Landscapes of Caste Exclusion: Rethinking Forests and Fields in South Asian Environmental History

Water, Bodies, Space:New Directions in World Environmental History Jack Bouchard Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire. By faisal husain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 278 pp. ISBN 9780197547274. $35.00 (hardcover); $35.00 (ebook). An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic. By kate luce mulry. New York: New York University Press, 2021. 362 pp. ISBN 978-1-4798-9526-7. $35.00 (hardcover); $35.00 (ebook). Mapping Nature Across the Americas. Edited by kathleen a. brosnan. and james r. akerman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. xii + 416 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-69643-0. $70.00 (hardcover); $69.99 (ebook). Sometimes it is the sudden intrusion of new questions, and the unexpected perspectives they offer, into the field of World History which has galvanized efforts to push our work and teaching forward in new directions. What does the Ottoman Empire look like from the viewpoint of a marsh in southern Iraq? How could England's Charles II dream of improving his subject's physical health in eastern England by radically transforming the landscape in which they lived? What does an Indigenous place-name on a European colonial map signify, and what can that tell us about local ecologies? These are some of the inquiries posed by a new generation of environmental historians, and they speak to the potential for their works to change how we study the past on a global scale. We are living through a transformative moment in the field of environmental history. The climate crisis has catalyzed both a surge in interest and a revolution in methods. Not only are more and more [End Page 133] explicitly "environmental history" studies appearing on the market, but increasingly other fields are producing works with an environmental inflection. A proper survey of recent publications in environmental history is becoming increasingly untenable, given the volume of output, such that to understand these transformations it is useful to examine the edges of the field, the places where scholars are pushing into new subject, methods, and conceptual approaches. Three new works offer a snapshot of the evolving field, and its potential to contribute to world history: Faisal Husain's Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire; Kate Luce Mulry's An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic; and Mapping Nature Across the Americas, a collected volume edited by Kathleen A. Brosnan and James R. Akerman. ________ Faisal Husain's Rivers of the Sultan is a wonderful addition to global environmental history, and a welcome contribution to histories of the Mideast and early modern empires. Of the three works, Husain's is perhaps the most explicitly environmental but also the most ambitious in its methods, combining several overlapping environmental history approaches. Rivers of the Sultan explores the history of the Tigris-Euphrates basin from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. As Husain argues, historians have treated these waterways as "dismembered bodies," a practice which flies in the face of science, historical memory, and the behavior of states. This new study instead "[adopts] a hydro-scale that considers the fluvial system as a continuous whole. Unified under Ottoman hegemony, the natural drainage pattern of the twin rivers fostered intimate bonds between upstream and downstream provinces, transporting not only water and sediment but also boatloads of men, guns, and grain that cemented the Ottoman presence in the east" (p. 5). This builds on recent advancements in water history, and a push for more river-stories in our literature.1 Such an integrative approach allows him to explain the ways that regional hydrographies and ecologies were exploited by, and thwarted, the Ottoman state: "From the sixteenth century, Istanbul put this natural [End Page 134] waterwheel to work for the benefit of its imperial project" (p. 3). We are meant to see empire from the perspective of a riverbank, and the view upends how historians have spatially oriented Ottoman history. Husain's work is divided into three parts. Part I, "The Amphibious State," examines the problem of fortification and shipbuilding in the Ottoman Empire and Tigris-Euphrates basin more broadly to understand the practical...

South Africa's Environmental History: Cases and Comparisons. Edited by Stephen Dovers, Ruth Edgecombe, and Bill Guest. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003, and Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Pp. ix, 326. $24.95 paper. This book has its origins in a 1996 meeting of environmental historians at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Whether intentionally or otherwise, the collection serves as a festschrift to the late Ruth Edgecombe, one of the prime movers behind both that meeting and this subsequent volume. Ruth died of cancer in 2001. Her death robbed South African environmental history of one of its pioneers and leaders at a time when she was still brimming with ideas and enthusiasm in a field still very much in need of champions. The book also serves as a gauge of both the promise and fragility of the scholarly environmental history enterprise in South Africa, surely one of the most exciting physical and social contexts in which to do environmental history research. The environmental impact of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid; the role of an often difficult natural environment in shaping the country's social, economic, and political history; the manifestation of social and political conflict in struggles over resources and territory-these are rich fields for environmental historians to plough. The book makes no claims to be comprehensive, and instead comprises an ultimately frustrating combination of detailed local case studies and broad-brush overviews and comparisons. Geographically, there is something of a KwazuluNatal bias, likely a reflection of Ruth's own professional base and her significant influence on the field of environmental history as practiced by both professional and amateur historians. This bias gives the book a particularism, even parochialism, that makes it perhaps less attractive to a general and especially a non-South African readership. This is countered somewhat by the inclusion of leading international scholars in environmental history such as Nancy Jacobs and Ravi Rajan, although neither the international comparisons nor the application to the South African case of theories formulated in other sociohistorical contexts rings entirely true. The strongest chapters are those by Sean Archer on windmills and wire in the Karoo, Lance van Sittert on the invasion of prickly pear in the Eastern Cape, and William Beinart locating South African environmental history in the African context. Beinart's commentary on South African environmental history as a whole applies equally to this book: Where are the studies of African people's environmental knowledge and practices? …

Reviewed by: Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History by Nathaniel Osborn Christopher M. Church Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History. By Nathaniel Osborn. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2016. Pp. xii, 210. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-6161-0.) Rejecting the declensionist narratives pitting humanity against a pristine environment that often characterize environmental histories, Nathaniel Osborn deftly explores the ecological history of Florida’s Indian River Lagoon—a water system along Florida’s Treasure Coast once teeming with wildlife but now plagued by algae blooms and lesioned fish. Osborn describes the lagoon as “a complex system that has at various times been conducive and hostile to animal and plant health” (p. 3). Central to his story is the interaction of humanity with this ecosystem from the pre-Columbian era to the present. This environment engendered conflict between Native Americans and Europeans and, eventually, boosters and settlers. The Indian River ecosystem provided as often as it took away, and Osborn’s central point is that humanity does not stand apart from nature. Humans are not external destroyers of pristine systems but are part of, and contribute to, nature’s roiling instability. As Osborn explains in chapter 2, the waterway has always been unpredictable. The lagoon’s location at the boundary between salt water and the inland watershed, as well as between Florida’s subtropical and the South’s temperate climate, has historically led to massive plant and animal die-offs due to wide swings in salinity and temperature. In a departure from fellow Floridian historians such as David McCally and Jack E. Davis, who have suggested that restoration efforts could return Florida’s waterways to some Edenic state, Osborn shows that no original state existed to which one [End Page 192] could restore the Indian River Lagoon. As an interstitial ecosystem, the waterway has shifted and changed, with and without the interference of humanity, over centuries. Osborn does not lose sight of the ecological impact of humanity, however, whose movement from a transitory to a sedentary lifestyle and concomitant population growth amplified the lagoon’s instability. In his treatment of the region’s industrial and commercial development in chapters 3 and 4, Osborn situates these historical developments as internal to the system rather than as external influences, arguing that Anglo settlers’ ambitions to exploit the region’s fantastic aviaries and fisheries influenced the lagoon as much as the settlers themselves were influenced by the environment. Perversely, it was precisely settlers’ attempts to stabilize the inherently unstable hydrologic system that sapped it of its health. Ultimately, the story takes a tragic turn in chapter 5, when rapid postwar growth, spurred by air conditioning and insect control, hastened the lagoon’s deterioration and dramatically altered its nature through residential construction and gentrification. With an eye toward the region’s several failed remediation projects, Osborn concludes with some difficult and rather fatalistic questions about how and whether humanity can fix a permanently transitional ecological body. Somewhat dismally, he offers no clear solution. Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History makes interventions that are well established within the field of environmental history, and though they bear repeating for Florida, Osborn’s work is generally light on historiography—he does not note the important work of William Cronon or William M. Denevan on the myth of pristine nature, for instance. Nevertheless, Osborn’s work speaks to current political discussions in Florida; his prose is accessible to nonspecialists; and his claims are firmly established through governmental reports, contemporary periodicals, published primary sources, and the substantive use of secondary literature. Osborn also does an admirable job pulling together insights from a variety of disciplines, namely, archaeology, geography, and environmental science. At just over two hundred pages, Indian River Lagoon does not dwell on any one topic for long, but it is nonetheless a clear, succinct look at the mutability of Florida’s wetlands that should be of interest to a general educated public and be particularly well suited for use in undergraduate classrooms. Christopher M. Church University of Nevada, Reno Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

To the casual observer, the topic of mining history is a natural fit with the field of environmental history. Mining, after all, has caused massive landscape changes; mines and their downstream production facilities are responsible for large-scale air, water, and soil pollution problems. After mines close, they are very often the focus of complex environmental remediation projects, some of which raise new pollution risks and trade-offs for nearby communities, all potential fodder for the work of environmental historians. Furthermore, scholars and popular historians have published a vast amount of mining history focused on themes such as labor, the social life of mining towns, mine accidents, and business history. Many of these works are local histories that concentrate on an individual mine, a particular labor dispute, or a single mining company. In terms of genre, these works have taken the form of memoirs (authored by prospectors or individual miners), oral histories, commissioned company histories, and scholarly works, all valuable scaffolding on which to build environmental histories. Nonetheless, the vast majority of environmental histories of mining have been published only since 2010 (a reflection, perhaps, of the field’s slow movement away from themes such as wildlife conservation and natural parks toward more research on industrial landscapes). In a relatively short time, however, environmental historians have pushed the field of mining history into multiple new thematic areas: the immense power of the mining industry to radically alter landscapes; the expansion of colonial frontiers and the dispossession of subsistence-oriented Indigenous communities from their local landscapes; the struggles of workers and communities against industrial pollution and disease; and studies of environmental changes within broad sectors of the mining industry (i.e., coal, uranium, nickel, copper, etc.). All of this work has helped historians better understand the material foundations—and the immense environmental costs—associated with the great acceleration of industrial production and consumption that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. In terms of geographic representation, environmental historians have produced work on mining from across the globe, but a disproportionate number of studies have concentrated on the United States and Canada, a reflection of the broader dominance of US scholars in the field of environmental history, and also the recent surge of interest among Canadian scholars in resource development and Indigenous communities. One note to those who are using this article: the boundaries between the categories outlined below are very porous. Very often authors of book-length histories of individual mines will touch on a variety of themes, including pollution, occupational health, colonialism, and Indigenous people. For each work, efforts have been made to find the best thematic fit, and, where there is crossover with other sections, it is so noted. The works are divided thematically because alternative approaches, such as using political boundaries or dividing by the type of material mined, would have resulted in the grouping of very disparate works in a somewhat artificial way. Ultimately, the goal has been to show the way that even very local mining histories speak to themes that are linked through networks of mining knowledge and practice that are global in nature.

The Impact of Human-Environmental Interactions. From the Columbian Exchange beginning in 1492, the development of slavery as a Southern institution, and the westward movement to the dust bowl, the Endangered Species Act, and the destruction caused by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, human interaction with the environment in America has been continuous, open-ended, and dynamic. How communities and individuals have used land, water, and natural resources has profoundly shaped U.S. history, influencing settlement patterns, social relations, cultural life, economic systems, and political institutions. In the past generation, scholars have examined these human-environmental interactions in myriad ways, giving birth to the exciting, new field of environmental history. By shedding light on new issues and recasting familiar views of major events and developments in our nation's past, environmental historians have reinterpreted American history in a way that is gripping, immediate, and timely. Definitive Coverage of Every Aspect of Environmental History The essential reference to this critical topic and the only work of its kind, the four-volume Encyclopedia of American Environmental History begins with eight broad thematic essays, which highlight the major issues and topics in environmental history and serve as an entryway to other, more specific articles throughout the reference. Arranged alphabetically, more than 750 articles cover every significant issue, event, law, and figure in U.S. environmental history. All articles are written and signed by leading environmental historians, scholars, and experts, many of them members of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). The Board of Advisers is composed of a wide array of distinguished historians, and many of them are ASEH founders and members. Useful reference features include 200 illustrations, 100 original documents, 80 maps, 20 charts, a master chronology, bibliography, and an index.

As Robert Wilson describes in his Oxford Bibliographies in Geography article “Environmental History” the field of environmental history has grown to be a relatively amorphous one. Having emerged from a growing global environmental consciousness during the 1960s and 1970s, which encouraged scholars and others to consider the intersections between society and the environment, it is now a multifaceted discipline that covers innumerable aspects of the environmental past. In Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, major works of identifiable environmental history proliferated from the 1990s, with many of these histories influenced considerably by the consequences of Anglo-European settlement on the environments of both countries. Arguably more so than in other geographical locations, the environmental histories of Australia and Aotearoa have been shaped and thus engage with histories of settler colonialism, conquest, and the ensuing environmental changes created by these processes. So too are they shaped by the environments’ own influence on settler identity. This has ensured that, at times, environmental history across these geographies has been markedly policy oriented, geared toward addressing key contemporary debates over the environment and various associated issues. The focus on policy-oriented historical questions has placed the environmental histories of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in conversation with the broader ecological humanities, as is reflected in the field’s emergence out of discussions relating to forestry and the impact of scholars such as Deborah Bird Rose and Libby Robin. More recently, environmental history has moved toward the environmental humanities, which is less ecologically focused and encompasses a broad range of approaches to understand and historicize the environment and peoples’ relationships to it. It is important to note that, despite the temptation to consider the environmental histories of Australia and Aotearoa together—due in large part to their geographical proximity—these countries have fostered markedly distinct fields. This annotated bibliography reflects both their similarities and differences.

Introductory Note to Bibliography of Atlantic Canadian Environmental History Teresa Devor Hall (bio) THE FIELD OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY is still relatively young in Canada, where scholarship explicitly focused on the mutual relations of humans and the rest of nature only became firmly established in the 21st century.1 Yet Canadian historical geographers and historians had already established traditions of inquiry into the relations between people and natural environments. For example, scholars analysed the development of modern Canada in the context of staple trades and the role of hinterland and metropolis in the distribution of resources, population, and finance.2 This bibliography recognizes a lineage of “environmental (or environmentally aware) history in Atlantic Canada” in its tracing of three generations of scholarship, starting with texts by William Francis Ganong, Harold Innis, Arthur Lower, and Andrew Hill Clark.3 Early works tended to treat nature deterministically, as a backdrop or obstacle presenting limits to human will and action, or as primarily a source of staples such as codfish and lumber, rather than as dynamic partner in the making of human communities, industries, and daily life.4 The next generation of scholarship represented in this bibliography emerged in the 1970s. Researchers sought to understand the transformation of particular spaces (geographical), places (cultural), and structures (economic and political) in Atlantic Canada while engaging earlier work and exploring the larger implications of close, bounded studies.5 Some practitioners, including historical geographer Graeme Wynn, described the transformations that humans wrought to the [End Page 163] landscapes that sustained them. But environmental history was not a significant area of exploration for historical geographers or other scholars of the region.6 This bibliography is, primarily, a testament to the f luorescence of environmental history within regional scholarship over the past two decades. Scholars continue to build on the themes and approaches in previous writings while drawing on new intellectual frameworks, and responding to contemporary ecological, scientific, cultural, social, economic, and political developments. These texts reflect theoretical work, including American historian Donald Worster’s tripartite explanation of the field as focusing on “nature, socioeconomic relations with nature, and intellectual and cultural relations with nature.”7 The latter two categories are especially well-represented in the historiography, much of which focuses on fishing, agriculture, and forestry. Most of the French-language Acadian history titles in the pages that follow centre on these three areas of study. Yet regional scholars have also made significant contributions to topics in environmental history, including national parks and heritage sites, environmental movements, natural history, the ecological knowledge of Indigenous and settler inhabitants, transportation, cultural representation, and climate history.8 This predominantly English-language bibliography represents a preliminary survey of over 100 years of inquiry into nature-society dynamics in the region’s past. The author’s choice to cast a wide net in the search for titles reflects a desire to represent the living environmental history of the region’s inhabitants, many of whom have a deep lived experience of interdependence with nature. The inclusion of titles in popular history, Indigenous history, and natural history demonstrates approaches and topics that can effectively foreground our mutual interrelatedness.9 A broad conceptualization of the field thus offers practitioners [End Page 164] innovative strategies and insights.10 Furthermore, the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission require that scholars of the regional past recognize and seek to repair the silences perpetuated within our disciplines. For those of us of settler ancestry, this includes creating opportunities for Indigenous people to speak – within and beyond the academy. The 2020s mark a social-ecological conjuncture of epic proportions. The architects of the United Nations Paris Agreement on climate change inform us that human actions in this decade will be decisive in setting a course for the future of life on Earth.11 Researchers in social and natural sciences refer to the current era as the Anthropocene to demarcate the high degree of human influence on the composition of the Earth and atmosphere.12 Students of the emerging field of planetary health argue that environmental degradation creates the context for novel pandemics such as COVID-19.13 Research into past relationships between people and the rest of nature, and the broad dissemination...

WHEN JOHN OPIE approached me in 1991 to ask me to pinch-hit for him as editor of Environmental History Review while he was on sabbatical, neither of us imagined that he'd end up being Wally Pipp and I'd do a lame imitation of Lou Gehrig. In retrospect, I should have known better. John winked at me with the roguish charm for which he is renowned and I took it as camaraderie, a shared moment between a venerated elder and an up-and-coming Young Turk. He clearly recognized better than I what a sucker he'd landed. If I'd knocked over a liquor store that day instead of accepting John's offer, I'd have been out of prison and off parole long before now. As it is, I'm hobbling toward the exit of a decade in the saddle. It has been a transformative decade, one in which the field of environmental history and the journal you're holding in your hands have emerged as significant participants in the debate about history and its meaning and purpose and as contributors on the larger stage of environmental policy. In 1992, environmental history remained an immature discipline, still taking baby steps toward a comprehensive approach to the field. While it was no longer accurate to say that environmental history was environmentalist history, the parallels between both sides of this equation remained palpable. Yet the work to transform and broaden the field was well underway, some of it published, and I found myself with a boiling pot, asked to try to keep the lid on. Whether I've succeeded or not, the field is in much better shape, this journal has become an important historical publication, the third most frequently cited after the Journal of American History and the Pacific Historical Review, and the caliber of scholarship in environmental history is daunting and getting better all the time. When I was handed the journal, Opie had already rescued us from our nadir. John had come back to the editorship in 1987, when ASEH numbered less than 200 institutional and individual members and the organization was truly not strong enough to field independent conferences. Environmental history teetered in 1987, full of promise but with few of the institutional mechanisms necessary for academic survival. In the five years of his second stint as editor of the journal he founded in 1976, Opie brought us back from the brink. The journal I inherited was

Paul Sutter’s essay offers a thoughtful and perceptive discussion of trends in the field of environmental history over the last two decades. Faced with the task of synthesizing a disparate literature, Sutter identifies two key theoretical developments: the conceptualization of landscapes and environments as hybrid rather than as either natural or social, and the move toward a more complex notion of agency. He then discusses in more detail four topical themes and key works. He offers a reading list—and an excellent one. However, when he turns to the larger questions—why and whither environmental history?—Sutter becomes ambivalent, even angst-ridden, calling for a moral reengagement and a “course correction.” He is concerned that with the turn toward the hybrid, environmental history may have lost its ambition and perhaps even its soul. In the 1990 Journal of American History round table on environmental history, Donald Worster had a clear answer to those same questions. Drawing on ecological science, the unorthodox Marxism of Karl Wittfogel, and the cultural ecology of Julian Steward and Marvin Harris, Worster argued that the nascent field’s greatest contribution lay in studying how people obtained their living from the land and its concomitant environmental effects. Worster called for a focus on the productive landscapes that had grounded various human communities, but he was also advocating a mode of practice that would ask big questions and apply similar techniques to different times and places. The implication was that one day scholars would synthesize the insights of environmental history and point out its lessons for how contemporary humans should inhabit the earth. Worster called for a narrowly focused scholarship with a grand social ambition; Sutter summarizes a field that is diverse but in his view too modest. At the end of the essay, he urges a return to the “grand narrative of environmental decline” and to the task of prescribing “normative” relationships between human beings and nature. While I share Sutter’s environmental angst and his desire for an ambitious environmental history, I disagree on the path the field should follow.

ObjectivesAcademical and not-for-profit research funders are increasingly requiring that the research they fund must be published open access, with some insisting on publishing with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)...

Covering a broad array of topics and reflecting the continuing diversity within the field of environmental history, Out of the Woods begins with three theoretical pieces by William Cronon, Carolyn Merchant, and Donald Worster probing the assumptions that underlie the words and ideas historians use to analyze human interaction with the physical world. One of these - the concept of place - is the subject of a second group of essays. The political context is picked up in the third section, followed by a selection of some of the journal's most recent contributions discussing the intersection between urban and environmental history. Water's role in defining the contours of the human and natural landscape in undeniable and forms the focus of the fifth section. Finally, the global character of environmental issues emerges in three compelling articles by Alfred Crosby, Thomas Dunlap, and Stephen Pyne. Of interest to a wide range of scholars in environmental history, law, and politics, Out of the Woods is intended as a reader for course use and a benchmark for the field of environmental history as it continues to develop into the next century.

Elinor G. K. Melville (1940–2006)

En la península y en el golfo de California, el proceso de conquista colonial impuso un proceso de antropización-colonización de la relación sociedad-naturaleza a lo largo del tiempo moderno y contemporáneo. Desde el siglo XVI, este cambio se implementó mediante la inserción de los recursos naturales terrestres y marinos disponibles en el territorio sudcaliforniano en el marco de la Economía Mundo. La península y el golfo de California se vieron sometidos a un proceso, a largo plazo, de saqueo y despojo territorial que denomino “Apropiación Asimétrica” (que se traduce en una línea temporal de cuatro momentos históricos, algunos coetáneos, desde el siglo XVI al siglo XXI). En el primer momento de esta línea temporal, se describe en el texto cómo la Corona transfirió, mediante diversos sistemas de cesión territorial, el control de recursos (perlas, acuacultura, guano, sal, etc.) hacia empresarios privados encargados de extraer el capital natural para comercializarlo en mercados globales entre el siglo XVI y el siglo XX. Esta capitalización/privatización de recursos costeros-marinos a lo largo del siglo XX se evidenció en un proceso de especulación financiero territorial, orientado al desarrollo del turismo de masas como eje del modelo de desarrollo económico (tercer y cuarto momento histórico de la Apropiación Asimétrica que se analiza en el texto. La propuesta de metodología de investigación parte del trabajo que desarrollamos en el campo de la Historia Ambiental, entendida como estudio sobre las relaciones entre sociedad y naturaleza a lo largo del mundo moderno y contemporáneo, estudiado mediante el análisis de los documentos archivísticos y bibliografía de coetáneos, viajeros o documentos institucionales. Esta propuesta metodológica supone el estudio de los cambios territoriales, ambientales y socioeconómicos junto al impacto de los mismos en el capital natural del territorio sudcaliforniano, procesos que generan conflictos y luchas contra el extractivismo y despojo como modelo económico. Desde el campo de la Historia Ambiental, el concepto de extractivismo es definido como transferencia de bienes naturales de manejo comunitario hacia la esfera del mercado, enajenados los pueblos y beneficiados sectores empresariales con este proceso de privatización. De igual manera, el concepto de apropiación asimétrica implica la identificación de cómo la transferencia verificada mediante el extractivismo y despojo territorial impacta sobre la arquitectura del modelo de desarrollo económico generando episodios y realidades de injusticia ambiental, dando lugar a importantes desequilibrios territoriales. Estos desequilibrios territoriales tienen una matriz histórica que la Historia Ambiental permite narrar como un contínuum, pero que como práctica de colonización del territorio llega hasta inicios del siglo XXI como demuestra el estudio del impacto del capitalismo financiero en Baja California.

Over the course of the twentieth-century, the primary path toward the ‘good life’ in the United States involved the purchase of a single family home in the suburbs, which promised financial security, social independence and access to a healthy environmental and verdant greenspace. But the system that developed was also built on racial exclusion and unsustainable and environmentally destructive levels of resource consumption. An examination of the spaces of the single-family home shows the challenges in creating a just and sustainable good life, as the social meaning and material realities of the system become intimately tied together. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

This editorial explores the rationale behind transitioning the ESNBU journal’s content licensing from CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) to CC BY (Attribution). For a decade, the journal operated under the CC BY-NC license to restrict commercial use, but this approach has unintentionally limited its reach and visibility. The objective is to address these limitations and promote unrestricted dissemination of scholarly content. The analysis involved a review of the journal’s indexing history, feedback from database providers, and usage statistics over the past ten years. We examined cases where the NC clause hindered the journal's inclusion in databases, especially those operated by commercial or for-profit entities. We also reviewed existing literature on licensing impacts in open access publishing to understand broader trends and potential benefits of a transition to CC BY. The study found that the NonCommercial restriction created significant barriers to the journal's visibility and dissemination. Several commercial and academic databases opted not to index the journal's content due to ambiguity around the "commercial use" clause. By transitioning to a CC BY license, we anticipate enhanced indexing opportunities, increased content integration into educational resources, and a broader reach, ultimately leading to higher citation rates and greater impact. Moving to a CC BY license aligns the journal with the principles of Open Science, fostering unrestricted access to knowledge. This change supports wider dissemination, potential for increased collaboration, and enhanced visibility in academic databases. Future analysis will focus on measuring the impact of this transition on the journal's citation metrics, user engagement, and overall accessibility.