Decolonization influenced the rise of environmental activism and thought in Australia and South Africa in ways that have been overlooked by national histories of environmentalism and imperial histories of decolonization. Australia and South Africa’s political and cultural movement away from Britain and the Commonwealth during the 1960s is one important factor explaining why people in both countries created more, and more important, public indigenous botanic gardens than anywhere else in the world during that decade. Effective decolonization from Britain also influenced the rise of indigenous gardening and the growing popularity of native gardens at a critical period in gardening and environmental history. Most facets of contemporary gardening—using plants indigenous to the site or region, planting drought-tolerant species, and seeing gardens as sites to help conserve regional and national flora—can be dated to the 1960s and 1970s. The interpretation advanced here adds to historical research tracing how the former Commonwealth settler colonies experienced effective decolonization in the same era. This article expands the focus of research on decolonization to include environmentalism. The interpretation of the article also augments national environmental histories that have hitherto downplayed the influence of decolonization on the rise of environmentalism. Putting decolonization into the history of the rise of environmental thought and action sheds light on why people in contemporary Australia and South Africa are so passionate about protecting indigenous flora and fauna, and so worried about threats posed by non-native invasive species.

This article argues that because of the perceived and real biological characteristics of the different species of the genus Eucalyptus, imperialists and settlers, and later governments and the elites of developing nations, planted eucalypts widely and created new socio-ecological systems that encouraged and reinforced divergent patterns of economic, social, and ecological development. Planting eucalypts changed local ecologies and encouraged a movement towards market-based capitalism that benefited settlers, large landowners, urban elites and middle classes, and capital-intensive industries at the expense of indigenous groups living in and near forests. This article analyses the globalization of eucalypts in four broad phases: first, an enthusiastic expansion and planting from 1850–1900; secondly, failure in the tropics from 1850–1960; thirdly, increased planting and success rates in the tropics from 1960–2000, and fourthly, a growing criticism of eucalypts that began in the late nineteenth century and blossomed in the 1980s during an intense period of planting in India and Thailand.

Nineteenth-century Europeans visiting Southeast and South Asia eulogised teak trees (Tectona grandis) for their value and beauty. Diplomatic diaries, travel memoirs, literary descriptions and geography books for children described the teak as a universal sovereign of the sylvan world, the regal “lord” of the forests. With dwindling supplies of oak in Britain, British elites saw teak as a vital component of the country's global naval supremacy in the nineteenth century. The fear of a dwindling supply of teak during the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries encouraged the creation of forestry departments and laws in British India that attempted to preserve the finite amount of teak in the sub-continent. Yet the finite ecologies of India and Burma could not supply all the teak required to fuel expanding demand. Britain would have to look beyond its formal empire in Asia to find more teak.

The history of forestry in British India has evoked a wide range of responses from environmental historians. Debates often centre in particular on the ethic of the bureaucratic organisation responsible for managing the government-controlled forests of India: the Indian Forest Service. Born on the subcontinent and rooted in the European scientific tradition, the Indian Forest Service model, or “empire forestry” as it came to be called from the 1920s onward, has been described as a first step in the world-wide environmental movement or, alternately, as the culprit responsible for widespread deforestation of the subcontinent. This article will address a key aspect of the debate over the Indian Forest Service (hereafter referred to as the IFS) that has profound implications for our understanding of the relationship -between imperialism and forestry conservation. By examining the tension between conservation-minded foresters who battled against timber companies and economically focused imperial bureaucrats, we answer the following question: did the IFS develop a legacy of deforestation throughout the subcontinent between 1855 and 1947? We conclude that the IFS did not develop a dominant ethic of resource exploitation, nor did the IFS rapidly accelerate the rates of deforestation during the colonial period. Rather, the IFS provided a powerful and persuasive counterweight to gentleman capitalists and economically oriented administrators who strenuously battled for more extensive exploitation of forest resources.

An apparent increase in the incidence of S. Brandenburg in New Zealand, coupled with the possibility that the virulence of the organism may also be changing, prompted this study.

Three typing methods: macro-restriction fragment length polymorphism (MRFLP) profiling using pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), plasmid profiling and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling were used to determine strain diversity amongst 115 recent and historical isolates of S. Brandenburg from both human cases and non-human sources.

Antimicrobial resistance was noted only in three isolates. Plasmids of varying sizes were found in 31 isolates. MRFLP analysis resulted in 13 different patterns. Combining the three sets of typing data yielded 24 composite types. Comparison of composite type, isolation date and geographical location of case allowed the retrospective recognition of seven potential clusters during the 5-year study period. Composite types of 24 (80%) of the non-human isolates tested were indistinguishable from human isolates, suggesting that human infection may be via a number of vehicles.

Although not cost-effective for routine use on all salmonella isolates, the methods used in this study are an important adjunct to serotyping for discrimination within an emerging serotype.