beyond colonialism

AFRICAN ENVIRONMENTAL history, like the broader field of environmental history, has lengthy drawn inspiration from interdisciplinarity. This interdisciplinarity has allowed us to artificial position new questions and to look after new insights into the continent's changing people-environment relations. At the same time, individual defining feature of recent African environmental histories, in distinction to the broader field, has been a focus upon environmental interventions under colonialism. Specifically, environmental historians have persistently investigated the environmental events of the colonial conquest; the disenfranchisement of Africans by dint of various colonial schemes to extract, keep and even restore Africa's natural resources; and Africans' efforts to negotiate and reshape these colonial environmental interventions. While these works have illuminated plenteous it seems to me that this obsession with colonialism has its limits. Indeed, expanding African environmental history's analytical and interdisciplinary intention might well enable us to generate of recent origin questions-and insights-into contemporary debates about "degradation," urbanization, resource consumption, and health in Africa. I'd like to diocese historians in this field take a plenteous broader view of Africa's changing people-environment relations, to bring colonialism into broader temporal, geographical, processual perspectives, and to explore Africa's contemporary environmental be of importance tos in a wider context. I imagine that this broader analysis would draw from environmental history's tradition of interdisciplinarity, and that it could manifest itself in a range of ways. While I frame my make notess specifically in terms of African environmental history, I will argue that these suggestions have implications for the broader field of environmental history.

In the first place, this expanded perspective would entail a a great deal of longer-term analysis of environmental change in Africa. Because of the dearth of written documents to shed light upon the distant past, Africanists will have to draw from novel interdisciplinary work on environmental change, particularly that of paleoclimatologists, geologists, and paleoecologists who look for to reconstruct longterm changes in Africa's climate and the consequences on African landscapes and race Indeed, a group of paleoclimatologists and ecologists popularly is conducting research on long-term climatic shifts in the Great Lakes region of East Africa, and historian David Schoenbrun drew from similar early investigations in his work A Green Place, A profitable Place.' Just as historians like Schoenbrun have helped to historicize better the long-term climatic and ecological studies, these studies also can illuminate more novel histories of environmental interventions (including those of colonial rule) in of recent origin ways. Current debates, for instance, about the uniqueness of contemporary resource use, deforestation, and "degradation" might be sharpened if we understood better in what manner contemporary environmental exploitation fits into a a great deal of longer history of climate change, resource use, and ecological change.

A broader understanding of Africa's environmental change might also incorporate processe that have transformed nation and their environments throughout the world. African environmental history has lengthy focused almost exclusively on rural environments and the nation who inhabit them, but like other parts of the globe, Africa also has a lengthy history of economic specialization, accumulation, and urbanization. Cities like Jenne-Jenno, Gao, Great Zimbabwe, and Aksum all owed their extension to these processes. For environmental historians, historical studies of urbanization, economic specialization, and accumulation could shed light upon the environmental consequences of these processes2 (Historians have debated, for instance, whether urban extension depleted available resources in Great Zimbabwe and Aksum, thus contributing to their decline.) Historical studies also could provide insights into the generally received development of mega-cities like Lagos, and the interrelations of urban and rural environments and tribes Finally, these studies might also illuminate a contemporary history of consumerism and its relationship with environmental change. A colleague lately described to me the heated debates about polythene bags (buveera) in Kampala (Uganda), where the city's expanding population uses the plastic bags to package consumer beneficials but then discards or reduce to ashess them. The dumping or burning of buveera adversely affects soil and air quality, since incinerated bags bring out dioxins and other organic pollutants. The fate of the low plastic bag in African cities like Kampala thus drives us to consider consumerism, its detritus, and its environmental events not only in Africa on the other hand elsewhere in the world.

Investigating the environmental results of economic specialization, accumulation, urbanization, and consumerism might lead to novel questions for environmental historians to tackle. In Kampala, for instance, in what way do burning plastic bags affect the health of urban and rural familys and shape their conceptions of health and illness? Parallel questions influence my general research in West Africa, which explores by what means urban growth and the introduction of irrigated agriculture affected malaria's ecology and Africans' changing conceptions of health and malaria.3 Indeed, environmental historians may contribute to and derive crucial insights from the history of public health. by what means people use their environments has profoundly affected diseases like malaria and trypanosomiasis. Falciparum malaria, for instance, emerg as an acute moot point in human beings several thousand years ago, probably because human activities helped to facilitate conditions beneath which the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, and its greatest in quantity important mosquito vector, Anopheles gambiae, thrived. Clearing forests for sustenance production created ideal sites in which A. gambiae reproduc above time, agricultural production increased human population densities, providing a human reservoir in which P falciparum could sustain itself. by conversion these diseases have shaped human populations and land use, affecting population densities and influencing by what means and where people lived, farmed, herded, and traded. A developing dialogue between environmental history and history of public health and medicine thus appear to bes productive. To public-health histories, environmental historians can contribute greater historical profundity and more attention to in what manner environmental use shaped disease ecology In engaging with the history of public health's relate tos about changing medical knowledge, developing health-care infrastructures, and the influences of sex class, race, and ethnicity upon access to health care resources, environmental historians can take stock of changing notions of health, illness, and their environmental implications.