Posts Tagged ‘seminar’

« Older Entries

Seminar – The Diplomacy of Krill: negotiating the exploitation of Antarctic resources in the 1970s

Friday, May 13th, 2011

Antarctic marine living resources. Man at desk signing document.
Alessandro Antonello, School of History, ANU

School of History Seminar Series
Wednesday 18 May 2011, 4.15-5.30pm, Seminar Room A, Coombs Building, ANU

In May 1980, after six years of discussions and negotiations, 15 states agreed to the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), a convention which created a structure of principles and institutions to provide for the conservation of the whole Southern Ocean ecosystem, to control its exploitation as a nascent and promising fishery, and to insist on the continuing centrality of the Antarctic Treaty and parties to that treaty in the management of Antarctic affairs. This paper explores CCAMLR’s creation in the latter half of the 1970s, especially the ways in which diplomats and scientists conceptualised issues relating to understanding and exploiting the marine living resources of the Southern Ocean, especially the Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba.

Tags: , ,
Posted in News | Comments Off

Seminar: ‘Sisters of the South’

Friday, September 24th, 2010

Eucalyptus trees‘Sisters of the South’: Australian-South African botanic exchange and the origins of comparative climatic forestry in South Africa c.1881-1994

Brett Bennett, University of Texas at Austin/University of Western Sydney

Wednesday, 29 September, 4.15-5.30 pm
McDonald Room, Menzies Library, ANU

Recently many historians have argued that the development of forestry within South Africa and the larger British Empire was merely an extension of continental European forestry methods and culture. This paper places the origins of one important part of South African and British imperial forestry, the formation of plantations of exotic trees, within an Australian and southern African context. I argue that environmental and cultural comparisons between South Africa and Australia by white South Africans, combined with widespread failures of the first Australian trees planted in southern Africa during the nineteenth century, fuelled the rise of what I call a comparative climatic school of forestry in the Cape Colony in the 1890s. Foresters in the Cape Colony started to compare supposedly similar South African and Australian climates to find the “correct” Australian tree to plant in South Africa, or in the words of this school’s leader, David Ernest Hutchins, to “fit the tree to the climate”. This Cape comparative school of climatic forestry then spread to the rest of South Africa after 1902 when Cape foresters staffed newly created forestry departments in the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal during the reconstruction period. From 1902 and onward, foresters continued to refine their knowledge of Australian climates and the habits of Australian trees planted in South Africa to select the proper trees for plantations. This knowledge helped lead to the rise of large plantations of Australian trees throughout southern Africa in the twentieth century.

All welcome. Please contact barry.higman@anu.edu.au if you have any queries.

School of History, Research School of Social Sciences
Seminar Series: Semester 2, 2010

Tags: , , ,
Posted in News | Comments Off

At the Riverside: Jesuit missionaries and Aboriginal people at the Daly River, Northern Territory, 1886-1899.

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Daly RiverA cross-cultural encounter.

Dr. Stefan Sippell
University of Munich

Time: 4.15-5.30pm, Wednesday 28 April 2010

McDonald Room, Menzies Library
Australian National University

24th September 1886. They have arrived. Father Adolf Kristen and Brother Vinzenz Scharmer are the first Austrian Jesuits to cast their eyes on the Daly River – here the missionaries are going to attempt to convert the Aboriginal people in the area to the Roman Catholic faith. But – the author of the diary records – as the two men step to the water’s edge they are disappointed: “No doubt they expected to find it resemble the Danube in its majestic flow, and found it smaller than the river Inn!” What they saw in the surface of the water is to all intents and purposes their own reflection … (more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in News | Comments Off

Dispossession and Forest Conservation

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Fenner School Public Seminar
1-2pm Thursday 25th March 2010
Fenner School Forestry Lecture Theatre, Forestry building 48

Dispossession and Forest Conservation

John Dargavel and Edwina Loxton
Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU.

Dispossession is the obverse, the hidden face of forest conservation and the struggles to create national parks and protect forest biodiversity in special reserves. In this seminar, we sketch its presence from mediaeval Germany and imperial India to the impacts of global environmentalism in Tanzania and the Sundarbans, and to the national parks and wild rivers movements in present-day Australia.

Dispossession has led to peasant wars, encroachments and protests, and attempts in Australia to offset the impacts with structural adjustment payments. The history of the intimate relationship of forest conservation with dispossession displays the increasing and extending scale of state power.

Tags: ,
Posted in News | Comments Off

E.H.F. Swain and the Battle of Forestry Versus Agriculture

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Dr Gregory Barton
Centre for Environmental History, ANU

Time: 4.15-5.30pm, Wednesday 10 March 2010

Venue: McDonald Room, Menzies Library, Australian National University

Some foresters began to question the dominance of agriculture during the early to mid twentieth century. They did so by advocating massive global afforestation programs that would redefine state land management policies. E.H.F. Swain is one such example. A forester who served as chair of the forestry board in Queensland from 1920- 1931 and chief commissioner of the New South Wales forestry commission from 1935-1948, he voiced the most extreme perspective of any forester throughout the British Empire. He used his position as a chief commissioner in New South Wales during and after World War II to advocate an entirely new vision of society and its economy: instead of supporting the advance of the wheat belt across the world, he sought to create a society more heavily based on forestry. A prophet and bureaucrat that wrote in the style of Thomas Carlyle, he advanced a radically green vision of wholeness that died with the British Empire.

Dr Gregory Barton is a Research Fellow with the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University.

All welcome. Please contact Shino Konishi (shino.konishi@anu.edu.au) if you have any queries.

Tags: , ,
Posted in News | Comments Off

Seminar: Weather at a Time of Catastrophe

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

Chris O’Brien

History (RSSS) Seminar
Thursday, 3 September, at 3.30 pm
in the McDonald Room, Menzies Library, ANU.

In 1897 Darwin was destroyed for the first time. Well over a century later, with the view back cluttered by three subsequent destructions, the 1897 cyclone is all but forgotten. Having discussed this forgetting, this seminar will recount the furies of that calamitous night. Compelled by the issue of how people understand events in their environment, it then places this event in the context of then contemporary knowledge of weather. Outlining what was known about storms and cyclones, along with the origins of this knowledge, it is clear that long before the advent of radar and satellite technology people could read the skies with considerable aptitude. In Darwin, newspaper reporting of events such as the 1897 cyclone transmitted technical and local weather knowledge to a readership far beyond scientific elites. This paper will argue that these narratives supplied readers with visual cues that enabled them to connect with their environment in a way that more recent reporting, emphasising abstract metrics such as temperature and barometric pressure, does not.

All welcome.

Tags: , ,
Posted in News | Comments Off

« Older Entries