In the context of global warming and climate change, there is an increasing interest in studying how environmental landscapes are formed and subject to change over periods of time. A broad stream within the discipline of physical geography, in particular, has focused for several decades on documenting and explaining the range of factorsāextreme weather events, broader climate trends and human interventionsāin transforming environments. However, few efforts, have gone behind the scenes, and studied how biographical influences, scholarly mentoring and research networks have defined and debated such concerns about landscape change in the field of geography.
This collection of essays addresses this noticeable intellectual gap by following the scholarly conversations within a group of distinguished British geographers, who since the 1950s have been overwhelmingly concerned with exploring and debating landscape change in terrains such as the deserts of northern and southern Africa and the Mediterranean savannahs. Their many disciplinary engagements and contributions were, subject to an eventful, intense and engaging discussion at a conference hosted by the Sussex Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) in 2017, titled Etchings in Time: Nature, Culture and Geography. The conference focused on the worldās dryland ecologies, which not only occupy close to half of the earthās surface but make up regions that have been historically contested and fought over by a range of political and economic interests for their mineral wealth and strategic location. The collection draws on the conference deliberations around landscape formation and change, but also aims to feed into several allied debates in fields such as environmental conservation, climate adaptation and human security. A common intellectual strand brought together the various academic concerns in this volume; this being the influential voice and the disciplinary engagements of the geographer A.T. Grove. Dick Grove as he came to be known set the tone for the CWEH 2017 conference by connecting the different intellectual journeys of the individual participants (and now contributors to the volume), who at different moments in their research careers were either his students who attended his classes at Cambridge university or had him serve as their doctoral supervisor. The questions that underpin the essays of the contributorsāgeographers, ecologists and a social anthropologistācan be linked to Groveās consuming interest in desert geomorphology, the study of desert landforms and their careful mapping on different parts of the earth.
In terms of the overall sequence of the essays, this volume first introduces Groveās eventful research trajectory and briefly discusses his many influences on the other contributors and in the field of geography in general. It then places the various essays within the larger traditions of geography as a discipline and the implications of the work for understanding several aspects of contemporary politics. Grove was arguably among the first British post Second World War geographers to systematically study and document landforms that were shaped by elemental forces (winds, rivers and lakes) in the Sahel region of west and central Africa and the Kalahari of southern Africa. His studies opened up new disciplinary possibilities by highlighting how cartography was crucial not only in the war effort but also, in providing a methodological context for understanding human and climatic impacts on lands in the newly independent countries of Africa.
Later in his career, Grove moved from his initial interest in the climatological and quaternary geological history of Africa to develop a much wider interest in the regional environmental histories of Africa, the Mediterranean and Southern Europe. This was also the period that saw the emergence of environmental history as a study of āhistoric human interactions with the environmentā not in the way quaternary geologists and archaeologists had hitherto understood the environment. His classic study with Oliver Rackham The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (2001) focused on the complex interplay between the environment and the peoples of the Mediterranean from the earliest times to the present. In it, the authors covered key events in the making of the regionās environmental histories and surveyed many of the environmental impacts that resulted from political and economic developments. The Nature of Mediterranean Europe not only brought together the classical training and ecological history skills of Rackham but also insightfully drew out Groveās climatological interests. Both the authors were, in fact, much influenced by the 1988 publication of The Little Ice Age by Groveās late wife Jean M. Grove. Relying largely on historical archives, The Little Ice Age was one of the earliest and prescient work in global climate history which attempted, for the first time, a world synthesis of glacial fluctuations and human responses during the period 1250ā1900. The Little Ice Age together with Wallace Broeckerās work on deep ocean saline flows, in fact, influenced the Hollywood disaster genre blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow; a film which has helped raise awareness about global warming in the popular imagination (Grove and Damodaran 2006).
Moreover, in the now familiar pattern in which African scholarship appears to have pre-figured global studies, much of J.M. Groveās first published work concerned the colonial environmental history of the Gold Coast and the Volta Delta (Grove and Johansen 1968). Both of these rich scholarly efforts not only influenced a generation of geomorphologists but also offered several compelling research themes for environmental historians, including Groveās son Richard Grove who was to become a pioneering environmental historian in his own right (Grove 1995). A.T. Groveās first research student Claudio Vita-Finzi (1969) published The Mediterranean Valleys: Geological Changes in Historical Times, a work based on North African experience while Andrew Goudie, another early research student, went on to study and widely publish on global human impacts (Goudie 1984). These remarkable intellectual networks established through joint fieldwork experiences, and collaborative research projects in the 1950s and 1960s were to shape the contours of the discipline.
Dick and Jean Grove from 1950 until the 1970s spent long periods away on field trips often with groups of students and their growing family in Norway, Switzerland and Africa. These convivial expeditions provided an unsurpassed learning experience for students who were able to immerse themselves in the joys and the informality of these field trips. Jane, their older daughter remembers travelling long distances to Europe in the 1960s in a Land Rover driven by Dick packed full with family and equipment that included crampons, ice axes and land measuring equipment and meeting up with undergraduate and research students (Powell 2019). Jeremy Keenan in this volume credits his lifelong fascination for the Sahara which he crisscrossed on a camel on several journeys in search of the Tuareg to Dickās undergraduate lectures. In many ways, these insights and some of the key essays in this volume underline the importance of biographical narrative to the history of science and its practices.
The Earth Seen from Above
A.T. Grove had his first airborne flight as an 11-year-old when long-distance aviation pioneer Sir Alan Cobham brought his Flying Circus to the market town of Evesham in south England. The experience proved to be defining and he subsequently went on to develop a deep interest and desire for flying. When Grove was admitted to Cambridge as a geography undergraduate in 1941, Britain was in the middle of the great war. In July of 1940, Hitler had ordered the preparation of a plan to invade Britain, and German aircraft were aggressively bombing ports and airfields along the English Channel. By August, Germans raids involved 1500 aircraft a day and attacks on airfields and radar stations had led to a great loss of RAF aircraft and experienced pilots. By 1941, the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbour and the German declaration of war on the US made the war into a global one (Royde-Smith and Hughes 2018). With the war not going very well for Britain, the RAF needed fresh recruits on an urgent basis. Grove was only too happy to be called up into the Royal Air Force in August 1942. He served in the forces till 1945, when he returned to Cambridge to finish his degree in 1947 (Grove 2010). His flying experience included a stint at the Air Training Corps in Cambridge in 1942; and he was sent to Scarborough where he learnt to fly Tiger Moths before travelling to Canada to serve as an instructor for a flying training school near Winnipeg. While flying, Grove, however, began to observe and record geographical features of the lands below, and found himself often reflecting on the probable dramatic impacts that changes in climate could have brought upon topography and landforms. Flying, in effect, played a crucial part in helping the young Grove to evolve his sensibilities and insights on geography as a discipline.
Later, Grove would become a flying instructor on Tiger Moths and Mosquitoes as well. On several of his solo flights, he was able to watch sandstorms, sand seas and ancient lakebeds, while flying over Africa and elsewhere. These aerial views left a strong impression on the young Grove and he later recalled that his time with the RAF allowed him to appreciate how flying could offer a good impression of the ground. At that time, Grove had not seen aerial photographs, and in his later career as an academic geographer at Cambridge, he would stitch together mosaics of aerial photographs to construct maps which he then further Cross-checked by ground studies. In sum, the experiences with the RAF helped him connect aerial photography and mosaic map making with systematic ground level studies of topographical features.
While Grove was flying Tiger Moths and Mosquitoes, pilots like him were also changing the way Britain saw the world. Geography as an academic discipline in Britain, in particular, after the Second World, was on the cusp of adopting a radical shift in terms of developing new perceptual approaches, mapping techniques and research methodologies. The war provided an urgent context for closely studying different kinds of terrain across the world. World War II, and later the Cold War that ensued, inevitably led to a reconsideration of how landscapes could be viewed by scientific research (Kirsch 2011). War required precise mapping and called for pushing the boundaries of cartographic knowledge for strategic purposes. Enhancing the accuracy of geo-positioning required field occupation or expanding networks beyond national territories. Cross-border surveillance and intelligence gathering posed huge technical and political challenges. The use of long-range weapons required accurate data and knowledge of the terrain. A solution to this difficulty was the development of short range navigationāSHORAN in short formāwhich was an electronic navigation system that used a precision radar beacon to help bombers to identify their geographic positions, navigate, fly and spot targets in the dark or through cloud cover (Cloud 2002). SHORAN, along with aerial photography, was soon recognised as a powerful tool for the post-war development of geography.
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