The article explores the forest ecology of the Municipality of Terracina, in thePontine Region, from the Unification to the beginning of the 20th century andhighlights the critical administrative issues and the potentials concerning themanagement of commons.This analysis looks at the forest through the lens of social and institutional conflict,which shows the discrepancy between the national legislative agenda and localgovernance, questions the correspondence between environmental and socialmarginalities, politicises the development of the forest area.This case-study is of particular interest because of the vast area of land at that timeunder customary and communal tenure; the late appearance of widespread phenomenaconnected to forests and the late development of reclamation plans; the impact of thehygienic constraint set by the 1877 Forest Act.The article contestualises and investigates the role of wooded commons from anenvironmental history perspective and relies on administrative records and existingscholarly literature on common lands and forest issue in Central Italy.
This article analyzes the rising and the evolution of the territorial issues in Italy from the unification, 1861, to nowadays. It focuses on uplands and, specifically, on their relationship with lowlands. The essay reconstructs the dialogue between marginal areas and modernization in Italy addressing the challenges posed to the economic science. This time period articulates in two phases. Through 1960s uplands have experienced a combination of two trends, the gradual enlargement of the deprived rural surface and the progressive geographical shift of degradation and depopulation towards South. Since early 1970s public and scientific understanding of the regional disproportions between mountainous and lowland areas started to question the previous assumptions and open up, possibly, a new positive phase.
From 1880 to 1964, many expeditions crossed seas and borders and climbed the highest mountains of the world, generating spaces which varied in accordance with the purpose of the journey and the interests of the explorers. This vast array of spatial re-productions is the realm of geography. Building upon the etymology of geo- and graphein (earth writing), this contribution analyses landscapes as products of geography by adopting emerging approaches in the environmental humanities (EH). Combining environment and humanities entails a mutual transformation: on the one hand, we recognise a landscape as constituted by stories other than materiality; on the other hand, the text - the object of interest par excellence in the humanities - involves a corporeal subject, not only a written or oral entity. If we deem the geography of a place the material translation of practices, discourses, and representations, EH offers the interpretative space and analytical tools to read (and re-write) the complex text of landscape. Given that power relations shape cultural and historical aspects of representations, which is to say geography, reassessments of geographical texts through EH can take on the status of a decolonising practice.
While climate campaigners organize direct action groups and city councils begin considering climate change an undeniable imperative in planning and policy, school strikers have launched the international platform School Strike 4 Climate. The support for local climate action around the world is growing and will not stop.
Through considering a "Geo Archive" as a tool of history, this paper explores several conundrums concerning environmental migration in social sciences. It demonstrates how historical perspectives can problematize and unsettle various automatisms that are widely present in journalistic, public, and policy discourses. Through examples from the Geo Archive, the article illustrates how unavoidable historical dimensions can enrich our understandings on the interaction between environmental issues and migration flows. This paper engages with an open access "archive in-the-making". This Geo Archive includes case studies of migration flows and puts those flows in conversation with environmental transformations and climatic changes. The analysed collection presents high-profile stories which are representative samples of different approaches, temporalities, geographies, sources of information, narratives, and scales. This endeavour encompasses different disciplines and fields of expertise: environmental humanities, IT and communication experts, and political ecology. The archive places itself within the realms of public history, environmental history, and history of the present and aims to reach out to wider audiences. This digital humanities project stemmed from a support action funded by the EU initiative Horizon 2020 titled CLISEL whose overarching goal was to analyse and better inform institutional responses and policies addressing climate refugees and migrants.
This blog piece is inspired by Harald Lesch’s talk “Science, Society, Signs” at the RCC Lunchtime Colloquium. It focuses on the potential and limits of graphic representations of climate change-related phenomena, interpretations, and understandings.
What if we let Italy talk through its forests? What if we unfold Italian history through its forests? Today’s blog discusses Italian forest narratives and how they may be read.
In this article we analyse the emergence and the transformation of three different socio-natural spaces in a particular historical context – that is, the establishment of a modern state. We explore this issue by researching the relationship between forests and modernisation from Unification in 1861 to the 1890s. Over this period Italy experienced a radical change connected with the state-building process, and forests represented a material place where innovations in social and economic development were tested. Based on three case studies, this article explores how modernity was articulated through urban parks, ironworks, and infrastructures. The three cases speak of both depletion and conservation; they exemplify the patterns through which, in the very making of modernity, Italian society articulated its relationship to nature in an attempt to overcome customary rights and the traditional rural organisation of society. Forests were constructed as socio-ecological spaces reflecting Italy’s contested and heterogeneous modernisation process through which political tensions, social conflicts and economic development theories were inscribed on transformed landscapes.
Questo saggio si propone di analizzare il ruolo assegnato ai boschi e all’economia forestale nell’ambito dell’indagine su Lo spopolamento montano in Italia, avviata sul finire degli anni Venti e pubblicata tra il 1932 e il 1938 a cura del Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche e dell’Istituto nazionale di economia agraria (d’ora in avanti Inea). Si tratta di una fonte tutt’altro che omogenea in materia poiché, pur interessandosi alle zone in cui era concentrata la maggior parte della superficie forestale italiana, le varie parti che compongono l’inchiesta si occupano delle condizioni e dell’utilizzo dei boschi in maniera non sistematica. Nei paragrafi che seguono, dopo aver illustrato brevemente il contesto in cui vennero realizzate le ricerche che confluirono nell’inchiesta, proporremo una breve panoramica sui primi cinque volumi, quelli che corrispondono all’area dell’arco alpino italiano (Inea 1932-1938, voll. I-V). Abbiamo scelto di escludere da questo confronto i due volumi dedicati all’area appenninica non tanto perché non riteniamo utile (o praticabile) un confronto tra montagna alpina e appenninica, quanto perché, a differenza della prima, la seconda è coperta solo parzialmente dall’inchiesta sullo spopolamento montano.
This paper compares two schemes of agrarian transformation that occurred during World War Two in Libya and northeast Brazil, undertaken by the Italian fascist regime and US private and governmental officials respectively. Although developing different historical trajectories, these similar efforts aiming to convert desert and semi-arid areas into productive fields intertwined with military services and reflected colonial and post-colonial appropriations in the Global South. The article demonstrates how both Libya and Brazil represented militarised environments and contested spaces well beyond the WW2 timeframe and how the colonial expansion projects that preceded and resulted from WW2 combined military campaigns and mastery over nature. Our analysis builds upon Italian and US primary sources and scholarly publications in environmental history.
Notepad of the European Society for Environmental History, November 2018