ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF ADWA WÄRÄDA FROM 1941-2000

BERHANE, TESFAMARIAM

dc.contributor.author	BERHANE, TESFAMARIAM
dc.date.accessioned	2018-11-12T08:12:18Z
dc.date.available	2018-11-12T08:12:18Z
dc.date.issued	2018-11-12
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/9153
dc.description.abstract	n general, environmental history refers to the history of interaction of human communities with the natural world. It studies all about peoples and places, flora and fauna, soils and waters, fire and steel, growth and decay etc. It is a multidisciplinary subject which comprehends multiplicity issues like geography, health, agriculture, history, chemistry, ecology, biology and forestry. Several scholars produced a lot of researches and working papers related with the field particularly in the last three and four decades. For this reason the focus on environment began to become one of the hot issues of our globe even though the changes are not as expected and dramatic. It is from this aspect that the thesis focused on examining the historical outline of Adwa Wäräda from 1941-2000. The main objective of the study is identifying the causes and the impacts of environmental changes as well as the different mitigation measures taken by the government and the people in the period under study. The study area is one of the resourceful areas in water availability and forest coverage. However, the water content of the district reduced from time to time. Rivers shrink down flow and dry-up. Several factors attributed for the environmental decline including demographic pressure, land tenure system, deforestation, poor land management system, the backward agricultural system and so on. Hence after, the environmental changes negatively affected the livelihood of the people including vulnerability to uncertain rainfall, flood and scarcity of fodder, growing crisis in wild animals, diseases, and disturbance in water resources. In order to alleviate the situation the people and the government in collaboration with the non-governmental organizations practiced modern and traditional conservation techniques. The one and memorable activity was the food-for-work project of Därg. As a result, different governmental and non-governmental organizations had intervened and take role in the rehabilitation activity. The conservation activities include tree planting, construct bund construction, terraces and micro-basins, building watershed and check-dams. However, it was not equivalent with the volume of degradation of the natural resource and the result was not satisfactory. These all changes were, therefore, brought from the unsustainable agricultural practices which have been practiced since human settled in the area. Partly the misuse of natural resource by the people was also took part in the degradation process. Famine and drought became common. Thereby, peoples forced to dislocate and resettled in different parts of the country. The forests were dramatically transformed in to croplands, settlement, and grazing fields within few years. These environmental changes brought different human and animal diseases. Rinderpest and Anthrax were the dominant diseases that swept the cattle population during the 1950s and 1960s. Malaria, cholera, diarrhea, smallpox, and meningitis were also other killer diseases that suffered and took the lives of many people in the district. All these become hindrance for the p	en_US
dc.language.iso	en	en_US
dc.subject	OF HISTORY	en_US
dc.title	ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF ADWA WÄRÄDA FROM 1941-2000	en_US
dc.type	Thesis	en_US