ICEHO Stories
“Beautiful, Beautiful Copenhagen”: My adventures at the first WCEH
By Edward McDonald
No, this is not a musical. Definitely not a musical. It is an airing of some dusty memories. The fourth WCEH conjures memories of the first, in Copenhagen in August 2009. I was a minor player (so minor that my paper on tourism and environment was actually presented in Malmö, Sweden – a very nice place, by the way), but I was there. What’s left in my memory bank fifteen years later? And what interest has it earned? Let’s see. . . .
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
By Graeme Wynn
When Claire Campbell asked me to reflect on the importance of the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO) and its quinquennial World Congress (WCEH) in this series of blog posts, I had little room to manoeuvre. I have been President of ICEHO for the last five years, and I have been closely involved in every WCEH (including the fourth, coming up in Oulu, Finland, August 18–23, this year). But I was soon wondering why I didn’t “just say no'' to Claire. After several despairing days I found myself obsessing— in this respect alone, like the great Canadian narrative historian Donald Creighton – about “when to begin and how.” The “when” seemed reasonably straightforward: ICEHO began in 2009 (or, it turned out, thereabouts, perhaps). But “how” to find a “hook”, something to make an administrative/organizational history of two relatively recently emerged entities worth reading? I was at a loss. . . .
Visualizing A Sustainable Energy Future
By Cutler J. Cleveland and Heather Clifford
We are in the early stages of a seismic energy transition. Such transitions coincide with major shifts in human well-being and the health of the Earth’s natural systems. The discovery of fire and the agricultural revolution dramatically improved food security, lengthening life expectancy and enabling the population to expand. The Industrial Revolution was powered by the steam engine and accelerated by the internal combustion engine and other devices that use fossil fuels. Average individual well-being improved dramatically while the overall population grew eightfold since 1800. . . .
Knitting the Climate Crisis: Verena Winiwarter Uses Handicraft to Make Complex Science Tangible
By Patricia McAllister-Käfer
As she arrives on this summer morning in a café in Vienna’s Wieden district, Verena Winiwarter is not in a good mood. The environmental historian is just back from visiting the ski resort Galtür in Tyrol, along with journalists. There, the 59-year-old says, you can see the Jamtalferner – one of the few remaining glaciers in the eastern Alps – melting before your eyes. Disappearing glaciers, species going extinct, catastrophic forest fires – researchers like Winiwarter are recording these huge losses, which affect all of humanity, in their local environments. “I am one of those people who feel emotionally caught up,” Winiwarter says. . . .
Hi-Vis Futures: Art for Climate Justice
By Libby Robin
It is still not easy to talk about climate change in Australia. Publicly funded arts institutions in the “GLAM” sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) are struggling with major funding cuts, year after year, and even the Australian Research Council grants, which are peer-reviewed, have been subject to interference by ideologically-committed politicians, who regard both the arts and climate change as “leftist” causes. Governments led or controlled by vested fossil fuel interests, climate change denialists and their fellow-travellers, have been the norm for the past six years. . . .
Epidemics & Ecologies: Reading in the Time of COVID-19
By William San Martín, Alexandra Vlachos, and Graeme Wynn
As citizens around the globe face restrictions on movement, long periods of isolation, and rolling (almost incessant) news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, we thought that this might be a good time to pause and think (and read and reflect). We are in one of the greatest public health and economic crises in living memory (one of the last survivors of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Hilda Churchill died from the coronavirus in the UK on 28 March 2020). In many ways . . .
To be, or not to be, there?
By Graeme Wynn
Environmental historians live in difficult times. As governments declare climate emergencies (rather than acting decisively to alleviate them) and citizens grow increasingly concerned about global climate change, it seems that we are particularly vulnerable to “flight-shaming.” You may cycle and recycle, sort your garbage, drive an EV, turn out the lights on leaving the room, even plant a tree or two, but how can you call yourself an environmental historian and continue to travel across the globe? Such questions were in the air at the recent World Congress of Environmental History. . . .
A Compelling Tale with Implications for Research: Robert Bilott’s Plenary Talk at WCEH2019
By Lisa Mighetto
Robert Bilott is a partner at the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, LLP in Cincinnati, Ohio where he has practiced environmental law and litigation for more than twenty-eight years. He has been selected as one of the Best Lawyers in America for several years running and has received numerous honors for his work in environmental law and litigation. Rob is a former chair of the Cincinnati Bar Association’s Environmental Law Committee and a graduate of New College in Sarasota, Florida (BA) and the Ohio State University College of Law (JD, cum laude). In 2017, Rob received the international Right Livelihood Award, commonly known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” for his years of work on PFOA. The title of his Plenary at WCEH 3 was . . .
Birds on the Wing: Environmental History in Europe, and Beyond
By Graeme Wynn
The rising enthusiasm for environmental history among European (and other) scholars should be of interest to – and perhaps concern for – historical geographers. Fifteen years ago, a handful of scholars, aware of the growth of environmental history in the United States and concerned about the relatively low profile of the field in Europe, founded the European Society for Environmental History. The organization’s first biennial conference, attended by slightly more than 100 people, was held in St Andrew’s, Scotland, in 2001. A dozen years later . . .
The State of the Art of Brazilian Environmental History
By Regina Horta Duarte
Two international events held roughly ten years apart signal that environmental history in Brazil is flourishing. In May 2008, the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte hosted the 4thSymposium of the Latin American and Caribbean Society of Environmental History (SOLCHA), attended by over 200 scholars from Latin America, Spain, Canada, the United States, England, India and South Africa. In July 2019, the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Florianopolis received some 400 researchers from around the globe for the Third World Congress of Environmental History, sponsored by the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO). Brazil was able to . . .
Appraising the Anthropocene
By Graeme Wynn
The Anthropocene. We live in it. We hear about it. We worry about it. But what, exactly, is it? Baby boomers, Gen Xers and older Millennials may recognize it (or at least the word for it) as a relatively recent coinage. By common account “The Anthropocene” became a thing 20 years ago, when the Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term at a meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme to recognize the accelerating impact of human activities on earth system processes. Two decades on, it is impossible to . . .
50th Anniversary of Earth Day
Today is Earth Day – the 50th since the inaugural event about which Adam Rome wrote The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York; Hill and Wang, 2013). To mark this half-century we point you to an annotated list of 365 books to start your climate change library, compiled and published in 2019 in Literary Hub Daily . . .
A Rewarding Experience in Many Ways: The 3rd World Congress of Environmental History
By Verena Winiwarter
A huge effort goes into the preparation and hosting of a World Congress. Preparations start years in advance and holding such a conference needs the dedication of the program committee members, the members of the local arrangements team and that of all the contributors to the program, be they chairs, commentators or presenters. The first ever World Congress for Environmental History . . .
Small Publishing in the Time of COVID
By Sarah Johnson
I am sitting looking out of my study window at a red kite sweeping across the brightest blue sky to its nest in a Scots pine tree; cow parsley is in its full frothy glory in the field, blossom is humming with bees and the lime and ash trees are dressed in the new-minted green that epitomises an English rural May. But this is a May the like of which none of us has known. The American naturalist Edwin Way Teale wrote of the season’s joyfulness and energy: ‘All things seem possible in May’, but now we are living amid the impossible. The spectre of COVID-19 stalking across the globe, anxiety for our loved ones and colleagues throughout the world, the pressures of home-schooling children and the deep foreboding about socio-economic consequences that seem likely to spiral out for years to come . . .
Environmental History in Romania: The Travail of a Scientific Field
By Stefan Dorondel
To write about environmental history as an independent epistemological field in Romania could be a task accomplished within minutes. This statement is rigorously true only if we consider environmental history as a field of scientific inquiry without taking into account works from related disciplines such as geography or anthropology. Even enlarging the range to encompass other disciplines that include works that attempt to study the intersections between the environment and society does not yield tremendously numerous results. In the following pages . . .
Ecological Networks and Transfers across the Indian Ocean in the Age of Empire
By Ulrike Kirchberger
The Indian Ocean has always been a space of ecological exchange. People, plants and animals crossed it and transformed the natural environments of Africa, Asia and Australia over long periods of time. In the nineteenth century, when European colonial powers expanded their influence, these exchanges increased. Humans and nonhumans moved across the ocean to an unprecedented degree. The introduction of the steamship and the telegraph facilitated and accelerated these migrations. Colonists shipped cattle, horses and sheep between the three continents. Australian eucalypts and acacias were . . .
Water History Flowing Away
By Maurits Ertsen
Wednesday June 24 2020 was a nice day. Representatives from the Global Network of Water Museums, the LDE Center for Global Heritage and Development, and the International Water History Association engaged in an online discussion on water heritage. Starting from the idea that the importance of water for humankind has never been doubted – that water has long featured in many societal domains, from policy development to engineering, and from archaeology to the natural sciences and the creative arts – the organizers of the debate suggested . . .
Environmental History is Everywhere
We noticed, recently, the following essays on the Aeon+Pysche website, each and all of which provide thought-provoking reading for environmental historians and others. Notable are their range – in time, from the Ancient World to the present; in space from Colorado to the Mediterranean and beyond; and in the background of their authors, from classics and natural history through the philosophy of science, to creative writing. Together these pieces affirm the value of speaking – as Thoreau had it – “a word for nature.”
Linking Climate Pasts and Futures
What can we learn from the climate futures that people expected, hoped, or feared in the past? As Historian Ruth Morgan reminds us, “the future, after all, is always as much about the past as it is the present.” In these two talks, Professor Morgan reflects on the place of history, archives, and past knowledge in directing our climate futures. Learning from the uncertainties, disasters, and possibilities of our past can help us imagine new futures.