Posted by 
By Tom Brooking
The conventional photograph of recent Zealand is certainly one of verdant landscapes with sheep grazing on lush eco-friendly pastures. but this panorama is nearly totally a man-made construction. As Britain grew to become more and more reliant on its abroad territories for offers of nutrients and uncooked fabric, so all around the Empire indigenous vegetation have been changed with English grasses to supply the labored up items of pasture -- meat, butter, cheese, wool, and hides. In New Zealand this approach was once carried to an severe, with wooded area cleared and swamps tired. How, why and with what results did the transformation of latest Zealand into those empires of grass happen? Seeds of Empire offers either a thrilling appraisal of latest Zealand’s environmental heritage and a protracted past due exploration of the importance of grass within the procedures of sowing empire.
Read Online or Download Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand (Environmental History and Global Change) PDF
Similar australia & oceania books
Circle of Death (Damask Circle Book)
In a single, vicious evening, Kirby Brown’s international is torn aside. Her ally is lifeless, killed by way of a madman who's now after her. and he or she has no inspiration why. Doyle Fitzgerald has been despatched to Melbourne, Australia to seek down a killer. What he doesn’t look forward to finding is a circle of witches able of controlling the weather and a sorceress decided to take that persistent for herself.
The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia
The booklet of this booklet in 1981 profoundly replaced the way we comprehend the historical past of kin among indigenous Australians and eu settlers. It has due to the fact turn into a vintage of Australian heritage. Drawing from documentary and oral proof, the ebook describes in meticulous and compelling aspect the ways that Aborigines replied to the coming of Europeans.
An Uneasy Relationship: Norfolk Island and the Commonwealth of Australia
The placement of Norfolk Island, as a territory of the Commonwealth of Australia, is likely one of the old anomalies in governance, which has persevered due to the fact 1914. It displays the direct ancient linkages among the British Crown and people Norfolk Islanders who have been descendants of Pitcairn Islanders of Mutiny at the Bounty status.
Waitangi & Indigenous Rights: Revolution, Law & Legitimation
This landmark examine examines matters surrounding New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi, concentrating on fresh Fiji revolutions and indigenous well-known rights to the seabed and foreshore. during this revised version, the writer ways those complicated and debatable issues with a cautious, thorough, and principled strategy whereas facing the large constitutional matters and responding to reviews made by means of different students.
Extra resources for Seeds of Empire: The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand (Environmental History and Global Change)
Sample text
He returned as British delegate to the New Zealand International Exhibition held in Christchurch in 1906–07, and condemned burnt-over bush as an ‘eyesore’. He missed the kahikatea groves that had grown along the rivers of the Waikato in his early adulthood and lamented that ‘beauty was disfigured by the stumps of blackened trees, which stood up as memorials of the great forest which the dairy farms had displaced’. P. P. Reeves expressed concern in a well-known poem (reproduced in many anthologies used in schools) ‘The passing of the forest: a lament for the children of Tane’.
It was for this reason – as well as for progressive social, political and economic changes, such as female suffrage, industrial arbitration, and old age pensions – that commentators from the United States, Britain and Europe were attracted to the ‘social laboratory’ of New Zealand in the 20 years before the First World War. Visiting in 1899, the Chicago-based progressive journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd saw North Island settlers busily replacing forests and swamps with modern farms and improved pasture.
They later became less reliant on such information, following their own procedures to observe, record, analyse and communicate important details about environmental processes, and how these could affect their lives and livelihoods. Particular terms and procedures are needed whenever people from one culture seek access to information held by another, and inquirers must have special skills if they are to understand what has been said and how to interpret silences. Traditionally amongst Ma¯ori, some environmental knowledge was privy to the observer, some to immediate or extended family members, and some to the tribe.