From less than three dozen in 1949, the number of small hydropower stations in the People’s Republic of China grew to nearly ninety thousand by 1979. By the early 1980s, these stations were distributed across nearly 1,600 of China’s 2,300 counties. In 770 counties, small hydropower was the primary source of rural electricity generation. This article offers a history and assessment of these developments, unsettling our traditional emphasis on large-scale hydroelectricity. The article begins by reconstructing the PRC’s enormous investments in small hydropower from the 1950s to the early 1980s. This reconstruction, the first of its kind in the English language, not only helps reassess key periods and events in the history of the PRC but also establishes the position of small hydropower in the hydraulic history of the twentieth century. The article then turns to a discussion of the claimed impacts of small hydropower. As electricity became available for the first time in many parts of the Chinese countryside, it affected patterns of economic and social activity for hundreds of millions of people. Finally, the paper explores what the case of small hydropower can offer to conceptual and theoretical problems surrounding development, innovation, and the environment. Returning to the long-standing debate over scale and development, China’s experience with small hydropower reminds us of the important role played by smaller-scale, appropriate, and self-reliant technologies in global energy history.

Logwood, a dyestuff extracted from its namesake tree native to the Yucatán Peninsula, was a commodity valued in the textile centres of early modern Europe. The trade in logwood began as an extractive endeavour attempted by merchants and former pirates on the margins of Spanish colonial authority, but by the late eighteenth century it had expanded to become a wide-reaching activity with connections to broader trends on both sides of the Atlantic. In the New World, the trade's growth fuelled Anglo-Spanish imperial rivalries and led to the introduction of slave labour to harvest dwindling logwood stands. The ecological consequences of human exchange also spread logwood's range to Caribbean islands, turning a frontier trade into a domesticated plantation industry. In the Old World, logwood was a versatile dye source that contributed to a range of hues. Initial regulations to protect consumers eased as dyers improved the quality of logwood dyes. The logwood trade expanded global textile supply chains and brought innovation to Europe's proto-industrial textile industry. It gave the continent's dyers new ways to meet consumer demand and spurred the development of mechanical methods to expedite refining.

Archival aerial photographs are a unique but underused and potentially game-changing source to study twentieth-century environmental and climate change dynamics. While satellite imagery with comparable high resolution appeared only in the early twenty-first century, archival aerial imagery with native sub-1-meter resolution became ubiquitous in the 1940s. Archival aerial photography therefore quadruples the time depth of high-resolution analysis to eighty years, allowing for a more reliable identification of structural trends. Moreover, the greater time-depth brings into focus the Great Acceleration that started in the 1940s, and virtually in real time. The article uses a human manual analysis of a sample from two time series (1943 and 1971) of archival photographs of the Oshikango area of Namibia (see Figure 1) to demonstrate how aerial photography complements conventional datasets. Namibia was one of the first places in colonial Africa where what subsequently became the standard protocol for “aerial mapping” was used and for which the imagery and the “flight plans” have survived. The standard protocol makes the imagery compatible with any archival aerial photography from the 1940s to 1990s and the flight plans contain key information to identify, interpret, and combine the individual photographs into orthomosaics. Although the use of manual analysis of aerial photography is not new, unlocking the full explanatory potential of high-resolution mass data requires machine reading and analysis. Current machine reading methods, however, are based on the pixel method, which identifies such features as farms, water holes, and trees only as low-resolution pixel aggregates. In contrast, the object method of machine analysis, combined with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to unlock the sub-1-meter native resolution of historical aerial photography, renders visible individual trees and other features, including their precise location and size, allowing for the dimensions of trees and other features to be measured between different time series of images. The interrelationships between different features in the environment can thus be assessed more precisely in space and over time, for example comparing tree growth and surface water sources. A major challenge is that the object method used for high resolution geospatial imagery cannot be easily applied to monochromatic archival aerial photography because it has been designed for analyzing multispectral satellite imagery. As discussed in the article, using the manual sample as a training data set for an experimental machine-learning protocol demonstrates proof of concept for automatically extracting such features as farms, water holes and trees as individual objects from archival aerial photography. This increases the time depth of available high-resolution land use, environmental, and climate data from 2000 back to the 1940s and provides a base line for the Great Acceleration and brings the massive changes from the 1940s through the 1990s in focus as captured in aerial photography.

From Iran and Mozambique to France’s Gilets jaunes, consumer energy protests are ubiquitous today. Little historical scholarship has so far explored such “fuel riots,” the problematic moniker bestowed by contemporary policy scholars. This article argues for disaggregating the homogenous crowd of so-called rioters, instead analyzing why particular socioeconomic groups persistently take to the streets. To do this, it sketches an energy-centered approach to class with both structural and subjective axes. This analytic is applied to a comparative history of two of the best-documented energy protests of the last half-century. During the 1970s, independent truckers blocked American highways to protest the high price of motor fuel. A decade later, half a million North Indian farmers mobilized to demand cheaper and more reliable electricity. Half a world apart, the two movements shared key characteristics. They were the expression of specific class fractions whose material interests were conditioned by heavy dependence on state-mediated energy supplies. Awkwardly located between big capital and wage labor, both truckers and farmers owned stakes in the carbon-intensive means of production that left them exposed to volatility in energy quality and pricing. Both mobilized in reaction to perceived breaches of state-centered moral economies of energy which threatened this dependence, leveraging their power to interrupt supplies within the circulatory systems of fossil fuel society. Even as both movements failed in their own terms, their political resistance helped to lock in place consumer subsidies for cheap carbon-intensive energy. Such energy protests deserve a central role in our environmental histories of fossil fuel society.

Pringlea antiscorbutica (Brassicaceae) and Azorella polaris (syn. Stilbocarpa polaris, Apiaceae) are endemic sub-Antarctic flowering plants of significant ecological and historical importance. Pringlea antiscorbutica occurs on Îles Kerguelen and Crozet, Prince Edward, and the Heard and MacDonald Islands; A. polaris on Auckland, Campbell, and Macquarie Islands. We examine the use of these unrelated species of “wild cabbage,” as scurvy remedies and sustenance for eighteenth–nineteenth-century sailors. We trace their European discovery, taxonomic treatment, morphological representation, and cultural association through the historical record. Scurvy killed more sailors during the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries than armed conflict and shipwrecks combined. Both plants were essential to the survival of sailors and formed a nutritious, carbohydrate-rich staple of their diets, however, attitudes to these plants were strongly influenced by cultural background. Use of P. antiscorbutica as a scurvy remedy was promoted by Cook and Anderson, leading to a greater historical legacy than A. polaris, and a unique contemporary research focus on the plant’s nutritional value and cultivation potential. In contrast, contemporary studies of A. polaris have been directed primarily at the plant’s protection. Pringlea antiscorbutica and A. polaris are intrinsically linked to human associations with the sub-Antarctic islands, which further increases their cultural and conservation value.

Cinquante ans après la Conférence de Stockholm de 1972, la littérature est appelée à offrir un compte rendu sur le passé et informer les décisions à venir. Dans ce contexte, le présent essai critique propose une revue historique de la gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement, couvrant la période de 1945 à 2022. Pour ce faire, il réunit les processus et évènements marquants des dernières décennies et distingue les moments clés ayant façonné la gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement. Informé par la littérature scientifique et des documents officiels, l'article expose l’émergence, la mise à l'agenda et l'institutionnalisation de plusieurs enjeux environnementaux. Il contribue ainsi à situer les développements qu'a connus la gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement et contextualiser les processus en cours. La conclusion de l’étude invite à accorder une plus grande attention aux enjeux environnementaux et à repenser la gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement au-delà des frontières, tant étatiques que disciplinaires.

The 1930s Dust Bowl on the Great Plains was one of the most catastrophic environmental disasters in history. Over-farming, severe drought, and high winds primed dust storms. Depopulation occurred in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. All was made worse by the economic crisis. While historians have written extensively about the Dust Bowl, its causes and its effects, there is little detailed scholarship on the religious dimensions of this ecological tragedy. This article examines some of the important ways that the Dust Bowl shaped Protestant religious life and popular theology just as it prompted denominational relief campaigns, educational efforts, and conservation work. It looks particularly at Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, holiness groups, and Pentecostals. Reactions to the Dust Bowl reveal patterns of thinking about and acting on ecology, social concern, migration, millennialism, and new federal relief efforts. An examination of the growing historical fragmentation of white Protestantism is central to this article. In this era of environmental ruin and mass migration to the West, religious groups and individuals offered vastly different solutions and interpretations, foreshadowing later political and cultural conflicts. In the 1930s, long before the birth of modern environmentalism, Protestants were asking why things had gone so horribly wrong and what, if anything, could be done about it.

This article examines how and why mass tourism on the Adriatic coast in the 1980s became such a dominating factor in local societies and environments. As economic crises led to decreased living standards, local municipalities became more dependent on foreign tourism. Also, previous environmental management policies ensured that tourism became entangled with the Adriatic environment, which was heavily transformed by the rapid expansion of tourism.

This article analyzes an 1869 law from Cisleithania that defined all running waters as public goods. Economic and political actors debated the issue of water rights over several decades in the mid-nineteenth century, as is shown in contemporary publications, proceedings of assemblies, and administrative archives. The legal solution that was ultimately adopted established the management of water rights and uses according to a particular form of property which was intentionally preferred over a system of private appropriation. Looking in detail at what “public good” meant for the actors, this article argues that settling the legal status of rivers served to both consolidate the imperial state's power over society and to make water resources available to a productivist economic system. The new relationships to the environment that emerged during this time were inseparable from contemporary political and economic developments, and legislating was one way to bind these aspects together. Moreover, the case of water rights in the Habsburg Empire adds nuance to binary oppositions between private property and commons that dominate the study of property regimes and environment today. It invites us to consider how the establishment of a productivist economic system rested on a combination of different forms of property and strong state intervention.