Forests and Rivers

Unlike other regions of the world that also experience anthropogenically generated environmental problems, Inner Asia is particularly vulnerable to ecological catastrophes. In such a context, scholars of the region – like social scientists elsewhere – extensively use ideas of periodisation to temporally situate analysis of human intervention in the natural world. This article also attends to the temporality of human intervention in Inner Asia’s environment, but it does so within the structure of a much longer chronological framework. In doing so, it argues for more sustained scholarly attention to processes of environmental change in Inner Asia with their roots in the region’s period of imperial history. This argument is made in relation to the longue durée history of water- and forest-use in the Selenge river basin (Mongolia and adjacent Buryatia, Eastern Siberia, Russia).