Just been talking to someone about oil palm groves and palm oil in West Africa and it occurred to me that maybe some of you here might be interested in this article (from my preMastodon days). Not everything palm oil related is bad! #PalmOil#HistoricalEcology#Nigeria#Africa
#ClimateDiary We Are Living in the Pyrocene—At Our Peril.
Ancient prophecies of worlds destroyed by fire are becoming realities. How will we respond?
"Mythology has morphed into ecology. We’re witnessing a slow-motion Ragnarok—a story from Norse mythology in which a great battle burns the world. Climate history is becoming a subnarrative of fire history".
By Steve Pyne, a historical ecologist working on fire.
@BenjaminKlein yes ok my answer was a bit glib; of course like everything it was a bit more complex than what fits into one toot and there were conflicts. Of course. But overall megafauna and humans coexisted more successfully in Africa than, say, Europe, where all mega fauna was killed long ago.
Overall it’s just not right that“humans” always destroy “nature”; see my pinned 🧵 on #HistoricalEcology.
I am very sad to have learned today of the untimely death of the artist Anna Laurent, due to cancer. I got to know Anna over the last year, as we were developing a PhD proposal together on the basis of this wonderful photography project she had done on seeds in #Iraq#Kurdistan . I would have loved to have worked with her on this #HistoricalEcology#Ethnobotany
#ClimateDiary Now this is a story that has cheered me up (not much, recently). It sounds like a really wonderful, thought-through regenerative #restoration project - tree planting done the right way.
And: it is wonderful to see the efforts of people like Guy Shrubsole, George Monbiot and Eoghan Daltun, campaigning and writing about UK and Irish #rainforests for years, bear fruit. All this work does matter. Spurs me on a bit again! #HistoricalEcology#Devon
Bryony Wilde, project manager at Arlington Court, said:
“Through this tree planting, we’re helping to create a living landscape where both nature and people can thrive. These trees will not only provide a habitat for wildlife but also fix carbon into the soil, purify air and water, and provide a place for people to enjoy.” 💚
I 💯 agree on doing less overall, but we also need to move away from thinking wilderness = good, humans = bad. Actually for most of human history people everywhere have done much to create biodiverse, thriving ecosystems. See this #HistoricalEcology thread i once did on this with examples from throughout world. In that spirit: a little bit of human helping can be good, is not “against nature”
Am reading “Palestinian Walks. Notes on a vanishing landscape” by Raja Shehadeh at the moment (a Christmas present). Through the deceptively simple device of 7 walks taken over 27 years near his home town Ramallah, he offers a way into SO much (devastating) history. Also love it as it combines #PoliticalEcology with #HistoricalEcology - just my thing. A beautiful book, really recommend it. #Gaza#Palestine#Bookstodon#Walks
@davidho Much of the Amazon rainforest is only 400 years or so old, it grew after millions of indigenous peoeple died from diseases brought by conquistadors. Before that large parts were populated, with farmland, cities, states #historicalecology
But this doesn’t change the far bigger fact that more than half of CO2 emissions occurred since 1990
Hi everyone, today is the day my book, THE ATLAS OF EARLY MODERN WILDLIFE is published. 🙀💚
The Atlas catalogues the state of nature in Britain and Ireland during the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries. 🐺🦫🦅🦃🐳🐟🐢🐍🦞🦐
It's taken me five years to get to this point! The Atlas is based on over 10,000 records from 200+ primary sources (essentially books written in the time period)!
#ClimateDiary
Landleben in Zeiten der #Klimakrise: Es vergeht kaum ein Tag ohne größere Brände hier im Rheingau - heute wieder einer nicht nur in Riech- sondern Sichtweite auf dem nächstgelegenen Weinberg😳 Dystopisch.
Ob sich das die Klimawandelverharmloserinnen so vorgestellt haben wenn sie trollten "ach was, die paar Grad mehr, ist doch Urlaubsfeeling und der Wein wächst dann auch besser"🤡 (Funfact: Dürre setzt den Winzerinnen hier schon länger zu, es gibt bereits Wasserkonflikte...)
@dp@IsabVann2@Biedermann
Well… i do really love wine, good wine. Real, good quality wine is a world apart from mass produced stuff full of chemicals. Every good vineyard is full of #HistoricalEcology, so much wonder, so much knowledge care and love over generations. And so many vineyards do #agroecology. Just like #PalmOil (which i work on): nothing wrong with plant, everything wrong with profit-oriented mass production!
For #ThickTrunkTuesday, a second 🧵on the "Social Life of Trees" (borrowing this from Laura Rival). Today it's the #Iroko Tree, as it is known in West Africa, or #Mvule in Uganda - #MiliciaExcelsa. It is a tree I know well from my PhD fieldwork in Edo State in #Nigeria in the early 2000s, and one that is good for thinking through human-nature relations #EnvironmentalAnthropology 1/x
2/x #Iroko (Milicia excelsa) grows in tropical African forests but as a light-demander it thrives in openings and on abandoned farmland - it was through centuries of shifting cultivation that Nigeria's forests were rich in Iroko. Here a picture I took one near Iguesogba in #EdoState - a very nice reminder of some wonderful months I spent largely walking round, guided by two different really great "assistants" and now dear friends, learning about the #HistoricalEcology of Edo landscapes
Today it’s the #Yew - a tree I’ve been intrigued by ever since we first came across this big old yew tree next to #Wilmington church here in #Sussex. It’s over 1,500 years old and pretty amazing! 1/x
Am reposting this #HistoricalEcology 🧵 I did during #COP15 in Dec’22 - a brief world tour through West and East Africa, Amazonia, Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Europe, N America - enoy! I do believe #IntermediateDisturbance is the way forward
1/52 Good to see this Guardian Long Read, but as a historical ecologist I would like to add: humans do not just either stay within boundaries or destroy nature. It's often been a positive, dynamic human-nature symbiosis, with humans actively shaping and creating forests & biodiversity #historicalecology