Growth & Gratitude: Happy Five Years!

Editor’s note: It’s EHN’s five-year anniversary this week! Like in previous years, we’ll be celebrating all week long by featuring exciting work every day to mark the occasion. But first, a word from our founder, Elizabeth Hameeteman.

For the past year, EHN has continued to feature work from graduate students and early career scholars who identify as women, trans and/or non binary people in environmental humanities at large. The goal has been to highlight the multilingual and interdisciplinary scholarship of this group of scholars from around the world, and bring it to a wider audience. Our hope is that EHN will be a source of inspiration, support, and collaborative scholarship for scholars and practitioners working on environmental topics of all kinds.

Excitingly, we launched our companion podcast Ecotones Now in the past year with the aim of bringing EHN’s mission to the podcasting space, sharing EHN contributors’ work more widely, and giving them an opportunity to produce a show that corresponds to and expands on EHN’s work. A big thank you to Emma Moesswilde and Natalie Wilkinson for making it happen – and look out for the launch of season two very soon. 👀

In addition to the Ecotones Now podcast, we (finally!) launched a community newsletter to continue fostering a sense of community among contributors as well as anyone interested in EHN’s mission. It helps us to continue celebrating and promoting the work and achievements of historically marginalized scholars and practitioners while creating a sense of readerly community. 

EHN takes seriously its mission to promote multilingual and interdisciplinary scholarship and therefore also publishes non-English language pieces in an effort to counter the dominance of Anglophone perspectives in environmental history. We have published essays in multiple languages (e.g. Dutch, Turkish, Spanish, German, and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian) in an attempt to open up the platform to new perspectives, readers, and contributors. We are currently expanding our efforts by actively inviting scholars from Latin America, Asia, and Africa to contribute.

One of my continued goals is to make EHN a little less dependent on my personal involvement – not only because of my own recent life developments but also, and even more importantly, because I want the platform to grow and thrive in the next few years.

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As always, I would like to express my gratitude to the incredible EHN team who has helped along the way.

First of all, I would like to give a shout-out to Asmae Ourkiya, Lindsay Marshall, and Anastasia Day who moved on from their positions earlier this year. Thank you again for everything.

Their departure meant we welcomed new people to the team: Morgan P. Vickers and Bava Dharani.

I’m grateful to Trang Dang, Anna Guasco, Aly Kreikemeier, Emma Moesswilde, Natascha Otoya, Evelyn Ramiel, Lívia Regina Batista, Ramya Swayamprakash, Diana Valencia Duarte, Emily Webster, Natalie Wilkinson, and Genie Yoo for their continued commitment and willingness to invest their time and energy into EHN on an all-volunteer basis. I certainly hope that EHN will be able to provide each team member (and contributor!) with some form of financial compensation at one point. Bird by bird.

Last but not least, a big thanks to our readers who continue to share and support EHN’s mission. Here’s to many more years to come!


*Cover image: Via Unsplash.

[*Cover image description: A close-up of fairy dust in various shades of light pink and beige against a pink-purplish background.]