William Beinart is Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, University of Oxford; JoAnn McGregor is Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Reading

...will be assiduously mined by lecturers and students iin Europe and North America for years to come, and should be widely read and discussed, both among scholars of Africa and more generally. Will you see an aid bureaucrat perusing them in some departure lounge, or an undergraduate under a tree on an African campus? It would be good if you did, for this is part of the readership they deserve.

• Introduction by William Beinart & JoAnn McGregor I AFRICAN ENVIRONMENTAL IDEAS & PRACTICES Hidden fruits: a social ecology of fruit trees in Namibia & Angola, 1880s- 1990s by Emmanuel Kreike - The ironies of plant transfer: the case of prickly pear in Madagascar by Karen Middleton - Environmental data & historical process: historical climatic reconstruction & the Mutapa State, 1450-1862 AD by Innocent Pikirayi - Women & environment in African religion: the case of Zimbabwe by Terence Ranger - Living with the river: landscape & memory in the Zambesi valley, northwest Zimbabwe by JoAnn McGregor II COLONIAL SCIENCE, THE STATE & AFRICAN RESPONSES African environments & environmental sciences: the African Research Survey, ecological paradigms & British colonial development, 1920-1940 by Helen Tilley - Soil conservation policies in colonial Kigezi, Uganda: successful implementation & an absence of resistance by Grace Carswell - Conservation & resistance in colonial Malawi: the 'dead north' revisited by John McCracken - Representations of custom, social identity & environmental relations in Central Tanzania, 1926-1950 by Ingrid Yngstrom III SETTLERS & AFRICANS; CULTURE & NATURE An unnatural state: tourism, water & wildlife photography in the early Kruger National Park by David Bunn - The ant of the white soul: popular natural history & the politics of Afrikaner identity, with reference to the entomological writings of Eugene Marais by Sandra Swart - Fido: Dog tales of colonialism in Namibia by Robert J. Gordon - Past & future landscape ideology: the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park by Jane Carruthers