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Pacific Skipjack »
The Remarkable Story Behind the World’s Biggest Tuna Fishery
Authored by: Bob Kearney
Publication date: August 2026
The Pacific skipjack tuna is a remarkable fish. With nowhere to hide in the wide-open spaces of the Pacific, it is one of the fastest and most mobile fish in the world. It is also one of the quickest fish to reproduce, such that the largest tuna fishery in the world, co-managed by more than twenty Pacific island nations, can yield enormous catches of skipjack without threat to the well-being of the species. The south-western Pacific is the only region in the world where all tuna stocks have a ‘healthy’ status. It supports the acknowledged best researched and managed tuna fishery on the planet. With skipjack being the most important renewable natural resource in the region, the fishery is crucial to the economic and wider social wellbeing of Pacific Island peoples, who are now largely managing these resources for themselves.
Astonishingly, while many individuals, groups, organisations, institutions and governments from around the world were involved in the establishment of this gigantic fishery, it came to be successfully managed primarily through the vision and tenacious efforts of a single young Australian scientist, Dr Bob Kearney. In this book, Kearney tells the extraordinary, colourful story of how, beginning in Papua New Guinea at the start of the 1970s, he crossed paths, and sometimes swords, with philanthropists, bankers, fishing executives, scientists, lawyers, government leaders and representatives from many nations, and even the Indonesian military. Kearney personally designed, obtained funding for, administered, managed, and demonstrated the scientific and commercial value of his dream experiment, carried out across more than thirty million square kilometres of ocean.
Pacific Skipjack is co-published with ACIAR (Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research).
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International Review of Environmental History: Volume 12, Issue 1, 2026 »
Edited by: James Beattie, Ruth Morgan
Publication date: July 2026
This issue of the International Review of Environmental History is planted firmly in Asia and the Pacific, tracing the rise and politics of local environmental knowledge and place-making from the seventeenth century. Shifting cultures of disaster management along the Yangtze River and the sponsorship of post-colonial botany in Indonesia meet conservation tourism and arboreal remembrance in twentieth-century Aotearoa. Threaded through the contributions, the lives and afterlives of imperialism and colonialism gesture to the possibilities of environmental history for shedding light on the enduring role of the state in the mediation of culture, politics, and environmental change.
An Adventurous Life »
Johan Koren, polar explorer and naturalist
Authored by: Steinar Wikan, Cathrine Harboe-Ree
Publication date: 2026
Johan Koren commenced a life of exploration at the age of 17, when he attained a position on the RV Belgica, leaving his native Norway in 1897 on an expedition to the Antarctic. Trapped by ice floes closing in around them, Koren and his fellow crew members over-wintered in the Antarctic, the first people ever to do so.
An ardent naturalist by the time he became an orphan at age 11, this far-from-ordinary teenager was to grow into an extraordinary adult, participating in expeditions in the polar north and south and becoming a ship’s captain leading expeditions in northeastern Siberia and Alaska. During a period in which museums and private collectors clamoured for rare flora and fauna specimens, Koren’s personal qualities and professional expertise made him almost uniquely qualified for their pursuit. Enduring shipwrecks in the sub-Antarctic and polar north, destructive storms and the deaths of expedition companions, and surviving for a time in Siberia with assistance from local Chukchi people, Koren would eventually make important ornithological discoveries and have bird and animal species named after him by the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.
An Adventurous Life is the first English language translation of Steinar Wikan’s comprehensive biographical study, published in Norwegian in 2000. Cathrine Harboe-Ree’s careful and sensitive translation will make known to the world the remarkable story of this major figure of polar exploration and zoology.
‘A fascinating reflection on the period of scientific exploration when collecting was central to the huge expansion of knowledge of the natural world taking place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries’.
—Michael Pearson
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International Review of Environmental History: Volume 11, Issue 1, 2025 »
Edited by: James Beattie, Ruth Morgan
Publication date: November 2025
This latest issue of the International Review of Environmental History takes readers from the settler landscapes of nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand to the post-1945 rise of herbicides in Northern Europe. Lingering in Aotearoa, readers will be immersed in geological debates about the causes of past glaciation and trace the early twentieth-century appeal of the Phoenix palm. This issue also features a personal reflection on the campaign to protect K’gari-Fraser Island in the mid-1970s and its lasting influence on Australian environmental law. Together, these contributions reveal the spread and influence of transnational ideas on local understandings of environmental change and conservation.
Ink and Land »
Documenting Factionalism around a Prospective Mine in Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Willem Church
Publication date: August 2025
Ink and Land is an ethnographic account of political and legal struggles over landownership in Papua New Guinea, in which competing factions seek recognition as customary landowners of Wafi-Golpu, a major prospective copper-gold mine. Drawing on extensive archival research, oral histories, court documents and fifteen months of fieldwork, the book examines how different groups attempt to harness resource extraction for their benefit and how, in doing so, they reshape their social worlds through the medium of affidavits, court declarations and incorporation certificates. To analyse this process, the book advances the concept of antagonistic documentality—a form of conflict in which parties engage in conflicting world-building projects through and about documents and, in doing so, create an order of paper that outlasts the disputes themselves. Through this detailed case study, Ink and Land reveals how legal and bureaucratic battles over resource extraction in Papua New Guinea formalise factionalism, consolidate elite control over new sources of wealth, and redefine the nature of groups and landownership. By focusing on conflict over documents as a process of social transformation, the book offers fresh insights into the politics of land, law and resource extraction in the contemporary Pacific.
International Review of Environmental History: Volume 10, Issue 1, 2024 »
Edited by: James Beattie, Ruth Morgan
Publication date: October 2024
This latest issue of the International Review of Environmental History takes readers from tiger hunts in sixteenth-century India to the rise of organic foods across the Anglosphere by the late 1970s. Along the way, readers will encounter the ways that Cantonese migrants interpreted the environments of Aotearoa New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century, and the influence of environmentalism in the US trade union movement during the 1960s. This issue also features a forum on a growing area of interest for environmental historians and allied practitioners, the history of emotions in response to environmental change. Here, scholars outline an historiography of ecological anxiety and reflect on the role of emotions in their historical practice at a time of planetary crisis. Despite the diverse settings and topics of the papers herein, together the collection reveals the enduring impacts of how different societies have understood and shaped the more-than-human world.
Human Ecology Review: Volume 28, Number 1 »
Publication date: September 2024
Human Ecology Review 28(1) features a Special Section from a collection of researchers in Nigeria, reflecting on the political and cultural influences on, and responses to, the unique social and environmental devastation of the oil-producing Niger Delta region. Across five articles and the introductory piece, the scholars address social and environmental justice and policy (Eni et al.); and examine the attempts to restore and clean up the landscape (I. Nwoma and Anyika). The focus then turns to ecoaesthetic responses in literary forms to the Nigerian landscape and cultures, with an ecocritical analysis of postcolonial ecology in Isidore Okpewho’s novel Tides (C. Nwoma); of traditionalism, modernity, and nature in Joe Ushie’s collection of poems, A Reign of Locusts (Kehinde and Egya); and concludes with an examination of the trauma of alienation from nature and homeland in Amaechi Akwanya’s collection of poems Pilgrim Foot (Onyemachi).
Following the Special Section, Schooneveldt describes a methodology for reframing how we perceive the agency of other organisms; Warner refines and develops governance principles for assisted species migration; and Zhang and Guo explore informal institutions in China and their role in mediating pro-environmental behaviours.
Small Islands in Peril? »
Island Size and Island Lives in Melanesia
Edited by: Colin Filer
Publication date: July 2024
This book explores the idea that small island communities could be regarded as canaries in the coal mine of sustainable development because of scientific and anecdotal evidence of a common link between rapid population growth, degradation of the local resource base, and intensification of disputes over the ownership and use of terrestrial and marine resources. The authors are all anthropologists with a specific interest in the question of whether the economic and social ‘safety valves’ that have previously served to break some of the feedback loops between these trends appear to be losing their efficacy. While much of the debate about economy–society–environment relationships on small islands has been overtaken by a narrow focus on the problem of climate change, the authors show that there are many other factors at work in the transformation of island lives and livelihoods.
Salish Archipelago »
Environment and Society in the Islands Within and Adjacent to the Salish Sea
Edited by: Moshe Rapaport
Publication date: June 2024
The Salish Archipelago includes more than 400 islands in the Salish Sea, an amalgamation of Canada’s Georgia Strait, the United States’ Puget Sound, and the shared Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Salish Sea and Islands are named for the Coast Salish Indigenous Peoples whose homelands extend across the region.
Holiday homes and services have in many places displaced pristine ecosystems, Indigenous communities, and historic farms. Will age-old island environments and communities withstand the forces of commodity-driven economies? This new, major scholarly undertaking provides the geographical and historical background for exploring such questions.
Salish Archipelago features sections on environment, history, society, and management, accompanied by numerous maps and other illustrations. This diverse collection offers an overview of an embattled, but resilient, region, providing knowledge and perspectives of interest to residents, educators, and policy makers.
Format: Hardback
International Review of Environmental History: Volume 9, Issue 2, 2023 »
Edited by: James Beattie
Publication date: February 2024
The histories and legacies of extraction and toxicity are innumerable. Globally, these forces have both facilitated and been a by-product of industrial growth, technological advancement and nation-building for centuries, but so too have they enabled and exacerbated environmental degradation, structural inequality, and the continued colonisation of lands and peoples. In addressing the histories and legacies of extraction and toxicity, this special issue of the International Review of Environmental History draws attention to several of the most pressing themes taken up by historians dealing with these processes. The papers within explore how extraction and toxicity have been woven into the colonial fabric of various countries, the ways that the exploitation and contamination of specific landscapes have come to define the history of such places and spaces, the response of various groups to these processes, and the extent to which long-term environmental consequences wrought by extractive practices and their toxic by-products are—in many cases—yet to be revealed. The articles in this special issue span Australia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Southern Ocean, consider the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and draw on a range of disciplinary methods and perspectives. What binds them together is a deep engagement with the significant legacies of extraction and toxicity that endure into the present and inform contemporary environmental debates.