The draining of the Fens in eastern England was one of the largest engineering projects in seventeenth-century Europe. A series of Dutch and English projectors, working over several decades and with ...the full support of the Crown, transformed hundreds of thousands of acres of putatively barren wetlands into dry, arable farmland. The drainage project was also supposed to reform the sickly, backward fenlanders into civilized, healthy farmers, to the benefit of the entire commonwealth. As projectors reconstructed entire river systems, these new, artificial channels profoundly altered both the landscape and the lives of those who lived on it. In this definitive account, historian Eric H. Ash provides a detailed history of this ambitious undertaking. Ash traces the endeavor from the 1570s, when draining the whole of the Fens became an imaginable goal for the Crown, through several failed efforts in the early 1600s. The book closes in the 1650s, when, in spite of the project's enormous difficulty and expense, the draining of the Great Level of the Fens was finally completed. Ash ultimately concludes that the transformation of the Fens into fertile farmland had unintended ecological consequences that created at least as many problems as it solved. Drawing on painstaking archival research, Ash explores the drainage from the perspectives of political, social, and environmental history. He argues that the efficient management and exploitation of fenland natural resources in the rising nation-state of early modern England was a crucial problem for the Crown, one that provoked violent confrontations with fenland inhabitants, who viewed the drainage (and accompanying land seizure) as a grave threat to their local landscape, economy, and way of life. The drainage also reveals much about the political flashpoints that roiled England during the mid–seventeenth century leading up to the violence of the English Civil War. This is compelling reading for British historians, environmental scholars, historians of technology, and anyone interested in state formation in early modern Europe.
The driving factors affecting soil quality were identified to evaluate the effect of vegetation on soil quality in coal mine reclamation areas with various restoration durations. This study used ...Hippophae rhamnoides subsp.sinensis Rousi with different reclamation durations (3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 years) in the abandoned land area of the Juxinlong coal mine in Ordos as the research subject. Artificial and abandoned grasslands were selected as the study’s controls. A soil quality evaluation model was constructed to assess the soil quality in the reclamation area. A structural equation model was used to thoroughly analyze the driving factors affecting soil quality in the study area. The findings show that: (1) Reclamation duration significantly affected the physicochemical characteristics of the soil. As the reclamation duration increased, soil nutrients such as organic carbon accumulated while the bulk density index (BD) decreased. (2) The soil quality index of Hippophae rhamnoides forest land in China was the highest after 6 years of reclamation. The Hippophae rhamnoides forest land with the lowest soil quality index after 4 years of reclamation differed significantly from that after 6 years (p < 0.05). The soil quality index (SQI) of 6a (years) significantly increased by 67.44% compared to 4a. (3) By constructing a structural equation model, it was found that physical indicators (saturated water content and silt) and reclamation durations were the main drivers of soil quality. SQI had a strong interaction with organic matter (OM) and different restoration durations. The findings of this study will serve as important guidelines for future quantitative evaluation of soil quality following land reclamation and management during the ecological restoration process.
Land reclamation projects and the installation of drainage infrastructure has impacted coastal wetlands worldwide. By altering water levels and inundation extent, these activities have changed the ...viable ecosystems onsite and resulted in the proliferation of freshwater species. As more than 50% of tidal wetlands have been degraded globally over the last 100 years, the importance of this issue is increasingly being recognised and tidal wetland restoration projects are underway worldwide. However, there are currently limited sites where large-scale reintroduction of tidal flushing has been implemented with the explicit aim to foster the growth of a threatened ecosystem. In this study, the tidal restoration of an internationally recognised Ramsar listed wetland in eastern Australia is described to highlight how coastal saltmarsh can be targeted by mimicking inundation depths and hydroperiod across the 410-ha site. Coastal saltmarsh is particularly important to this site as it is part of the east Australasian flyway for migratory birds and the minimum saltmarsh extent, as listed within the Ramsar's limits of acceptable change, have been breached. To recreate coastal saltmarsh habitat onsite, water level and hydroperiod criteria were established based on similar vegetation patterns within the adjacent estuary. A calibrated 2D hydrodynamic model of the site was then used to test how the preferred inundation criteria could be applied to the largest possible restored wetland area. Once optimised, a synthetic tidal signal was implemented onsite via automated hydraulic controls. The onsite vegetation response over an 8-year period was assessed to highlight the ecosystem response to controlled tidal inundation and denoted substantial saltmarsh expansion during the period. The techniques applied onsite have successfully met the restoration targets and can be applied at similar sites worldwide, offsetting sea level rise impacts to natural inundation hydroperiod.
Since 2010, there has been obvious escalation of tensions in the South China Sea, coinciding with China's rise and the United States' 'pivot' to Asia. Has China become more aggressive in its approach ...to the South China Sea? What strategic goal is China is pursuing in this area? Where does the South China Sea rank in China's overall foreign policy agenda? This article addresses these issues from the Chinese perspective. In the first part, the article discusses China's changing strategy and the leadership's thinking behind the changes. In the second part, it examines in detail several incidents involving China in the South China Sea, including confrontations with the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal and China's more recent land reclamation. The article argues that China's strategic goal in the South China Sea is a relatively modest one. The South China Sea disputes do not rank particularly highly among China's strategic priorities. To a great extent the handling of these issues is also subject to the dynamics of the overall relationship between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Consolidation analysis is a key task for reclamation design. Although consolidation is a long-term process, acceleration of consolidation is often preferred for speeding up the reclamations. Before ...proposing measures to accelerate the consolidation and reclamation process, it is imperative to have an accurate prediction of consolidation settlement for fine-grained materials, which is greatly affected by spatial distribution of subsurface zones with different soil types (i.e., stratigraphic heterogeneities and uncertainty) and spatial variability of soil properties. In current practice, calculation of consolidation settlement often uses simplified stratigraphic boundaries and deterministic consolidation parameters without considering stratigraphic uncertainty or soil property spatial variability. The oversimplified practice might result in unconservative estimations of consolidation settlement and pose threats to safety and serviceability of constructed facilities on reclaimed lands. In this study, a stochastic framework is proposed for consolidation settlement assessment with explicit modeling of stratigraphic uncertainty and spatial variability of soil properties by machine learning and random field simulation from limited site investigation data. Performance of the proposed framework is demonstrated using an illustrative example. Results indicate that the proposed method effectively generates multiple realizations of geological cross section and random field samples of geotechnical properties from limited measurements and offers valuable insights into spatial distribution of the estimated total primary consolidation settlement curves and angular distortion.
This paper unpacks the land reclamation exercise in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s to early 2000s led by the war veterans of the 2nd Chimurenga together with the general landless populace and the ...government of Zimbabwe. The exercise followed the reneging of the Lancaster House Agreement by the Tony Blair administration where Britain committed to fund equitable land redistribution in Zimbabwe after independence in 1980. Irked by the abandoning of the promise to fully fund the land redistribution by the British authorities led by Blair, the Government of Zimbabwe under the late Robert Gabriel Mugabe proceeded to take back its land from mostly a minority white farmers who held a lion's share of all the productive land to redistribute it to mostly landless black Zimbabweans who were the original and rightful owners of the land. The exercise triggered a ruthless backlash from the United States of America (US), the European Union (EU) and the British who immediately connived to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe in an effort to force and coerce the government to abandon its program because it affected white commercial farmers and their organizations. The paper discusses three entities including Infrastructure Development Bank of Zimbabwe (IDBZ), AgriBank and Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company (ZISCO) that were sanctioned by the US, EU and Britain to arm-twist Zimbabwe to relinquish the land redistribution exercise. The aim of the paper is to expose the US, EU and British hypocrisy of claiming that sanctions are targeted whilst they are intended to stunt Zimbabwe's social, political, and economic growth as punishment for repossessing its land from the former colonialists. The paper adopts Desk Top research as its methodology, which includes searching through secondary data without fieldwork. Findings that emerge from the research show that the sanctions are wholesale contrary to assertions by mostly the US, EU and Britain, and are meant to destroy the economy thereby causing suffering to ordinary citizens such as women and children among others. Keywords: land; reclamation; sanctions; blacks; whites; Zimbabwe.
Coal mining has caused significant soil nitrogen loss in mining areas, limiting reclamation and reuse in agriculture. This article studies the effects of organic fertilizer, inorganic fertilizer, and ...the combined application of Pseudomonas fluorescens with the ability of nitrogen fixation on soil nitrogen accumulation and composition in the reclamation area of the Tunlan Coal Mine from 2016 to 2022 under the conditions of equal nitrogen application, providing a scientific basis for microbial fertilization and the rapid increase in nitrogen content in the reclaimed soil of mining areas. The results showed that as the reclamation time increased, the nitrogen content and the composition and structure of the soil treated with fertilization rapidly evolved toward normal farmland soil. The soil nitrogen content increased most rapidly in the presence of added P. fluorescens + organic fertilizer (MB). Compared to other treatments (inorganic fertilizer (CF), organic fertilizer (M), and P. fluorescens + inorganic fertilizer (CFB)), MB increased total nitrogen (TN) to normal farmland soil levels 1–3 years earlier. The comprehensive scores of MB and CFB on the two principal components increased by 1.58 and 0.79 compared to those of M and CF treatments, respectively. This indicates that the combination of P. fluorescens and organic fertilizer improves soil nitrogen accumulation more effectively than the combination of P. fluorescens and inorganic fertilizer. In addition, the application of P. fluorescens increases the content of unknown nitrogen (UN) in acid-hydrolysable nitrogen (AHN) and decreases the content of amino acid nitrogen (AAN) and ammonia nitrogen (AN). However, there was no significant effect on the content of ammonium nitrogen (NHsub.4 sup.+ -N) and nitrate nitrogen (NOsub.3 sup.− -N) in soil-mineralized nitrogen (SMN). When combined with inorganic fertilizer, the contribution of SMN to TN increased by 14.78%, while when combined with organic fertilizer, the contribution of AHN to TN increased by 44.77%. In summary, the use of P. fluorescens is beneficial for nitrogen recovery in the reclaimed soil of coal-mining areas. The optimal fertilization method under the experimental conditions is the combination of P. fluorescens and organic fertilizer.
Because This Land Is Who We Are is an exploration of environmental repossession, told through a collaborative case study approach, and engaging with Indigenous communities in Canada (Anishinaabe), ...Hawai'i (Kanaka Maoli) and Aotearoa (Maori). The co-authors are all Indigenous scholars, community leaders and activists who are actively engaged in the movements underway in these locations, and able to describe the unique and common strategies of repossession practices taking place in each community. This open access book celebrates Indigenous ways of knowing, relating to and honouring the land, and the authors' contributions emphasize the efforts taking place in their own Indigenous land. Through engagement with these varying cultural imperatives, the wider goal of Because This Land Is Who We Are is to broaden both theoretical and applied concepts of environmental repossession, and to empower any Indigenous community around the world which is struggling to assert its rights to land. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.
Against the Tides tells the compelling story of the rehabilitation of the Maritime marshlands, a project that reshaped not only the landscape of the Bay of Fundy region but the communities that ...depended on it.
PDF
