Search results for ""author ian d. rotherham""

The loss of the great fenlands of eastern England is the greatest single removal of ecology in our history. So thorough was the process that most visitors to the regions, or even people living there, have little idea of what has gone. For many, the Fenlands are the vast expansive flatlands of intensive farming, the ‘breadbaskets’ of Britain. Lost are the vast flocks of wetland birds that filled the evening skies in winter, the frozen wetlands and the fen skaters of the winter, and the abundant black terns or breeding wading birds of the summer months. However, pause a while off main roads and consider place names and road names: Fenny Lane, The Withies, Commonside, Reed Holme, Fen Common, Turbary Lane, Wildmore, Adventurers’ Fen, Wicken Fen, and more; they tell a story of a landscape now gone but once hugely important. The Fens bred revolution and civil war and paid the penalty. They nurtured religious non-conformism with global impact. After 1066, the Saxons withheld the Normans’ onslaught, and in the 1970s, unting’s Beavers took action against twentieth-century invaders. The fenscapes, neither water nor land but something in-between, breed independence and, if necessary, dissention. This story is of politically and economically driven ecological catastrophe and loss. So much has gone, but we do not even know fully what was there before. With global environmental change, and especially climate change, fenlands once again have major roles in our sustainable futures.

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Throughout history, nature its resources, landscape and terrain has shaped the tactics of warfare and determined its outcomes. From the medieval English Fens to the 20th century Iraqi Marsh Arabs, landscapes have fostered resistance and dissention. Harnessed by people under threat the landscape has influenced strategies and tactics.Water and wetland halted campaigns in the Florida Everglades and in the Franco-Prussian War of the late 1800s. In the Second World War the Dutch flooded the drained polders to halt the Nazi advance and in 1938 the Chinese nationalist forces breached the flood-dykes of the Yellow River to halt the Japanese advance.Mountain ranges and deserts have long provided landscapes for resistance fighters. From the former Yugoslavia to Afghanistan these gnarly battlescapes traverse time and space. Libyan fighters held off invading Italian forces by operating from the caves and valleys of the Green Mountains and the Welsh defended their mountainous principalities again

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From antiquity until today, trees and woods have inspired artists, writers and scientists; they have shaped cultures and reverberated through belief systems. Yet worldwide forest cover has declined dramatically over the last 1,000 years. Now, primeval forests are only to be found at a few sites unreachable by humans, and even then they are affected by climate change, atmospheric pollution and species extinctions. Nonetheless, ancient woods, trees and forests are at the core of many global landscapes. Understanding the vital resources that they provide requires genuinely multidisciplinary research. With contributions from major authorities in the field such as Oliver Rackham, Frans Vera, Elisabeth Johann, George Peterken and Melvyn Jones among others, this timely volume reflects on the importance of our oldest trees from a range of perspectives and varied geographical locations. Individual chapters consider eco-cultural heritage, the archaeology of trees, landscape history, forest rights, tree management, saproxylic insects, the importance of deadwood, practical conservation and monitoring, biodiversity, wood-pasture and more. Fresh insights are provided from across Europe as far as Turkey. Given the urgent need to understand, conserve and restore ancient woodlands and trees, this book will do much raise awareness, foster enthusiasm and inspire wonder.

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