature.

Question 17

Walker - Animals and the Intimacy of History

What happened to Kenton Carneige in 2005?

Answer 17

A geological engineering student, was attacked and killed by four wolves on a trail near a uranium mine in Saskatchewan.

Question 18

Deserts - Diana K. Davis

Who does Davis contest first wrote about desiccation theory?

Answer 18

Deserts - Diana K. Davis

Theophrastus - earliest thinker to draw a connection between deforestation and decreases in rainfall.

Question 19

Deserts - Diana K. Davis

How were deserts imagined and treated in the American mindset?

Answer 19

Deserts - Diana K. Davis

• American deserts were primarily categorized as barren, sterile, savage, and altogether unnatural—as places to be conquered.
• Ranching led to serious overgrazing in parts of the West.
• Led to 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, which regulated grazing.

Question 20

Deserts - Diana K. Davis

Where does the term ‘desert’ originate from?

Answer 20

Deserts - Diana K. Davis

Deserts as we know them today, in distribution and extent, were largely formed by the time Greek civilization began to produce writers of geography and history. The word desert itself may be one of the oldest written words, probably originating in the Egyptian hieroglyph “tésert.”

Question 21

Sara B Pritchard

Evidence technology-induced anxieties

Answer 21

Sara B Pritchard - Toward an Environmental History of Technology

• Disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and most recently Fukushima Daiichi, but these brief cases point to the complex ways in which ecology and the nuclear age were entangled.

Question 22

Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity

How did blacks overcome their circumscribed access to the white environment?

Answer 22

Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity

As some African Americans grew more affluent in the 1910s and 1920s, they continued to seek leisure activities in nature. This impulse led to the establishment of all-black resorts, such as Idlewild in Michigan. With private lots for sale, African Americans built both modest and more lavish homes and escaped the cities during the summer to hike, boat, swim, and fish along Lake Idlewild.

• While Kahrl and others have shown how African Americans tried to made in-roads into recreational activities often understood to be white, they do not fully explain how these pursuits became constructed as white in the first place.

Question 23

Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity

How did Chinese immigrants in California see the utility of the environment between 1810 and 1910?

Answer 23

Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity

Environmental strategies for economic and cultural survival in the face of overt racism. Chinese immigrants saw the cultivation of land as a route to prosperity and stability, and their establishment of permanent rural communities was a testament to their ability to adapt to environmental conditions.

Question 24

Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity

What occurred in British Honduras?

Answer 24

Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity

Masters affirmed slaves’ suitability for forced labor by emphasising their intrinsic connections to nature. For instance, they often equated their slaves to animals—both wild and domesticated—to justify their regime. In the case of British Honduras, a colonial official described a slave who spotted mahogany trees as an “instinctual creature” imprinted with knowledge of the jungle—not a rational human being who found trees through observation and reason.

Question 25

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did the river shape human development along the river.

Answer 25

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote Hudson’s Bay Company to transport all its goods in ninety-pound packages. The expenditure of labour in carrying these packages involved numerous acts of calculation, conflict, abuse and cooperation. In these acts a social order became transparent. If all journeys were downstream, if there had been no rapids or falls, then the human relations on the early-nineteenth century river would have been different’

Question 26

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did the damming project play out (RE: Emerson or Mumford?)

Answer 26

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote Nature was central to this vision in a classically Emersonian way… a series of giant slack-water ponds, the river’s energy turning turbines: pumps limiting its waters into canals, its bed a highway for barges. Hoover’s “maximum utilisation” seems more fitting than Mumford’s vision of the Neotechnic as a world of ecological balance.

Question 27

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did Mumford react to Giant Power?

Answer 27

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote Lewis Mumford - ‘espoused a common energy utopianism’. He made Giant Power into a social theory. He thought that when we switch energy sources, we potentially change the possibilities for our society.’ Mumford explained by Emersonianism had gone wrong. It had depended on the wrong energy source for its machines. Steam engines producing mechanical energy through shafts and belts belonged to what Mumford, following Patrick Geddes, called Paleotechnic. The Paleotechnic depended on coal and iron; it represented an ‘upthrust from barbarism’ that was hardly progress at all.

Question 28

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** What did Report 308 Recommend?

Answer 28

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote “308 Report” into the Grand Coulee river basin, by John Butler. AKA “The Columbia River and Minor Tributaries”, which recognised in the Columbia the potential for being the ‘greatest system for water power to be found anywhere in the US’. Butler imagined a Columbia eventually “controlled and managed as one system”. Its immense yield of power could make the cost per unit small, although the initial investment for the ten dams the Corps envisioned would ‘exceed that of any other single development of any kind for power that has ever been made’. Giant Power.

Question 29

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did human intervention play out in attempting to manage salmon populations?

Answer 29

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote Decline in natural salmon runs forced humans to intervene in spawning process to create more fish. Hatcheries - the product- wed technology and biology. New hatcheries operated without actual knowledge of the life cycle of salmon. 1920 - Bureau of Fisheries - ‘the hatcheries inflicted as much, or more, damage to the salmon runs than they had service of value’

Question 30

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How was Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons not applicable to the situation on the Columbia?

Answer 30

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** Hardin’s model of the commons is an invention. It never existed on the Columbia. There were rules and restrictions * Indians possessed treaty rights (de jure, at least) * Gillnetters controlled access to drifts * Fix-gear men commandeered space on the river.

Question 31

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How was space and race changed by the influx of new populations to the Columbia?

Answer 31

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ⁃ New work depended on precise organisation of humans and nature, and this organisation was spatial. Race divided space. As the Whites feared the Chinese - denying access to the river, their space was isolated in the canneries. The Whites saw Indians as anarchic and nuisances - moving them from their (granted) access to the river to margins narrower than before. * Gender was also subdivided by the river. * Chinese exclusion act 1992 left a shrinking and ageing workforce - replaced with Scandinavian women (daughters and wives of the men on the river)- who inherited the interior space in factories and canneries.

Question 32

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did Emersonian logic impact Americans?

Answer 32

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote Emerson reconciled nature with the busy, manipulative world of American capitalism. He reconciled utilitarianism with idealism; he reconciled the practical and the spiritual. When humans acted on nature they did not defile it, they purified it. “Art was nature passed through the alembic of man”

Question 33

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did Emersonian logic interpret the mechanisation of the river?

Answer 33

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote The mechanical was not the antithesis of nature, but its realisation in a new form. Stream was wind in the boiler of the boat, trains imitated pages or swallows darting from town to town. What seemed ugly in isolation became beauty reattached to “the Whole”.

Question 34

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did Kipling see the canneries?

Answer 34

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote ‘the canneries encapsulated a basic spatial division between the mechanical and the natural. Inside, crowding, humanity, death, machines, routinisation; outside, solitude, nature, life, the organic and freedom’ Kipling was disturbed by the disconnect between man and nature - prompting him to go fishing with a rod - to match his power against that of the chinook. This was a restoration of the masculine relation with nature.

Question 35

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did canneries impact spatio-temporality on the river?

Answer 35

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote ‘Even partially mechanised canneries so greatly increased the scale of everything - time, space, organisation, and energy - as to make Indian harvest seem distant and irrecognisable… whereas most salmon preserved by Indians usually lasted no more than six months, canned salmon lasted for many years.’

Question 36

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did the Columbia facilitate the spread of Malaria?

Answer 36

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote Brought up from California by returning Hudson’s Bay Company fur brigades in 1830. Catastrophically rearranged the human geography of the river. The mosquito that carried the disease was rare along the coast and scarce east of the Cascades, but thrived in the Lower columbia - where death rates reached 90%.

Question 37

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did social rituals and gender imbalances arise from salmon fishing in the Columbia?

Answer 37

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote As natives assumed the salmon return was not inevitable: Rituals, social practices and stories all recognised the possibility that the fish would fail to appear. They waited for salmon not with faith but anxiety. This had historical precedent. When Table Mountain slid into the river ~800 years ago, the population were cut off from salmon runs until the river broke through. Myths of the river had a recurring motif of when women imprisoned salmon within a pond, to be freed by Coyote - a lecherous and often foolish culture hero. Women are (for reasons unknown) associated with birds, such as the Eagle, whom feasted on the trapped salmon. This created a gender power dynamic which circumscribed the power of women, who were seen as threats to salmon supply. Women were kept away from the streams and distribution centres. Also symbolic ritualism surrounded menstruation - the loss of blood seen as a trope for the need for death to sustain life.

Question 38

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** Evidence changes in social ritual driven by the nature of the river in David Thompson's oral account

Answer 38

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote ‘My reasons or putting ashore and smoking with the Natives, is to make friends with them, against my return, for in descending the current of a large River, we might pass on without much attention to them; but in returning against the current, our progress will be slow and close along the shore, and consequently very much in their power; whereas staying a few hours, and smoking with them, while explaining to them the object of my voyage makes them friendly to us.’

Question 39

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How did the power of the river inspire how knowledge and art in 18th Century Astoria?

Answer 39

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** ## Footnote Indian canoes were the product of efficiency and art - carved from one singular log. **Gabriel Franchere**, an original Astorian, reported the largest canoes to be 30” long and 5” wide. Robert Stuart, Astorian, noted: ‘If perfect symmetry, smoothness and proportion constitute beauty, they surpass anything I ever beheld’ ‘The clearest mark of the knowledge and skill was when nothing happened, when Indians knew which paths through the river were the most efficient and least demanding of human energy.’

Question 40

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** How much of the river's energy is expended in 'work'?

Answer 40

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** Only 2% of river energy ‘works’, through erosion, transportation and deposition of matter. 98% of kinetic energy is expended in friction - thus heat dissipation.

Question 41

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** Demonstrate the 'phenomenal' power of nature along the Columbia

Answer 41

**Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998** End of Pleistocene saw the collapse of an ice dam holding glacial Lake Missoua, creeating the largest freshwater flood in history. In hours achieved what the Mississippi took 300 years to replicate.

Question 42

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** What does Pinker suggest about WWII?

Answer 42

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** ## Footnote Post–World War II, to suggest that human biology might play any role whatsoever in human culture was seen by many scholars “to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged.”

Question 43

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** What does LeCain suggest about the neomaterialist approach?

Answer 43

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** * A neomaterialist approach suggests that humans derive much of what we like to think of as our power, intelligence, and creativity from material things like cattle, silkworms, and copper. Because we now realize that humans are much more deeply embedded in their environments than previously recognized, in many ways the countless material things and processes that surround and permeate us should be understood as constituting who we are. We don’t just use organisms and things. Rather, like the microbiomes in our guts, these and countless other material fellow travelers are the very things that make us.

Question 44

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** What impact was artificial light said to have on whites?

Answer 44

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** * The inferiority of dark-skinned peoples, they believed, was confirmed by the “darkness” stemming from their lack of artificial illumination. Electric lighting even offered Western racists. * Ernest Freeberg notes, many Europeans and Americans believed that “stronger lighting pushed back not only the physical darkness but also a spiritual one.” * The rapid adoption of electric lighting by the Japanese, however, presented something of a challenge to the simple equation of bright white lights with bright white people. Having long dismissed all Asian peoples as innately inferior, Americans were forced grudgingly to admit that the Japanese were quickly proving every bit as technologically capable as any westerners

Question 45

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** How did the Romans perceive silk?

Answer 45

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** * Used modern tech on the Ashio mines. The revived mines output 25% of Japan's copper. * Increased ore processing saw tailings (containing sulphur, arsenic, cadmium and lead) into the Watarase. These chemicals were thus distributed on rice fields during flooding. * One of the first ever pollution studies (1892) found Ashio output rendered soil infertile, and damaged silkworm larvae.

Question 46

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** How did the Romans perceive silk?

Answer 46

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** ## Footnote The people of Rome, newly enriched by the conquest of the rich farming lands of Egypt, indulged themselves in this most marvelous of new materials. Strolling the public streets or wide squares of the Roman Forum, men and women alike luxuriated in its unparalleled ability to drape gently over the human form – a quality that sometimes brought the stormy moral condemnation. To the Romans, silk’s soft embrace was not just sensual – it was downright sexual. Daring silk-wearing Romans could in effect parade about nearly naked in public. Because of its almost-universal sensual appeal, silk became the driver for the globalization of trade on the central east-west axis of Eurasia some 2,000 years before our own era. For centuries, the Chinese managed to maintain a virtual monopoly on silk production in the ancient world by carefully keeping the secret to themselves. As a lucrative Eurasian silk trade (over the Silk Road discussed earlier) began to flourish during the Han dynasty, various Chinese rulers issued dire threats to execute anyone who attempted to smuggle silkworms, eggs, or mulberry seeds out of the kingdom. These draconian measures seem to have succeeded for a surprisingly long time, but by the sixth century CE the secret clearly had escaped. According to legend, two Christian monks carried silkworm eggs and mulberry seeds to Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in their hollowed out canes.

Question 47

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** What does Lynn White argue?

Answer 47

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** Medieval historian Lynn White argued in an influential 1967 article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” this Judeo-Christian tradition contrasted sharply with previously dominant animistic understandings of the human place in the world which understood human power as intimately linked to a vibrant natural world filled with other intelligent beings. White argued that this sharp cleaving of humans from nature in Judeo-Christian thought thus justified the Western exploitation of the environment and brutal treatment of other animals, which were understood to be categorically distinct from the humans for whom the world was made. “Especially in its Western form,” White asserted, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.”

Question 48

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** What does Lynn White argue?

Answer 48

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** Medieval historian Lynn White argued in an influential 1967 article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” this Judeo-Christian tradition contrasted sharply with previously dominant animistic understandings of the human place in the world which understood human power as intimately linked to a vibrant natural world filled with other intelligent beings. White argued that this sharp cleaving of humans from nature in Judeo-Christian thought thus justified the Western exploitation of the environment and brutal treatment of other animals, which were understood to be categorically distinct from the humans for whom the world was made. “Especially in its Western form,” White asserted, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.”

Question 49

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** What does David Noble argue?

Answer 49

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** The Religion of Technology - some influential Western thinkers believed that this spark of the divine also gave humans the power to recreate their lost Eden through technology.

Question 50

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** What is the Extended/Embodied Mind thesis?

Answer 50

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** The prominent cognitive theorist Andy Clark argues that there is an “unexpected intimacy of brain, body and world,” suggesting that the mind itself “is best understood as the activity of an essentially situated brain: a brain at home in its proper bodily, cultural and environmental niche.”

Question 51

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** What is the extended evolutionary synthesis?

Answer 51

**Timothy LeCain - The Matter of History (2016)** Living things do not simply evolve to fit into preexisting environments, they argue, but co-construct and coevolve with their environments. Allows, for example, the colour of butterflies or the shape of leaves on a tree to change depending on environmental factors – not just over the course of generations of evolution, but during the developmental lifetime of a single organism

Question 52

What happened in 1988?

Answer 52

United States hit by high temperatures -\> “the Greenhouse Summer”. Giant fires burned in the iconic Yellowstone Park, and NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress that “The greenhouse effect … has been detected and is changing our climate now”.

Question 53

What was the Chipko movement?

Answer 53

The Chipko movement of “tree huggers” from the Himalayan foothills contested the right of loggers to extract timber from their community woods in 1973, by putting their bodies in the way of the loggers, “sticking to” the trees (Chipko means to stick). Such struggles between communal use and commercial extraction have been familiar in Asia and Europe back to medieval times.

Question 54

What did Adam Smith state in Book II of the Wealth of Nations?

Answer 54

'This produce, how great soever, can never be infinite, but must have certain limits.’

Question 55

What did the Royal Society state about improvement in the 17th century?

Answer 55

“Where men of great wealth do stoop to husbandry, it multiplieth riches exceedingly”

Question 56

What was the Spanish empire of the 16th century dependent on, what did this result in?

Answer 56

* Supply of timber (for navy) * State to acquire wood from municipal commons. * Spanish citizens resisted, falling back on fueros as a source of legal defence to right to common land.

Question 57

What mitigated concerns about population growth in the 17th century?

Answer 57

Thirty Years War - 1618-1648 - decimated the German population.

Question 58

What did James Steuart's Inquiry comment on regarding lordship?

Answer 58

rulers should act so their subjects 'make their several interests lead them to supply one another with their reciprocal wants'

Question 59

How did Francois Quesnay allude to the body and circulation of currency?

Answer 59

currency ‘goes equally to the upper and lower parts of the body, just as currency goes in equal amounts to the product recovery and sterile classes’.

Question 60

What did Adam Smith state about Nature?

Answer 60

‘man is by Nature directed to correct, in some measure, that distribution of things which she herself would otherwise have made’ Nature wanted the 'self-preservation and propagation of the species'

Question 61

What point did Charles Lyell make about life on earth?

Answer 61

There existed a fixed, finite quantity of life.

Question 62

What articles of Canon and Roman law respectively justified the conquest of the New World?

Answer 62

Romanus Pontifex and dominus mundi

Question 63

What document was read out to the Amerindians before being butchered?

Answer 63

Requerimiento

Question 64

What doctrine did Vitoria recourse to in order to allow unfetterred Spanish access to thew New World?

Answer 64

Ius comunicandi - Spanish had right to move and trade throughout New World.

Question 65

What did Governor John Winthrop comment about Small Pox in the US?

Answer 65

‘For the natives they are all neere dead of small poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess’

Question 66

What happened to the pig population released into Hispanola in 1492?

Answer 66

Eight were released in 1492. By 1500, their numbers were said to be 'infinitos'

Question 67

How does Crosby describe Spanish cattle in the Antilles?

Answer 67

"The Spanish cattle took to the meadows and savannahs of the Antilles like Adam and Eve returning to Eden"

Question 68

What domesticated crops grew well in Barbados?

Answer 68

Camomile, onions, cabbage, parsley, sage, garlic - at the cost of local plantmatter.

Question 69

Describe the goat tyranny in St Helena

Answer 69

* Goats introduced to St Helena in 16th century. By 1582, Tom Cavendish noted that the goats 'were seen up to two hundred together, and sometimes in a flock a mile long'. * 1816 - William Beatson - 'to the goat therefore is solely ascribed the total ruin of the forests, an evil which is now sorely felt by every individual on the island'

Question 70

What did Lauren Hollsten contribute to the debate?

Answer 70

Examines 16th century Caribbean - spec. Barbados, and its transformation from a tobacco colony to a full-scale sugar plantation.

Question 71

What did Richard Ligon state in his 'True and Exact History of the Caribbee Islands'?

Answer 71

'I saw by the growth... that it was a strong and lusty plant, and so vigorous, as where it grew, to forbid all Weeds to grow very neer it; so thirstily it suck'd the earth for nourishment, to maintain its own health and gallantry'

Question 72

What happened to sugar consumption in Britain between 1663 and 1699?

Answer 72

Doubled.

Question 73

When was Barbados considered spent?

Answer 73

Colonel Modiford - 1865 Richard Blome suggested moving to Jamaica, 'capable of receiving those great numbers of people that are forced to desert the Caribbee Islands; their plantations being worn out'

Question 74

How much firewood did it take to refine 100m3 of sugar cane?

Answer 74

4000 hectares of woodland.

Question 75

What did Whistler comment on the mills in 1654?

Answer 75

'the mill they now use destroy so many horses that it beggars the planters'

Question 76

What did Jose Navarro comment on Portugese resource exchange?

Answer 76

the Portuguese 'continuously destroy and annihilate her natural productions'

Question 77

How did Vandelli describe the Portuguese management of Brazilian forests?

Answer 77

'once the forests are burned, they are cultivated for two or three years, while the fertility produced by the ashes lasts, until the diminished fertility makes them abandon the plots in order to burn new sections of the forest. Thus they continue destroying the forests along the rivers'

Question 78

What trees produce gutta-percha?

Answer 78

Isonandra Gutta, Taban, Dichopsis Oblongifolium (native to Far East)

Question 79

What did the West Ham Gutta Percha Company claim about Gutta Percha?

Answer 79

'almost every species of toy is made from this gum; the furniture, the decorations... the lining for our water cisterns. It is used for pipes, alike for the conveyance of water and sound'

Question 80

What discovery was made in 1847?

Answer 80

Werner von Siemens discovered Gutta Percha to be the most effective electrical insulator.

Question 81

When did GP trees go extinct in Asia?

Answer 81

Singapore - 1857 Malacca - 1875 Perak - 1884

Question 82

How much GP-covered telegraph cabling was laid by 1907?

Answer 82

200,000 nautical miles. With trees outputting 312g latex per tree, this would take 88,000,000 trees.

Question 83

How did resource exchange benefit Muhammad Ali?

Answer 83

Egypt, 19th century. State bought at low prices and sold at high - funding industrialisation, construction of canals, barrages, railways and port facilities.

Question 84

What did Poivre's and Hale's theory of desiccation lead to?

Answer 84

Concessions Regulations of 1723 - setting limits of deforestation in Mauritis.

Question 85

What could be seen by 1770?

Answer 85

British involvement in Bengal was premised in terms of responsibiltiy to 'assess and respond to growing evidence of artifical influences on rainfall'

Question 86

What did Orville Platt declare in Congress, 1983?

Answer 86

Americans 'are the most advanced and powerful on earth'

Question 87

Why did McKinley state about acquiring the Philippines?

Answer 87

'there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianise them'

Question 88

What did Frederick Cooper claim about empire-states?

Answer 88

Long arms but weak fingers.

Question 89

What could be said of environmental changes in Africa?

Answer 89

Imperial conquest only lasted 70 years, and environmental impact was less decisive than assumed.

Question 90

What was the capacity of the Chinese Navy in the 15th century, why did it disappear?

Answer 90

Zheng He's ships were 120m long, and capable of circumnavigation. China had 3,500 in a 'treasure fleet' which reached Africa before Columbus found the New World. The Ming dynasty shut it down, fearful of losing control over foreign trade.

Question 91

McNeill - Mosquito Empires

Answer 91

* Caribbean. African slaves brought with them Anopheles and Aedes strains of Mosquito - carrying Yellow Fever and Malaria. * Thrived in plantations where natural predators were removed + still water permitted reproduction * Natives survived, Europeans died. This defended the colony of Spain from invasion (French, Guiana, 1673 = Deadly), but also put power in hands of natives. * Revolutions in 19th century were aided by mosquitos - Europeans could not launch successful military campaigns.

Question 92

What did Matt Ridley suggest?

Answer 92

Western concepts of Malthusian population development and environmentalism found their home in the authoritarian state of China, embodied in the One Child Policy.

Question 93

What did a Blueprint for Survival, 1972, sound like to Ridley?

Answer 93

A Blueprint for Survival reads today like a rant by an embarrassingly extreme member of both Ukip and Greenpeace. It demands that governments “declare their commitment to ending population growth; this commitment should also include an end to immigration”. Song Jian was struck that the book recommended reducing Britain’s population from 56 million to 30 million. “I was extremely excited about these documents,” he later wrote.

Question 94

What was the Blueprint for Survival, 1972?

Answer 94

* A Blueprint for Survival was an influential environmentalist text that drew attention to the urgency and magnitude of environmental problems. * First published as a special edition of The Ecologist in January 1972, it was later published in book form and went on to sell over 750,000 copies. * The Blueprint was signed by over thirty of the leading scientists of the day—including Sir Julian Huxley, Sir Frank Fraser Darling, Sir Peter Medawar, and Sir Peter Scott—but was written by Edward Goldsmith and Robert Allen, who argued for a radically restructured society in order to prevent what the authors referred to as “the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet”

Question 95

What did Blueprint for Survival recommend?

Answer 95

* It recommended that people live in small, decentralised and largely de-industrialised communities. Some of the reasons given for this were that: * it is too difficult to enforce moral behaviour in a large community * agricultural and business practices are more likely to be ecologically sound in smaller communities * people feel more fulfilled in smaller communities * reducing an area's population reduces the environmental impact

Question 96

What is important to note about the Annales?

Answer 96

* **Febvre** - Geographical Introduction to History - environment provides the backdrop to history * **Braudel -** 3 temporalities - geographical time - extremely slow change; socio-economic change - change within lifetime; political - rapid change. Environment still a backdrop * **Ladurie -** Environment in dialogue with humans - humans shape environment and environment shapes humans. Times of Feast, Times of Famine. Group stands accused of writing history without names.