The Rise of Conservation in South Africa
Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770-1950
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 20 November 2003
- ISBN 9780199261512
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages452 pages
- Size 240x160x30 mm
- Weight 926 g
- Language English
- Illustrations numerous line drawings and halftones 0
Categories
Short description:
This is a major and innovative contribution to the environmental history of settler societies and of South Africa. The Cape, like Australia, became a major exporter of wool. Vast numbers of sheep flooded its semi-arid plains and rapidly transformed its fragile natural pastures. This book analyses the development of conservationalist ideas over the long term in South Africa as a response to these problems.
MoreLong description:
This book is an innovative contribution to the growing comparative field of environmental history. Beinart's major theme is the history of conservationist ideas in South Africa. He focuses largely on the livestock farming districts of the semi-arid Karoo and the neighbouring eastern Cape grasslands, conquered and occupied by white settlers before the middle of the nineteenth century. The Cape, like Australia, became a major exporter of wool. Vast numbers of sheep flooded its plains and rapidly transformed its fragile natural pastures. Cattle also remained vital for ox-wagon transport and internal markets. Concerns about environmental degradation reached a crescendo in the early decades of the twentieth century, when a Dust Bowl of kinds was predicted, and formed the basis for far-reaching state intervention aimed at conserving natural resources. Soil erosion, overstocking, and water supplies stood alongside wildlife protection as the central preoccupations of South African conservationists.
The book traces debates about environmental degradation in successive eras of South African history. It offers a reinterpretation of South Africa's economic development, and of aspects of the Cape colonial and South African states. It expands the understanding of English-speaking South Africans and their role both as farmers and as protagonists of conservationist ideas. The book is also a contribution to the history of science, exploring the way in which new scientific knowledge shaped environmental understanding and formed a significant element in settler intellectual life. It paints an evocative picture of the post-conquest Karoo, analysing the impact of self-consciously progressive farmers and officials in their attempts to secure private property, curtail transhumance and kraaling, control animal diseases, enhance water supplies, eradicate jackals, destroy alien weeds such as the prickly pear, and combat drought. It concludes by analysing conservationist interventions in the African areas, and discussing evidence for a stabilization of environmental conditions over the longer term.
William Beinart's complex and wonderfully informative book has its origins in the author's long-standing interest in the ideas that 'underpinned environmental regulation in Africa districts' of the Cape Colony and, to a lesser extent , the other territorial components of the Union of South Africa after 1910.
Table of Contents:
Preface and Acknowledgements
Lists of Figures, Illustrations, Tables, and Maps
Introduction: Livestock Farming and Environmental Regulation at the Cape
Scientific Travellers, Colonists, and Africans: Chains of Knowledge and the Cape Vernacular, 1770-1850
Defining the Problems: Colonial Science and the Origins of Conservation at the Cape 1770-1860
Fire, Vegetation Change, and Pastures 1860-1880
Vets, Viruses, and Environmentalism in the 1870s and 1880s
Water, Irrigation, and the State 1880-1930
The Night of the Jackal: Sheep, Pastures, and Predators 1890-1930
Drought, Conservation, and Nationalism: the Career of H. S. du Toit 1900-1940
Prickly Pear in the Cape: Useful Plants and Invaders in the Livestock Economy 1890-1950
'The Farmer as a Conservationalist': Sidney Rubidge at Wellwood, Graaff-Reinet 1913-1952
Debating Conservation in the African Areas of the Cape 1920-1950
Postscript: Debating Degradation over the Long Term: Animals, Veld, and Conservation
Bibliographical Note
Select Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Index
