Cooks River Remediation? Or Renovation?

The renovation of the Cooks River in the vicinity of Ewen Park, between the suburbs of Earlwood and Hurlstone Park is a classic case of attempted remediation of the river that reproduces certain faults of the earlier renovation of the river in the 1930s. In time the planting of salt marsh and other species may soften the look, but the formidable sandstone banks erected will never approximate the banks before the era of steel piles. The decaying steel pile banks prompted this action on the part of a local council, but the replacement blocks of sandstone reproduce the essential features of the canalised river. The visual pollution of this sandstone wall is complemented by the provision, presumably for the sake of bikers who might skid off the path into the river and fall over the substantial sandstone ledge, of a visually polluting steel rail along large sections of the river.

Sandstoneblocks as 'remediated' river bank, near Ewen Park

Environmental determinism

Thomas H. Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London, 1857)

Ellsworth Huntington, World-Power and Evolution (New Haven, 1919)

Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) Annales School –
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), transl. 1972

i) geography/climate/ seas/ soils/ forests-
the physical setting – the longue durée

ii) demography/ economics — forestry, fishing, commerce, agriculture — births and deaths, disease etc

iii) l’histoire événement — social life/politics, belief, culture –event based history– stories, narrative

declension

Donald Worster, b. Needles, California, 1941

i) Natural world and its history

ii) Human systems of production such as capitalism

iii) Ideas we have about nature

Dust Bowl: The Southern Great Plains in the 1930s (1979)

Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985)

declension

Donald Worster, b. Needles, California, 1941

i) Natural world and its history

ii) Human systems of production such as capitalism

iii) Ideas we have about nature

Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985)

Hydraulic Society – Karl Wittfogel

William Cronon, b. 1954
http://www.williamcronon.net/students.htm
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983)

Richard White, b. 1947 — cultural turn in environmental history.

cultural landscapes

hybrid landscapes

a. climate change
Jean Grove, The Little Ice Age, 1400-1800

b. The Dust Bowl (Worster) See Cunfer, Geoff. “The Dust Bowl”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Cunfer.DustBowl for an extensive bibliography.

c. El Nino/Southern oscillation index
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (2001) — combination of El Nino induced drought and new political economy of market forces brought about catastrophic late 19th century Indian famines.

d. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (1987) . Biological expansion of Europe to the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries and then the Pacific and Australia >>> European dominance in the temperate regions of Australia, US, Canada, NZ

“What is environmental history?”
http://www.eh-resources.org/environmental_history.html
http://www.eh-resources.org/vodcast/

http://iantyrrell.wordpress.com/publications/

Ian Tyrrell is a Sydney-based historian.