There may appear to be little point in an “outsider” attempting to write about the censorship of the historical record. Those employed to vet official records in Great Britain perform their task behind closed doors; and since even the titles of the files they continue to withhold are often kept a secret, scholars have little opportunity to question their decisions. As editor of the Central Africa volume of the British Documents on the End of Empire project (BDEEP), my own status is certainly that of an outsider. Established in 1987, BDEEP seeks to make available an edited and annotated selection of British government documents from The National Archives (TNA), formerly the Public Record Office, charting developments in colonial policy during the decolonisation era. Yet although its volumes are published by the Stationery Office, BDEEP is emphatically not an official publication.

This large collection is important to the history of science. Homer L. Shantz was one of the pioneers of environmental studies of vegetation, soils and available moisture over large regions. He studied the effects of erosion, increased salinity and alkalinity of soils and the damage that could be caused by introduced vegetation. His work is at the foundation of the environmental ‘engineering’ efforts of the 1960s and later.

Homer L. Shantz was born in Michigan in 1876. He was educated at Colorado College and received a doctorate at the University of Nebraska in 1905 where he first began environmental surveys from the Botany Department. He was then employed by the Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Plant Industry, during the first decades of the 1900's, where he worked for the Land Classification Board.