Chinese environmental regulation in the 1970s and '80s

Pollution in China (credit: Anjali aisha)

Just appearing online in Environment and History is an artcile by Yun Liu, "Voices of Protest Against Industrial Pollution in Hubei, China, During the 1970s and 1980s". The abstract:

This article examines local official records to find voices of protest against industrial pollution in Hubei, China, during its early reform era from the 1970s to the 1980s. Archival evidence from unpublished official documents indicates that to some extent local officers responded to citizens’ petitions against two main forms of industrial pollution: air pollution and soil pollution. Air pollution mostly affected urban residents but elicited more contention. Soil pollution got comparatively less exposure but caused more direct damage to impacted peasants. Both rural and urban victims of industrial pollution projected their own voices of protest typically by submitting group-authored and signed or anonymous whistle-blowing letters. Protests against pollution emerged with inter-group conflict negotiation in public or semi-public venues as well as in local investigation reports. The findings discussed here help to explain how local environmental governance evolved through increasing public awareness at subnational levels in China’s early reform years.

The political ecology of land reclamation in the Veneto

Environmental History recently published Elisabetta Novello and James C. McCann's "The Building of the Terra Firma: The Political Ecology of Land Reclamation in the Veneto from the Sixteenth through the Twenty-first Century".  The abstract:

The 1963 Vajont disaster and the devastating floods that hit the Veneto as well as other areas of Italy in 1966 brought about a significant revision of the policies on soil defense and civic protection. This was the last step in a long process of environmental management intending to build a balanced human-environmental system from the early modern period to the present. This essay explores the changing political ecology of soil and water management in the Veneto region in northern Italy. More specifically, the study traces the evolution of land reclamation works in the longue durée—in particular over the last five centuries—and the economic and social consequences of human actions on the territory. In order to fully outline the policies adopted in different historical periods, it is necessary to understand how the concept of land reclamation changed and gradually came to include drainage, hygienic, agrarian, and environmental factors, with attention paid to the specific ecologies of plains, mountains, and lagoon areas. In this long process, the changing relationships between landowners, farmers, and the state have altered human/natural interactions, with implications for land and water use.

Regional Land Reclamation Museum of Ca' Vendramin 

Flood control and soil conservation districts

Despite it's future-leaning title, Jerrold Long's "Making ‘Conservation’ Work for the 21st Century – Enabling Resilient Place" has quite a lot of discussion of the history of environmental sensibility and land-use regulation in the US. The abstract:

During the New Deal, as part of a larger effort implementing Progressive-era “conservation” regimes, the federal government authorized the structurally-invasive Flood Control Act of 1936. At the same time, the Standard State Soil Conservation Districts Law promoted the creation of local, place-based efforts to protect or restore locally-valued resources. “Conservation” thus came to signify both the invasive, structural, engineering approach of mid-20th Century flood control, and the local, more responsive and flexible nature of soil conservation districts. But our understandings of our place in the natural world have changed subtly but significantly over the past century. Any legitimate natural resource regime must achieve its resource management goals while balancing its demands with local cultural expectations, which now generally include some desire to protect the natural environment. This article argues – using a case study focused on a small flood control district – that local conservation districts can be used to implement 21st-Century understandings of “conservation” that more accurately reflect local culture and needs. These locally-driven and place-based conservation efforts can improve and protect the aesthetic, health, ecological, and economic resources of a particular landscape, even as they manage that landscape – in part – to satisfy human needs. A system succeeding on all goals would be truly socio-ecologically resilient, promoting resilient ecosystems, a resilient local culture and economy, and a resilient local legal system – together creating a resilient place.

Conservation in Malawi

The latest issue of Environment and History (not to be confused with Environmental History; the former has a more European orientation while the latter's is more American) has a few book reviews of note.

Elias Mandala reviews Wapulumuka O. Mulwafu, Conservation Song: A History of Peasant- State Relations and the Environment in Malawi, 1860-2000 (White Horse, 2011) (the book was also reviewed here and here). The book seems to join a significant body of literature that shows colonial conservation efforts being shaped by misunderstandings of the environment and motivated by the desire to save the environment from the supposedly destructive practices of native peoples.