Local Places, Global Processes: Histories of Environmental Change in Britain and Beyond

We live in an age of unprecedented environmental change: global, interconnected and universal. Yet though our lives are inextricably connected to global processes, and increasingly mobile, we still live in particular places. Our perceptions of change, and what kind of change might be for good or ill, are shaped by the interaction of localized experience and the wider forces of transformation. Local Places, Global Processes examines how these relationships have been shaped in Britain over time in three ways. First, through essays addressing influential ways of understanding and debating questions of ‘the state of nature’. These are complemented by case studies on conservation, landscape change and management, and how perceptions of environmental change have emerged or been discarded over time. Chapters also draw on a series of site-based workshops that brought together historians, landscape managers and artists to discuss and reflect on particular sites: Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, owned by the National Trust and the first British nature reserve; the Quantock Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Somerset, England’s first AONB and a landscape enriched by Romantic association; and the landscape of Kielder Water and Forest, a land of superlatives in Northumberland in north-eastern England – the largest planted forest and artificial lake in northern Europe.
The multi-disciplinary approach draws together the exchanges, artworks and writing assembled at these workshops and afterwards. This opens up how being in a place, and engaging with ideas attached to it, shape perceptions of the environment. It provides resources with which landscape managers can think about their tasks and engage various publics in discussion about future environments in light of these histories of place. Rather than a history of these three places, this is history written from them.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Abbreviations
1. Introduction: Local Places, Global Processes: In Search of the Environment, Paul Warde, Peter Coates and David Moon
2. Three Places, Peter Coates, Paul Warde and David Moon
A. ENVIRONMENT AND LANDSCAPE
3. The Environment, Paul Warde
4. Landscape Character Assessment and the Quantocks during the Nuclear Age, Emma-Jane Preece
5. The Curious Case of the Missing History at Kielder, Richard Oram
6. Birds and Squirrels as History, T. C. Smout
7. The ‘Nature’ of ‘Artificial’ Forests?, Chris Pearson
B. PLACES
8. Not All Those Who Wander are Lost: Walking in the Quantock Hills, Marianna Dudley
9. An Amphibious Culture: Coping with Floods in the Netherlands, Petra J. E. M. van Dam
10. Names and Places, Paul Warde
11. Constructing the Kielder Landscape: Plantations, Dams and the Romantic Ideal, Jill Payne
12. The Kielder Oral History Project: Three Case Studies, Leona Jayne Skelton
13. Wild Britannia: Environmental History, Wildlife Television and New Publics in Britain, Robert A. Lambert
ART INSERTS
14. John Clare, Drainage and Printmaking, Carry Akroyd
15. Landscape and the Artist in Twenty-First Century Britain, Jenny Graham
16. Kielder: A Planned Wilderness, Peter Sharpe
C. BEAUTY AND AESTHETICS
17. Beauty and the Aesthetics of Place, Nature and Environment, Peter Coates
18. Light on Landscape: An Antipodean View, Libby Robin
19. ‘Beauty and the Motorway – The Problem for All’: Motoring through the Quantocks Area of Natural Beauty, Tim Cole
20. The Beautiful and the Global, Petra J. E. M. van Dam
21. Reservoirs, Military Bases and Environmental Change: Joining the Dots, Chris Pearson
22. Species Conservation at Kielder: Animating Place with Animals, Duncan Hutt
D. CHANGE, CHOICE AND FUTURES
23. Environmental Change: A Local Perspective on Global Processes, David Moon and Leona Jayne Skelton
24. Hidden History: Kielder’s Early Modern Landscape, Matt Greenhall
25. Waterlands to Wonderlands, Paul Warde
26. Kielder Dam and Reservoir, Jonty Hall
27. Kielder Forest, Graham Gill
28. National Trust: ‘Wicken Fen Vision’ (2009) [extracts]
29. Kielder Water and Forest Park: The City in the Country, Christine McCulloch
30. Nature, Cultural Choice and History, T. C. Smout
31. Concluding Reflections, David Moon, Peter Coates and Paul Warde
Acknowledgements
Timeline of Events
List of Contributors

Peter Coates is Professor of American and Environmental History at the University of Bristol. He is an environmental historian of the 19th and 20th century, particularly of the USA and UK. His principal research interests are in the study of human relations with the rest of the natural world over time with recent specific emphasis on energy environments and fluvial landscapes.

David Moon is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York. The main focus of his research has been the rural world of the Russian Empire from the 17th to the 20th centuries. His research on environmental history considers the interrelationship between the human and non-human worlds, and how people have understood this interrelationship, over time.

Paul Warde is Lecturer in Environmental History at the University of Cambridge. His principal research interests are in the environmental, economic and social history of early modern and modern Europe. In particular his resreach focuses on the use of wood as a fundamental resource in pre-industrial society; the long-term history of energy use and its relationship with economic development, and environmental and social change and the history of prediction and modeling in thinking about the environment.