environmental history

• 
• SOURCE: Science Magazine
  3/30/2020
  

  Lead Pollution in Ancient Ice Cores May Track the Rise and Fall of Medieval Kings

  Recently, scientists have identified startling spikes of lead deposited in medieval times in Arctic ice cores and in lake sediments in Europe.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  3/11/2020
  

  Liberal Activists Have to Think Broadly and Unite Across Lines

  by Matthew D. Lassiter

  Fifty years before Greta Thunberg, students at the University of Michigan organized a Teach-In that paved the way for Earth Day demonstrations that mobilized 20 million people in 1970.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  1/12/20
  

  Even for an air pollution historian, these past weeks have been a shock

  by Nancy Cushing

  City dwellers in southeast Australia have been forced to take a crash course in the finer points of air pollution. 

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• 1/12/20
  

  The History of Fire: An interview with Stephen Pyne

  by Matthew Crawford

  "Fire is a creation of the living world, but we have defined it as a phenomenon for physics and chemistry...we’ve mostly ignored the ideas and institutions that shape the social half of the equation."

• 
• 11/17/19
  

  The Runway for Global Warming: The Suez Canal's 150th Anniversary

  by On Barak

  The largest infrastructural project of the nineteenth century annexed the Middle East into the fossil-fuels complex. Reexamining its history is indispensable for decarbonization today.

• 
• SOURCE: Tom Dispatch
  11/10/19
  

  The Greatest Scam in History

  by Naomi Oreskes

  Scientists working on the issue have often told me that, once upon a time, they assumed, if they did their jobs, politicians would act upon the information. That, of course, hasn’t happened. Why?

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  11/12/19
  

  How racial segregation exacerbates flooding in Baton Rouge

  by William Horne

  Strategies of segregation and secession to hoard resources are leaving the whole metropolitan area unprepared for rising waters.

• 
• 10/27/19
  

  A Brief History of the Fox

  by Adele Brand

  In a flash of geological time, we have rewritten the fox’s wildwood, in ways both graphic and subtle. We have added, taken away, replanted and concreted.

• 
• 9/29/19
  

  Climate Change: A Worldwide Catastrophe In The Making

  by Alon Ben-Meir

  The United Nations Climate Action Summit revealed how far presidents and prime ministers are willing to go avoid the terrible consequences of global warming.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/21/19
  

  How decades of L.A. smog led to California’s war with Trump over car pollution

  President Trump said he would revoke California’s ability to set its own auto emissions standards, a provision that gave the most populous state significant sway over the car industry.

• 
• SOURCE: Time
  9/23/19
  

  How Understanding the History of the Earth's Climate Can Offer Hope Amid Crisis

  by John Brooke, Michael Bevis and Steve Rissing

  Our planet’s relationship to carbon dioxide has changed drastically before; it can change again. 

• 
• SOURCE: Texas Observer
  8/30/19
  

  The Houston Flood Museum and the Harvey Memories Project Gather Harvey Memories for Historians of the Future

  They’re a time capsule of the destruction wrought by the deadliest storm to hit Texas since 1919.

• 
• 9/1/19
  

  Searching for El Dorado: The Colonial Fantasy of the Amazon

  by Ed Simon

  There is a direct ideological thread that runs from the early explorers of the Caribbean and South America and the current environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Brazilian rainforest as fire burns its way across the length of a land which was once called paradise. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  8/27/19
  

  Nukes, plugs and walls: Humanity’s harebrained schemes for combating natural disasters

  Whether we’re considering corking the top of an erupting volcano, erecting a wall to guard against a tornado or pumping water into a fault line to stop an earthquake, humanity’s solutions are often shortsighted and sloppy.

• 
• SOURCE: Time
  8/23/19
  

  Environmentalists Have Been Warning About Amazon Fires for Decades.

  The climate change that TIME in the 1980s warned might be possible has already come to pass, and the damage it causes is starkly plain.

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• 8/25/19
  

  Winter Isn’t Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene.

  by Steve Pyne

  What does a full-blown fire age look like? We’re about to find out.

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• 6/16/19
  

  Silent Spring: Why Rachel Carson’s words still ring true today

  by Catherine Whitlock

  Any future US president would do well to heed the likes of Rachel Carson and her successors and invest in clean energy policies, protect the environment, and promote biodiversity.

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• 6/16/19
  

  Environmental Historian Sara Dant: "History Is As Relevant Today As Ever."

  by Korina Ike

  "We have many challenges - environment, politics, social, cultural - that are the end-product of our historical arc.  Understanding how we got here, what has worked and what hasn’t in the past, gives us the best chance of moving forward successfully."

• 
• 3/24/19
  

  What I’m Reading: An Interview With Environmental Historian Eleonora Rohland

  by Erik Moshe

  “History as a discipline needs to renew itself, needs to reassert or renegotiate its place in society, needs to be vocal on political abuses of terminology or populist and racist reinterpretations of historical events.”

• 
• 8-27-16
  

  It’s Time to Rethink Our Reliance on Standard Textbooks Put Out by Big Name Publishers

  by Dan Allosso

  Self-published textbooks are better in several ways.