Reading Time: 5 minutesIn an era marked by a pressing global climate crisis and alarming rates of biodiversity loss, natural history museums stand out as beacons of hope in our collective struggle against environmental degradation.
Environmental History Now.
A Platform on Representation, Engagement, and Community
Turning the Tide: A Queer Look at the Orca
Reading Time: 10 minutesI no longer think that science holds little or no bias. Through entrenching heteronormativity and patriarchy, biases hurt not only the queer community but all communities, because they display a skewed image of reality. But perhaps there is hope in stories such as the Orca’s Song, where an osprey and an orca can be wives.
The Raised Bog Underneath the Farm: Walking into the Past and the Present
Reading Time: 8 minutesThroughout the past 150 years, the Peel underwent drastic changes due to drainage projects, turf-cutting, and animal farming. The new materialities these uses produced can make one almost forget that this used to be a peatland. However, Jeroen, an ornithologist, remarked upon the black waters surrounding grassland areas in the Peel. He argued that in these nutrient poor pools, the peatland was “peeking through” the fabric of the present-day landscape. The multiple pasts of the Peel were still present in the landscape’s materialities.
“Premature Electrification”: Petro-masculine Panic in the EV Era
Reading Time: 17 minutesAmong the varied significations circulating around the petroleum-powered car, the commodity has operated as a salient vehicle for expressions and tools of hetero-masculinity.
Hercegovina Kalifornija: Landscape and legacies in the Neretva Valley
Reading Time: 14 minutesThe dream of Herzegovina as California has been around for as long as I remember. It first appeared in Yugoslavia as an industrial and entrepreneurial vision of a landscape that could provide us with everything, provided we were sufficiently entrepreneurial. But it was also an image of a place of rest, where little is needed to enjoy life, in which case industrialisation may be unnecessary.
Baguio at 115: Colonial Legacies in Contemporary Cityscapes in the Philippines
Reading Time: 9 minutesThe Philippines’ Baguio: from an indigenous pastureland to a colonial hill station and now a bustling tourism center grappling with environmental challenges and Indigenous land disputes on its 115th founding anniversary.
![The cover image is an excerpt from a press article entitled “Ecological disaster in the upper valley. The Aude river polluted by a violent poison” (“Catastrophe écologique en Haute-Vallée. L’Aude polluée par un poison violent [sic]”), published by the regional newspaper L'Indépendant on 18 September 1983, the day after the pollution. Beneath the headline are two photographs. On the left lies a dead trout, “fallen victim to human stupidity” as the caption states (“Une truite splendide victime de la bêtise des hommes”). On the right, there are the inhabitants of Quillan perched on the city's old bridge, gazing out over the river. The caption reads: “A destruction that rallied all the Quillan residents” (“Une destruction qui a mobilisé tous les habitants de Quillan”).](https://i0.wp.com/envhistnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Image_LT.jpeg?fit=640%2C377&ssl=1)
From Firstborns to Equal Shares: Inheritance, Land, and Ecology in Revolutionary France
Reading Time: 5 minutesInheritance can have far-reaching consequences that extend beyond the family unit, shaping not only society and economy but also the environment.
Thriving in a world of plants: the possibilities of ecobiography
Reading Time: 7 minutesIn 1874 Sarah Brooks, with her mother and brother, walked nearly 700 kilometers out to the land of the Noongar people in the south-eastern extremities of the South-west Australian Floristic Region. It is still unclear how and why Sarah, an educated, accomplished, single woman, spent the last fifty-four years of her life out in this isolated place.
More-than-Human Remains: Reckoning with Ivory in (Post)Colonial Museums
Reading Time: 7 minutesMuseums developed and funded by European colonization often grapple with the morally blurry lines between public education and neocolonial exploitation. Elephant tusk — otherwise known as ivory — is embedded in these politics of historical display.