Happy New Year from all of us at EHN!
This January marks a big change: Genie Yoo will replace Elizabeth Hameeteman as EHN’s editor-in-chief, who has decided to step away for personal reasons. As a part of this process, Genie and Elizabeth have been working in the last couple of months to restructure EHN with the rest of the team. We feel that this is a great opportunity to make sure EHN operates in a way that is durable and feasible in the long term, without too much reliance on any one individual’s personal involvement. We will share more with you soon.
We’re excited about what lies ahead and like to express our gratitude for your ongoing support as we continue to showcase the environment-related work and expertise of graduate students and early career scholars who identify as women, trans and/or nonbinary people from around the world, in different languages, and from various fields.
Today, as we have done in the past three years, we would like to highlight EHN’s top posts of the past year.
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1. “Green Space Versus the Police State: The Future of Weelaunee People’s Park” by Kera Lovell (April 4, 2023)
“Confronting institutionalized spatial power structures, takeovers, occupations, and activist-created parks reveal green space as not only a crucial site of urban political resistance, but also its symbolic reclamation as a form of power,” writes Kera Lovell in this intriguing reflection on the role of activist-created parks as forms of protest. Kera connects police brutality in the postwar People’s Park Movement to the January 18, 2023 murder of environmental activist Tortuguita at Weelaunee People’s Park in Atlanta–and sadly, this piece needs updating since more police violence has ensued since.
2. “Building on Sand: The Forgotten Roots of Singaporean Land Reclamation from Colony to Postcolony” by Bava Dharani (March 10, 2023)
Inspired by the 2018 doc film Lost World, Bava Dharani writes about how sand dredging complicates notions of modernization, development, and progress in Singapore. As Bava insightfully notes, it exemplifies how “Singapore’s pristine ‘artificial’ construction rests on the extraction of natural resources from its neighbors,” internalizing and embodying British colonial policies and logics in the process.
3. “Inverting ‘Tipu’s Tiger:’ The Terrifying Tiger Trembles in Bengal’s Mangrove Tiger Land” by Amrita DasGupta (February 9, 2023)
In this piece, Amrita DasGupta focuses on how thinking about tigers allowed her to chart a portion of the environmental history of the lower deltaic Bengal, known as the Sundarbans. As she explains, “Tipu’s Tiger”–a wooden mechanical toy displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum–serves as a reminder of “the colonial state’s complex reactions to its hierarchal subordination to the Asian tiger, especially during the early stages of colonial conquest.” Amrita shared and reflected on this piece in two recent episodes of our podcast Ecotones Now.
4. “As Clear As Mud: Understanding Small-Scale Fishing in Late Medieval England Through the Landscape” by Lena Walschap (January 24, 2023)
“Going on a research stay entailed long days in the archives, poring over medieval accounts written in hard-to-decipher script until my eyes were dry and my fingertips dirty with centuries-old dust. I needed a break, so I went on a run,” begins Lena Walschap. What follows next is a beautiful piece about how much a simple and unpretentious look to the landscape helped her understand small-scale fishing in late medieval England.
5. “Smoke and Plastic: Feeling the Environmental Past” by Catherine Peters (September 26, 2023)
Using a tweet by Smokey the Bear criticizing Barbie’s fire safety as a jumping off point, Catherine Peters reflects on how these two cultural icons “condition play while upholding sociocultural assumptions regarding what it means to care for the environment as well as ourselves.” As Catherine notes, they “tell us something about who has been prioritized throughout the environmental history of the United States.”
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As always, if you have ideas, proposals, or questions, feel free to reach out to us at contact@envhistnow.com.
*Cover image: Illustration by Nicolás Aznárez.
[Cover image description: An illustrated graphic depicting rows of faceless people with interlocking arms.]