Reading Time: 6 minutesEven their indigenous name, the Amazigh, has been colonized. But, what can the Amazigh, a culture that has lived sustainably for over 20,000 years, teach us about our fight against climate change and sustainable living?
A Platform on Representation, Engagement, and Community
Tag: environmental history
Fluctuating and Fragmented: The History of Regulating the Tidal Salt Marsh near Wood Island in East Boston, Massachusetts
Reading Time: 15 minutesEast 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.
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.
![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.
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.
Fearing the Subject of Study: The Climate Crisis and the Environmental Historian
Reading Time: 6 minutesThe world we have constructed appears to be hurtling towards disaster, if not outright oblivion.
Smoke and Plastic: Feeling the Environmental Past
Reading Time: 6 minutesThe suggestion that Barbie lives in an immaterial world was not lost on environmental icon Smokey Bear who, upon noticing her campsite, tweeted a visual critique.
A Well of One’s Own: Caste, Water, and Freedom
Reading Time: 5 minutesOn a cool October morning in 2019, I visited Babu on his small plot of farmland, now a lush patchwork of vegetables that his wife sells at weekly markets in nearby towns.
Mobilizing the Energy Crisis for Racial Justice
Reading Time: 7 minutes[…] looking at Black discourses around the energy debates of the 1970s indicates a sense of continuity rather than change. Black activists pointed out that many people in the U.S. had never, in fact, had access to middle class lifestyles.