January 2012

Issue 17.1 - January 2012

This year marks the tenth year since Adam Rome and Steve Anderson undertook the last journal redesign. The 2002 design helped Environmental History stand out from the crowd of academic journals by featuring energetic, spirited design elements. Varied color elements, cases, and typefaces all helped establish the journal as a lively interdisciplinary publication that was willing to take on intellectual challenges. During the summer of 2011, our editorial group, including the editor, Nancy Langston, and the graphics editors, Cindy Ott and Neil Maher, worked with graphic designers and the Oxford Journals production team to maintain the journal brand while streamlining the journal cover and interior design. We hope you agree with us that the new design maintains the Environmental History identity while creating a compelling and updated visual presentation.

You will also notice that we have improved paper quality, allowing for better image reproduction. Most important, we are thrilled to bring color figures to part of each issue, beginning with the Gallery article and one additional article per issue. Historical research and visualization increasingly happen in color, but few history journals allow for color reproduction, creating major dilemmas for scholars whose work relies on maps and spatial analysis. Environmental History is the first major history journal to offer color printing, and we believe it will significantly improve the journal.

Color will allow us to publish some of the most intellectually exciting work currently being done in the field. The Gallery has become a key component of the journal, and color will enhance this section immeasurably. Gallery authors use the images in their essays as analytical components that help present their argument, not simply as illustrations to accompany their text. Spatial approaches are increasingly important in environmental history, and they rely on evidence and argumentation that cannot easily be conveyed without color. Color is a critical element of many visual documents, and authors can better convey their interpretation of these documents with color figures. Maps, for example, often rely on color for their meaning. Color will allow for more accurate representations of time as well as space, allowing authors to communicate their arguments in a visually compelling and powerful way. With color, we can position ourselves as one of the most innovative journals in the field, and we can continue to attract the very best in cutting-edge scholarship. We hope you enjoy the color figures in this issue, and we encourage you to submit articles and gallery pieces that make the fullest possible use of color.

One of our goals for the journal is to attract scholarship that explores environmental change across the globe, not just within the United States. This issue begins with Matthew McKenzie's closely detailed study of fishermen in New England, “Iconic Fishermen and the Fates of New England Fisheries Regulations, 1883–1912.” For over four centuries, Georges Bank—once one of the most productive fishing banks in the world—sustained coastal communities in Canada as well as New England, but repeated attempts to regulate fishing technologies failed to sustain the fisheries. McKenzie shows how American cultural representations of fishermen in the nineteenth century shaped the failure of conservation efforts. Leslie Tomory's article, “The Environmental History of the Early British Gas Industry, 1812–30,” also explores regulation, focusing on tensions between gas companies, municipal authorities, and affected communities during the industrial revolution in Britain. Urban gas generation improved the lives of some urban dwellers, but it also produced toxic effluent that companies dumped into sewers and rivers. Tomory illuminates the patterns of opposition that quickly arose to this pollution. Simon Pooley's “Recovering the Lost History of Fire in South Africa's Fynbos” focuses on twentieth-century discourses about fire, exploring how political changes in South Africa affected scientific practice and forest management. Cynthia Radding's “The Children of Mayahuel: Agaves, Human Cultures, and Desert Landscapes in Northern Mexico,” brings together ethnobotany, ecology, and history to examine the intricate links between humans and agaves. Centered on the mutually formative relations between the agave family of plants and both indigenous and colonial populations in northern Mexico, Radding's analysis challenges us to rethink the distinctions we typically draw between wild and domesticated plants. The final article, John Wing's “Keeping Spain Afloat: State Forestry and Imperial Defense in the Sixteenth Century,” steps back four centuries, showing how the demands of war led to the systematic management of Spanish forests. Even as war stressed Spain's economy and consumed its natural resources, the crown continued to reaffirm local communities' long-standing legal rights to access forest resources.

Nancy Langston