Japan is ringed by a number of remote oceanic islands whose economic, strategic and symbolic significance is entirely disproportionate to their tiny size. Yet today they are uninhabited, populated primarily by birds. Historically, these islands and the oceans that surround them have formed a borderland between Japan, Hawai‘i, the United States, Britain and China. First targetted for their supplies of plumage and guano, they later became launchpads for empire and landing strips for bombers. Many have now been transformed into nature reserves.

What chain of events led people to set foot on such remote spots in the first place? How did they go about claiming the islands and the birds that nested on them? What kind of human settlements once existed there, and what happened after they were abandoned? What does the history of bird islands say about Japanese imperial and post-imperial power, and about the web of political, economic and ecological connections between insular and oceanic space? And what does all this say about the relationship between sovereignty, territory and environment in the modern world?

The national epic takes very different forms across different cultural and historical contexts. At the beginning of twentieth-century Australian literary history stands the tragic narrative of a failed individual, in Henry Handel Richardson’s trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917, 1925, 1929). In the mid-twentieth century, large-scale fictional narratives, also in the form of trilogies, were used by some realist writers to write epics of settlement. In the case of Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land trilogy (1941–53) the narrative is about the catastrophic contact between Aboriginal people and the invading white settlers, and the subsequent beginning of expansion across the continent. Written at the same period, however, are two trilogies of nation-founding that, like Richardson’s, are centred on later mining history: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s goldfields trilogy (The Roaring Nineties, 1946; Golden Miles, 1948; Winged Seeds, 1950) and Vance Palmer’s overlapping Golconda trilogy, begun at the same time as his national mythography, The Legend of the Nineties (Golconda, 1948; Seedtime, 1957; The Big Fellow, 1959). These trilogies are shaped by the history of mineral extraction in Australian-settler political, environmental and economic history. This chapter analyses the under-recognised meaning of mining in narratives of settlement and nation.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

There is a problem fermenting in the frigid waters of the Beaufort Sea, a portion of the Arctic Ocean north of Canada and the United States. The trouble has its roots in an 1825 treaty signed between Great Britain and Russia, which divided their North American territories into what are now Alaska and Yukon. In that treaty, the two empires drew a north–south boundary along the ‘Meridian Line of the 141st degree’ that ‘in its prolongation as far as the Frozen Ocean, shall form the limit between the Russian and British Possessions’.1 Nearly 200 years later the inheritors of this agreement, the United States and Canada, are interpreting the phrase ‘as far as the Frozen Ocean’ in contrasting ways. Canada understands this sentence to mean that the boundary between the two nations extends past the shoreline and into the Beaufort Sea, while the United States argues that the border ends at the coastline where the ‘Frozen Ocean’ begins.

Petitions were deeply material objects, despite the era’s idealized fiction of the frictionless lord–vassal encounter of wills. This chapter describes how sixteenth-century subjects managed to send their petitions to the royal court, through a daunting and often informal network of couriers. These agents moved petitions, helped and hindered by weather and geography, mastering ocean currents, perilous winds, riverine systems, and mountain paths. Here, the labor contributions of non-Spaniards was highly evident, as Indigenous communities, Afro-descendant rowers and muleteers, and others dominated many of the empire’s most daunting and crucial routes. Many sovereign indigenous and Afro-descendant subjects also sabotaged this mail system from the outside, sometimes in conjunction with British pirates and others. This chapter describes how imperial denizens coped with such sabotage, not least internal interference. It also describes the weakness of the official postal system, the supremacy of merchant couriers, the consequences of antipiracy armadas, and express services. It highlights the complex iniquities and limited successes of this dialogue, revealing that, despite constant obstacles and against all odds, the empire’s communications system – even though slow and often inconsistent – preserved the fiction of vassal–ruler dialogue.

Resource extraction has grown to global significance as part of a particular version of industrial modernity. This modernity emerged with the industrial revolution, accelerated dramatically during the twentieth century, and is now changing rapidly. The fossil fuel-driven world as we know it is questioned and in many parts of the world already taking a downturn. Resource extraction modernity came with a particular kind of societies, based on values linked to gender-, ethnic- and social hierarchy and with largely unsustainable practices. As this modernity is challenged, political and cultural tensions have grown around extractive industries that go far beyond those we saw in the past captured in concepts such as preservation and conservation. To make sense of these comprehensive changes the chapter unites two key concepts: the Anthropocene and the Planetary Mine that together shape the new extractivist paradigm. The Anthropocene speaks to the profound geo-anthropological transformation of the human-earth relationship. The Planetary Mine brings out the interconnected global character of contemporary resource extractivism of which Arctic mining is a significant part.

This chapter provides a survey of the close of the Late Bronze Age and the rise of Iron Age towns, and delivers an updated synthesis of existing evidence and arguments for climatic shifts across the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth to fourth centuries BCE. Kearns then undertakes an island-wide comparative analysis of ruralization and urbanization apparent in survey records by the mid-first millennium BCE. Focusing on legacy and recent survey data, the chapter argues for oscillations in sedentism across the island as communities experienced environmental changes and cultivated new weathering practices, and situates the re-emergence of social differentiation in the relationships between households and land and new spaces for public gathering at tombs and shrines.

This chapter provides a review of archaeologies of landscape and outlines where environmental studies reside within these discussions, particularly in the recent rise of climatic and environmental histories of the ancient Mediterranean. Through a review of the challenges of environmental determinism and the interpretive problems of studies of the historical forcing of climatic events in human history, Kearns argues for integrated methodologies that look critically at varied scales of evidence and interpretation. In advocating the study of weathered materials and their instrumentality within ancient landscape studies, the chapter engages with recent archaeological scholarship on materialism that analyzes how things act and effect historical change. Kearns contends that differentiated entanglements of communities and their physical, changing surroundings contributed to transformations in social and political evaluations of land, place, and status.

Ethical quandaries – such as justice and equity for under-represented communities, treatment of animals in laboratory and field research, and editing the genomes of plants, animals, and humans – are becoming ever more insistent in socio-environmental research. Accordingly, socio-environmental research requires that natural and social scientists become conversant with the humanities and that humanists actively engage, in accessible terms, the conceptual and ethical concerns arising in the sciences. Research methods in the humanities differ – where scholars begin with a thesis instead of a hypothesis – from those in the natural and social sciences. While the methodological differences between research in the humanities and the sciences render interdisciplinary cooperation and even communication between these two broad types of inquiry difficult, this section draws attention to the important contributions that ethical, religous, and historical approaches have made to understanding the reciprocal relationships between society and environment. These contributions range from scholars such as Aldo Leopold, Lynn White, and William Cronon to Vandana Shiva, Leonardo Boff, and Gregory Cajete.

This introduction lays out the context, scope, theoretical framework, core arguments and structure of the study. It problematises the focus on synergies between environmental protection and human rights in existing literature, and emphasises the importance of retrieving, exploring and critically unpacking the conflicts that underpin this relationship. The analysis introduces the central interrogation of the book: how environmental protection laws can collide with human rights concerns, and how regional human rights courts balance individual or collective human rights against the interest in environmental protection, when environmental protection and human rights collide. Several sub-questions unfold from this main interrogation. How do regional human rights courts address, conceive of and frame conflicts with environmental laws, many of which include considerations that are part and parcel of existing human rights? Which conflict-management techniques and argumentative strategies do they employ to settle such trade-offs? And what does this tell us about how the environment is represented, and how its protection is legally justified in relation to human concerns? The summary of the main findings of the book lay bare the importance of the project, the gaps it aims to fill, and how these novel insights reconfigure the relationship between environmental protection and human rights.

This first part explores the origins of the relationship between environmentalism and human rights and traces the evolution of this encounter through a historical lens. It analyses how concerns for environmental protection and human rights emerged as distinct aspirations that progressively evolved towards mutual integration into each other’s normative architecture, legal registers and institutional practices. By examining how the framing of the relationship between ‘Man and Nature’ changed over time and how these changes of perception were legally translated in international instruments, judicial decisions and doctrinal accounts, this part of the book thereby sheds light on a major paradigm shift that occurred in the 1960s, when environmental protection began to be framed as intrinsically intertwined with human rights concerns. This shift corresponds to the first explicit references to human rights in environmental instruments. The analysis unpacks how this radical turn in environmentalism was accommodated at three complementary levels: legislative, adjudicative and doctrinal. This produced a dominant account where environmental protection and human rights are viewed as synergistic and mutually reinforcing objectives, in disregard of the conflicts that also underpin this relation. This account thereby contributes to the literature that critically engages with liberal human rights-based approaches to environmental protection.

Environmental and human rights law emerged as autonomous and disconnected bodies of law with distinct normative underpinnings. Yet, these progressively evolved towards increasing normative interconnections and legal integration. This chapter historicises this evolution by retracing how concerns for environmental protection were legally framed in early environmental instruments and to what end. It then shows how these representations of environmental protection changed over time once they started being articulated in relation to human rights considerations. The analysis draws on early legislative instruments in environmental and human rights law and retrieves the competing rationales at stake in their negotiations, the diplomatic tensions that underpinned their adoptions, and the political and epistemic compromises that were struck to accommodate divergent views over environmental protection and socio-economic development embedded in broader post-colonial debates. The mainstream narrative of environmental protection as translated in modern environmental law is then problematised by demonstrating how specific concerns were accommodated while others were silenced, discarded or neglected. A dominant anthropocentric and synergistic frame emerged, which defines environmental protection as inherently beneficial to human rights. This led to a narrow focus on synergies between environmental and human rights protection, with scant attention paid to conflicts and trade-offs, as the chapter demonstrates.