The White Horse Press is a partner with ICEHO in providing an inspiring space for reflections in our “Notes from the Icehouse”—published in each issue of Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History—and granting free digital access to Underwriters and Supporters of the Icehouse.
Environmental History’s Usable Past: On Reviving the Scholarship of Synthesis
By Jonatan Palmblad
It was the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana who observed that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. Frequently invoked, if often unattributed, this aphorism gives credit to the work of historians even in times when usefulness is commonly equated with innovation and invention.
Volume 17, number 3, 2024
Facing Environmental Denialism: Lessons from the Bolsonaro Nightmare
By José Augusto Pádua
In October 2022, I cancelled a trip abroad and reduced my professional schedule to a minimum. I felt compelled to contribute in some way to Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in both rounds of Brazil’s upcoming presidential election. It was the first time I had taken such a decisive electoral stance.
Volume 17, number 2, 2024
Inequalities in the Land: Colonial Legacies and the Quest for Land Equity in Zimbabwe
By Admire mseba
In Zimbabwe, and other former settler colonies, unequal rights to land are broadly attributed to colonial dispossession and racial inequality. This is for a good reason. Settler colonial states took land from indigenous peoples and distributed it to white settlers.
Volume 17, number 1, 2024
Representations, Traces, Vital Agents: Why Images Matter to Environmental History
By Finis Dunaway
Too often, historians treat images either as inert illustrations that offer nothing more than objective records of reality or as passive mir-rors that merely reflect the past. By approaching them as represen-tations, traces and vital agents, historians can instead use them as primary sources to consider how images played an active role in the making of the environmental past.
Volume 16, number 3, 2023
What’s in a Name? More-Than-Human Approaches and Environmental History
By Emily O’Gorman
On several occasions I have been asked whether an explicitly more-than-human approach leads to new and different conclusions, or whether it simply describes something environmen-tal historians are already doing? Is there any value for the field in the term ‘more-than-human histories’? Or is it just unhelpful jargon? I have been reflecting on these questions over the last few months.
Volume 16, number 2, 2023
Mixed Methods, Dry Valleys, New Insights
By Stephen Chignell
The McMurdo Dry Valleys are a polar desert and the largest ice- free region of Antarctica. They were discovered in 1903 on the first expedition of British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who, seeing the bare rock and lack of plants, called the area ‘a valley of the dead’.
Volume 16, number 1, 2023
Navigating Transformations and Transdisciplinarity in Northern Finland
By Roger Norum
‘Maps are for tourists’, Juha pronounced, his mouth slowly turn- ing up in his trademark wry smile. We had just splayed a brand-new Tyvek geological survey chart of Kilpisjärvi, Finland across the pine table in front of us. Juha stepped back from the map and gave it a quizzical look.
Juha had been a reindeer herder for his entire life, and had never needed a map to help navigate the tussocks and meadows of his homeland. He slowly scanned the smooth Tyvek. Within a minute, he pointed out two errors on it: one, the misnaming of a minor fell; another, the incorrect term used to signify a lake.
Volume 15, number 3, 2022
Tigers, The Magic School Bus and Uncertainty
by Claire Campbell
My son wants to save the tigers.
My son is eight and, for the past three months or so, he has been very interested in tigers. A tiger poster hangs over his bed; a small framed print of a tiger sits on his bedside table. He watches videos of tigers, and lions, and cheetahs, on YouTube. He has taken out every book on the big cats available in our two nearest public librar- ies. He takes notes. (He’s in second grade. I can’t get my university students to do this.) As a result, he knows that tigers are endangered worldwide; the books he reads all mention this.
Volume 15, number 2, June 2022
Research in Theory and Practice
by Jules Reynolds
In June 2019 I traveled to rural Malawi for six weeks to con- duct preliminary dissertation research. I set out with confidence. I had, after all, checked off all the right boxes. Two years before I had successfully completed field work in South Africa (Reynolds, 2018; Reynolds, 2021). Now I was returning to another part of the conti- nent, to a village in which I had previously conducted community outreach activities in partnership with a local nonprofit.
Volume 15, number 1, March 2022
Ecotone Scholarship and Structural Change
BY SHANNON STUNDEN BOWER
In spring 2011, environmental historians and historical geographers gathered in southern Ontario. Their meeting was organised by the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) to discuss the current state and anticipated development of historical scholarship that takes nonhuman nature seriously. . . . Over a few days, participants reflected on the characteristics of Canadian environmental history and that field’s relation to international environmental history. …
Volume 14, number 3, September 2021
Unequal Knowledge
Justice, Colonialism, and Expertise in Global Environmental Research
BY WILLIAM SAN MARTÍN
Academic knowledge production depends on everyday tasks, from securing resources and employment to building arguments for research agendas. Viewing science and other fields of knowledge production in this way opens up a series of questions about the complex social and institutional arrangements that structure academic labour (Hackett et al. 2016). These arrangements define how, where and when researchers interact, how disciplines are defined, and how expertise, methods and conventions are recognised and endorsed …
Volume 14, number 2, July 2021
Opening a technical field
Ecological restoration, local knowledge and citizen science
by Stefan Dorondel
I write this short piece as the second wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic begins in Romania. It is too early to be certain about the causes of the pandemic, but several scholars have suggested climate change and accelerated environmental degradation as possible expla- nations. Human encroachments, they say, have subjected ecosystems to new stresses and produced devastating outcomes. If this is so, eco- logical restoration and nature conservation could help to reduce our exposure to suddenly-threatening zoonotic viruses by mitigating environmental change …
Volume 14, number 1, February 2021
An Environmental History Perspective on the UN agenda 2030 (‘Sustainable Development Goals’)
By Verena Winiwarter
In 2015, the UN adopted an Agenda to transform the world by ensuring sustainable development. In consultations with lay peo- ple and experts, seventeen goals covering important aspects of so- cial, ecological and economic sustainability were defined. The inter- linked goals are broken into 169 targets, and are monitored using more than 200 indicators. Official depictions show them as a set of brightly-coloured quadrangles on a white background …
Volume 13, Number 3, October 2020
Academics in Action: The Legacies of ICEHO's First Two World Congresses
By Jane Carruthers
It is just over a decade since the emergent International Consortium of En- vironmental History Organizations (ICEHO) hosted the First World Congress of Environmental History in Copenhagen in August 2009. So great was its suc- cess that ICEHO gained immediate recognition as a bright new star in the inter- national constellation of scholarly bodies. The most obvious legacy of this first WCEH was the formation of a robust formal international consortium of regional and specialist environmental history societies ...
Volume 13, Number 2, June 2020
On Place and Politics in the Global Environment
By Graeme Wynn
Back from the very successful Third World Congress of Environmental His- tory, convened in July 2019 in Florianopolis, Brazil, by Eunice Nodari and her excellent team, and contemplating the future of ICEHO, my mind was full of the place we had been, the gist of two conference keynote sessions, and various musings about the nature of historical practice…
Volume 13, Number 1, March 2020
Inaugural Piece: Notes from the ICEHOUSE
by Graeme Wynn
With this feature, we inaugurate a new collaboration between Global Envi- ronment/ The White Horse Press and the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations. ‘The ICEHOUSE Society’ is a vehicle to further the reach and significance of ICEHO. Described succinctly, it is ‘a place’ for friends of ICEHO to come together, to allow us to reach out beyond our base of member organisations to individual environmental historians (and like-minded people) to better serve this important constituency. …
Volume 13, Number 1, March 2020