Global Environmental History Research Articles

Mike Davis: Planetarity and environmentalisms: the invention of new environmental histories from the Ecology of Fear to Victorian Holocausts

Mike Davis transformed the understanding of southern California and dramatically reshaped thinking about the region in his books and many articles for New Left Review. Less well known locally is his significant impact of the approaches to urban environmental history and the large-scale effects of climate events at a global level. Davis can be seen as foundational for global environmental history in his methodology: analyzing the teleconnections and impacts of a particular climate event, (in Victorian Holocausts this was an El Nino) and then parsing out the social effects. The sever El Nino he describes was key in the disenfranchisement of millions in the Colonial worlds and the creation of new indentured and sub-proletariat populations that became the labor force for new forms of plantation agriculture, infrastructure labor, and rubber extraction in tropical forests. Davis’ work provided early historical analysis on the impacts of colonial capitalism in the creation of climate vulnerability. Both his creativity in urban environmental history and its imaginaries, and the foundational research on global climate history are extraordinary contributions.

The Yale Geochronometric Laboratory and the Rewriting of Global Environmental History.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, scientists speculated that the Pleistocene megafauna-species such as the giant ground sloth, wooly mammoth, and saber-tooth cat-perished because of rapid climate change accompanying the end of the most recent Ice Age. In the 1950s, a small network of ecologists challenged this view in collaboration with archeologists who used the new tool of radiocarbon dating. The Pleistocene overkill hypothesis imagined human hunting, not climate change, to be the primary cause of megafaunal extinction. This article situates the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis in a broader history of the emergence of historical ecology as a distinct sub-discipline of paleoecology. Tracing the work of the Yale Geochronometric Laboratory and an interdisciplinary research network that included Paul Sears, Richard Foster Flint, Edward Deevey, Kathryn Clisby, and Paul S. Martin, it reveals how both the methods and the meaning of studying fossil pollen shifted between the 1910s and 1960s. First used as a tool for fossil fuel extraction, fossil pollen became a means of envisioning climatic history, and ultimately, a means of reimagining global ecological history. First through pollen stratigraphy and then through radiocarbon dating, ecologists reconstructed past biotic communities and rethought the role of humans in these communities. By the 1980s, the discipline of historical ecology would reshape physical environments through the practice of ecological restoration.

Water, Bodies, Space: New Directions in World 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...

Nature at War: American Environments and World War II

Nature at War: American Environments and World War II

Harnessing the Great Acceleration: Connecting Local and Global Environmental History at the Port of Singapore

Harnessing the Great Acceleration: Connecting Local and Global Environmental History at the Port of Singapore

Making the leap: commodity chains and the potential for global environmental histories of capitalism

This article is a brief response to Leonardo Marques’ essay “Commodity Chains and the Global Environmental History of the Colonial Americas.” It focuses on the practical and theoretical limitations of commodity-chain histories as away to address our political and environmental moment. It argues that commodity-chain histories must overcome the complexity of their subjects, and leap the theoretical gap between local and global scales without losing sight of nature. To do so, the article advocates for more work by environmental historians, and a focus on transformation rather than commodity flows.

THE ZOONOTIC CITY: Urban Political Ecology and the Pandemic Imaginary.

In the context of the Covid‐19 pandemic this article takes a longer view of the evolving relationship between urbanization and the range of zoonotic diseases that have spread from animals to humans. I suggest that the existing interpretation of epidemiological transitions remains overly Eurocentric and requires a more nuanced conception of global environmental history. Similarly, the conceptualization of urban space within these teleological schemas has relied on a narrow range of examples and has failed to fully engage with networked dimensions to urbanization. At an analytical level I consider the potential for extending the conceptual framework offered by urban political ecology to take greater account of the epidemiological dimensions to contemporary urbanization and its associated pandemic imaginary. I examine how contemporary health threats intersect with complex patterns of environmental change, including the destruction of biodiversity (and trade in live animals), the co‐evolutionary dynamics of viruses and other pathogens, and wider dimensions to the global technosphere, including food production, infrastructure networks, and the shifting topographies of peri‐ or ex‐urban contact zones.

The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War . Edited by Simo Laakkonen, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017. 346 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, and index. Paper $35.00, e-book $35.00.

<i> The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War </i>. Edited by Simo Laakkonen, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017. 346 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, and index. Paper $35.00, e-book $35.00.

A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles by Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry

Reviewed by: A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles by Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry Frank Zelko A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles. By emily wakild and michelle K. berry. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018. 200 pp. $24.95 (paperback). In 2011, Duke University Press released Antoinette Burton's A Primer for Teaching World History, the first book in its series "Design Principles for Teaching History." With Burton as editor, the series promised numerous helpful volumes for those teaching various aspects of transnational and global history. Like a tree with an irregular fruiting cycle, however, the series did not bear any new books for a while. But 2018 proved a bumper crop, yielding Trevor Getz's primer on African history, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and Urmi Engineer Willoughby's A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History, and Wakild and Berry's environmental history volume. [End Page 232] With a quarter of a century of teaching experience between them, Wakild and Berry have taught environmental history in high schools, graduate seminars, and most everything in between. This book's goal is to help instructors, whether old hands or novices, design new courses or infuse environmental history into existing ones. From that perspective, the book succeeds admirably. It makes a case for the pedagogical and political importance of environmental history, suggests and breaks down numerous engaging texts and classroom exercises, offers concrete advice on assessment strategies, and urges instructors to take seriously the tools and student learning environments of the digital age. Readers of this journal will find the specific topics and case studies, frequently derived from the authors' global environmental history courses, particularly helpful, although I suspect not everyone will agree with all of their pedagogical imperatives. The first part of the book, titled "Approaches," contains four chapters that lay out a range of topics and learning objectives. The first examines how to make environmental history relevant to students' lives by linking it to their lunch. The focus is on food history, and the authors offer staples such as bananas, corn, and wheat as particularly useful and ubiquitous products to engage students in the history of plant domestication, agriculture, trade, and capitalism. Such an approach, they have found, pays "big dividends as your students begin to see nature and networks in everything" (p. 25). Chapter Two, "The Seed," sets out a list of learning objectives to help build a course. In line with the pedagogical theories emanating from university education departments, Wakild and Berry advocate prioritizing skill acquisition, such as locating and evaluating sources, over content knowledge. Those who take this stance frequently employ the "everything is on the internet" argument to downplay the importance of content. Wakild and Berry do not go this far, but their heavy emphasis on learning objectives and skill acquisition is nonetheless contestable. One can also make the case that well-presented content is vital to engaging students' initial interest in a subject and that skill building is more effective once this interest has been fully engaged. Furthermore, Wakild and Berry's discussion seems predicated on small classes in which instructors have the time and wherewithal to deeply immerse students in small group activities. Over the past decade, I have taught a first year global environmental history course with over 150 students. Wakild and Berry's intensive skill-oriented approach sounds like it would be difficult to implement in large classes; in my experience, a content-driven approach is both more realistic and more likely to hook students who might subsequently [End Page 233] enroll in smaller upper level classes where instructors can devote greater emphasis to skills and methods. The chapter on integrating animals into history is one of the book's highlights, reminding us how historians frequently neglect the lives of other species. In keeping with Levi-Strauss's famous formulation, animals are "good to think," Wakild and Berry cogently demonstrate how the interdisciplinary insights of the "animal turn" can undermine anthropocentric histories while at the same time offering compelling material for lectures and discussions. For those wondering how to integrate such material, the authors offer a chapter titled "The Hatchet," a set...

Globales Wissen und Science Diplomacy im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Bestandsaufnahme

In recent years, science diplomacy has become a hot topic in international affairs, and is now also emerging as one of the most vibrant subfields within International History. This article examines newer historical research that addresses the history of science diplomacy or offers fruitful avenues for such a history. The review identifies three broader trends in current scholarship: a focus on universities and foundations as transnational actors of science diplomacy, a shift of interest towards the ways transnational flows of knowledge were organized and managed politically during the Cold War, and an increasing overlap of global environmental history with the histories of science and knowledge.

Ikeya, K. ed.: Global Environmental History of Hunter-Gatherers: Living with Nature, Neighbors, and Civilization

Ikeya, K. ed.: Global Environmental History of Hunter-Gatherers: Living with Nature, Neighbors, and Civilization

Reorienting World Environmental History: Pedagogy and Scholarship on Cold Places

Abstract This article focuses on the teaching of world environmental history and makes a case for dedicating attention to cold places. It draws upon the experiences of the authors in designing and leading undergraduate courses centred on the high-latitude and high-altitude regions of the globe. In class, cold places were presented to students as sites of cultural encounter, windows on the history of science and technology and bridges between histories of industrialisation, empire, and the environment. The article highlights the pedagogical value of specific class materials while providing an overview of literature situated at the nexus of cold places and global environmental history. It closes with reflections on students' responses as well as the contribution that historicising cold places makes to the mission of the environmental humanities.

The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War. Edited by Simo Laakkonen, Richard P. Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo. Foreword by John R. McNeill

The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War. Edited by Simo Laakkonen, Richard P. Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo. Foreword by John R. McNeill

Uniting business history and global environmental history

This article introduces the contributions in the special issue and explains its aims. It observes that scholars in both environmental and business history are increasingly interested with the question of how knowledge flows over long distances, which is the central theme of this special issue. The introduction also serves to establish the relevance of the contributions to academics who research ‘environmental knowledge management’. Although this term did not exist during any of the historical periods covered by the contributions in this special issue, the firms discussed here were nevertheless engaged in this complicated task.

日本の新第三紀花粉化石群集と地球環境変遷(日本植物分類学会第6回新潟大会公開シンポジウム講演記録「新生代の地球環境変遷と地域フロラの分化プロセス」)

日本の新第三紀花粉化石群集と地球環境変遷(日本植物分類学会第6回新潟大会公開シンポジウム講演記録「新生代の地球環境変遷と地域フロラの分化プロセス」)

What is environmental history?

1. Defining Environmental History. 2. Forerunners of Environmental History. 3. The Birth and Growth of Environmental History in the United States. 4. Local, Regional, and National Environmental Histories. 5. Global Environmental History. 6. Issues and Directions in Environmental History. 7. Thoughts on Doing Environmental History. Notes. Select Bibliography. Index.

The Environmental Fall of the Roman Empire

Global environmental history is currently being enriched by troves of new data, and new models of environmental variability and human impact. Earth scientists are rapidly expanding historians’ knowledge of the paleoclimate through the recovery and analysis of climate proxies such as ice cores, tree rings, stalagmites, and marine and lake sediments. Further, archaeologists and anthropologists are using novel techniques and methods to study the history of health and disease, as revealed through examination of bones and paleomolecular evidence. These possibilities open the way for historians to participate in a conversation about the long history of environmental change and human response. This essay considers how one of the most classic of all historical questions–the fall of the Roman Empire–can receive an answer enriched by new knowledge about the role of environmental change.

The Ecological Edges of Belligerency - Toward a Global Environmental History of the First World War

This article represents an initial foray into the global environmental history of the First World War and suggests new approaches that can change our understanding of the conflict. With ravaged farmlands, charred trees, and muddy quagmires as iconic images of the First World War, scholars have generally tended to overlook the place and the role of nature. Yet only by taking the environment into account can we fully understand the trauma of war and how this conflict in particular shaped the most basic levels of human existence for years to come. Armies in the First World War were both social and biological entities, which depended on a “military ecology” of energy extraction, production, and supply. To keep soldiers and machines in action, belligerent states commandeered food and fuel throughout the biosphere, extending the war's environmental reach far beyond the western front. Examining a number of the ways that war shaped the periphery—evolving disease ecologies in colonial Africa, tin extraction in Southeast Asia, and food production in Latin America—will show that the boundaries of belligerency were vast. These three regions also illustrate the different ways in which the preparation and pursuit of war transformed societies and the natural world. Seeing what George Kennan called the twentieth century's “seminal catastrophe” from an environmental perspective illuminates the global dimensions of the First World War. The conflict accelerated environmental change that had begun in the previous century and established the patterns of military-industrial production, human victimization, and environmental exploitation that defined the twentieth century.

Biodiversification as an historical process: an appeal for the application of historical ecology to bio-cultural diversity research

In the context of recent appeals for the adoption of historical perspectives emerging in environmental and conservation studies, ‘biodiversification processes’ would be considered as specific historical and historiographical topics. However, as highlighted in this paper, a broader discussion of the biodiversification processes as historical processes is needed. This paper discusses some consequences that are presented during the study of biodiversification processes when focusing on the links between cultural and biological diversity at the individual landscape level rather than on an overview of the current literature on the subject. In this discussion, we briefly underline dissimilarities in the methods adopted in historical ecology to those in the conventional historical approach nurtured in global environmental history where biodiversification processes, as subjects of historical study, are largely ignored or subsumed into general observations concerning global change or embedded in presumed ahistorical ‘traditional’ economies and practice systems. Such a broad reassessment is required before multi- or inter-disciplinary applications seek to answer ‘common questions’ (Szabo, Environ Conserv 37:380–387, 2010) in the field of environmental and cultural conservation studies. This paper comments on field and documentary evidence collected during multidisciplinary historical ecology approaches to research in the Northern Apennines (Italy) and Pyrenees (Franco-Spanish) sites. These site-level investigations suggest that medieval and post-medieval changes in local practices and systems of environmental resource production and activation appear to have been key drivers in co-related variations observed in the past biodiversity dynamics of the sites. In order to corroborate the sedimentary evidence (or traces of evidence) concerning taxonomic and habitat changes, historical ecology has proposed the adoption of a local approach in which a specific historical analysis and use of documentary and archival sources—as well as the archaeological and sedimentary evidence—has posed a number of new questions to the traditional use of archival and textual sources by professional historians. In doing so, it becomes clear that when observed at a local, topographical site-scale or on an individual landscape-scale, the links between biological and cultural diversity appear more clearly as historical products, rather than broad co-evolutionary issues relating to the ‘co-evolution of nature and culture’. These historically produced links between biological and cultural diversity—identified as biodiversification processes that can be uncovered and explored through the adoption of approaches from historical ecology—are the driving forces that ‘generate’ processes of circulation in local ecological knowledge and its related practices.

The World the Bedouin Lived in: Climate, Migration and Politics in the Early Modern Arab East

Environmental history provides a perspective from which we can deepen our understanding of the past because it examines the relationships of people with their material surroundings and the effects of those relationships on the individual as well as the societal level. It is a perspective that holds particular promise for the social and political history of arid and marginal zones, as it contributes to our understanding of the reason some groups are more successful than others in coping with the same environmental stresses. Historians working on the early modern Arab East have only recently engaged with the lively field of global environmental history. After presenting a brief overview of some strands of this research, this article illustrates the potential of this approach by looking closely at a series of conflicts involving Bedouin and other power groups in the southern parts of Bilād al-Shām around the middle of the eighteenth century.