A Methodological Misunderstanding “The analysis is currently very descriptive and is not sufficiently robust.” I received this disappointing feedback after defending my PhD thesis to a panel of examiners in July 2024. I had spent […]
A Platform on Representation, Engagement, and Community
Category: EHN Blog
Fluctuating and Fragmented: The History of Regulating the Tidal Salt Marsh near Wood Island in East Boston, Massachusetts
East Boston has the largest amount of made land in the City of Boston. It was originally comprised of five islands connected by acres of fluctuating tidal marshes and flats. The history of the Great Marsh exemplifies centuries of efforts to regulate and control the ambiguous space between land and sea.
Plant Blindness and “Seeing” Vegetal Timescales
What is the concept of “plant blindness”? How can the arts help us to appreciate different timescales and plants’ ways of being?
Hercegovina Kalifornija: Landscape and legacies in the Neretva Valley
The 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
The 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
Inheritance 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
In 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
Museums 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.
Fearing the Subject of Study: The Climate Crisis and the Environmental Historian
The world we have constructed appears to be hurtling towards disaster, if not outright oblivion.