Environmental History News

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Monday, 9 January 2012

Research seminar: Debunking the Tragedy of the Commons – sustainable management of common land in England and Wales

Presenter: Prof. Chris Rodgers, Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University, UK
Location and time: Thursday 12 January, 4pm, Shefton Room, School of Historical Studies, Armstrong Building, Newcastle University, UK

Prof. Rodgers' paper develops from his AHRC funded "Landscape and Environment" research project with historian Dr Angus Winchester of Lancaster University. See: http://commons.ncl.ac.uk/

All welcome!

For directions see campus map.

Wednesday, 4 January 2012

CFP: Environment, Community, and Culture in North America

Under Western Skies is Mount Royal University’s award-winning biennial conference series on the environment in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

With the inaugural UWS conference in October 2010, Mount Royal has taken a lead role in interdisciplinary and community-minded environmental studies in Alberta, establishing a high-profile venue where scholars, artists, students, and concerned citizens from around the world can gather on a regular basis to share ideas concerning all aspects of the environment.

Under Western Skies 2: Environment, Community, and Culture in North America will take place October 10 – 13, 2012 in the university’s LEED certified Roderick Mah Centre for Continuous Learning.

The conference welcomes academics from across the disciplines as well as members of artistic and activist communities, non- and for-profit organizations, government, labour, media, and NGOs to address the environmental challenges faced by human and nonhuman actors across North America.

Confirmed keynotes include:

Scott Denning (Climatology, Colorado State University)
Louise B. Halfe (award-winning Canadian poet)
Alanna Mitchell (author Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis)
Gary Paul Nabhan (Ethnobotany, University of Arizona)
Niobe Thompson (co-director Tipping Point: The Age of the Oilsands)
Donald Worster (Environmental History, University of Kansas)

Call for Proposals Deadline is Jan 23, 2012. See the website for the full call for papers.

Wednesday, 21 December 2011

New podcast episode

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring”. In order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring this episode of the podcast explores the significance of this book with Mark Wilson, a PhD candidate at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, England. Mark has written a study which compares response to Silent Spring in the US and Britain. He also agues that Silent Spring is a typical product of its time that was closely connected with the Cold War and the rise of the counter culture at both sides of the Atlantic.

Listen to the podcast.

Friday, 16 December 2011

Silent Spring Essay contest

In commemoration of fifty years of Silent Spring, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in collaboration with the British Council, the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations, and the Consulate General of the United States, Munich is soliciting essays from junior and senior scholars which analyze the impact and reception of Silent Spring as well as the legacy of Rachel Carson. Essays might address one or more of the following questions:

How has Silent Spring shaped environmentalism or environmental thought in various countries? How is it a global phenomenon?
What elements of Silent Spring have had the greatest impact on environmental leaders? Policy makers? Anti-environmentalists?
How is Silent Spring still relevant to current environmental debates?
How has the relevance of Rachel Carson’s writing changed over the decades since Silent Spring was published?
If Rachel Carson were alive today, what would she be writing about?

In the spirit of Carson’s own writing, submissions are encouraged to address an interested public with an approachable and provocative style. The RCC will be awarding both a junior and senior prize for the most outstanding essays:

Junior Prize: $1,000 for 1,000 words (or less); Open to students aged 13-18
Senior Prize: $2,000 for 2,000 words (or less); Open to anyone aged 19 and above

The winning essays, as well as those which receive an honorable mention, will be published in a commemorative edition of the RCC Perspectives series, an occasional papers series available in print and online.

Submissions are due via email to perspectives@carsoncenter.lmu.de by 15 March 2012. Include a short biographical profile and indicate whether the essay is to be considered for the junior or senior prize. The essays will be reviewed by an international committee of scholars and writers.

Download the pdf announcement.

Friday, 4 November 2011

CFP: Environmental Protection in the Global Twentieth Century: International Organizations, Networks and Diffusion of Ideas and Policies

Research College (Kollegforschergruppe, KFG) "The Transformative Power of Europe", Free University of Berlin, 25-27 October 2012

Issues of pollution, excessive use of natural resources, nature protection and climate change transcend national boundaries. They tend to be of a regional or even global scope. In historical perspective, the European Union was relatively slow to take up environmental protection (beyond health and safety related issues) in the 1970s, followed by the formal introduction of this policy field into the EC treaty with the Single European Act only in 1986-7. In fact, other International Organizations (IOs) had addressed environmental issues much earlier starting with the League of Nations in inter-war Europe. After World War II the United Nations and its Economic Commission for Europe, the Council of Europe and the Organization for European Economic Co-operation and Development, the present-day OECD, addressed environmental issues such as water and air pollution by pooling scientific expertise, collecting comparative data, propagating and funding international scientific programmes and inducing greater media attention to the cross-border dimension of environmental protection. These IOs became norm entrepreneurs in environmental protection and crucial sites for the diffusion of ideas and policies to other IOs, to states and governments and probably, across world regions and regional integration organizations.

In a long-term perspective covering what might be called the global twentieth century, the UN Conference Man and the Environment in 1972 appears to be a turning point. From then onwards, environmental protection increasingly became the focus of policy-making at the transnational and international level, in the context of IOs, and was no longer confined to bilateral treaties, for example concerning river pollution. This is also when the European Communities developed their first Environmental Action Programmes and began to become involved in issues such as bird and habitat protection. The conference will take the event of 1972 as a point of departure for analyzing the origins of the role of IOs in environmental protection prior to this event and for exploring how it evolved until the early 1990s, with a perspective to the present-day.

Academically, the conference has two main objectives. The first objective is to explore the structural environment for IO activities and agenda-setting in environmental protection, especially their linkages with scientific institutions and experts and any network-type relationships with societal NGO actors as well as member states and governments, which were pioneering new environmental policies nationally. The second aim is to study how the IOs helped to diffuse, or transfer, ideas and policy concepts - by uploading them from societal or state actors at national or regional level or by downloading and re-contextualizing ideas and policy concepts developed within and among IOs to national and regional policy-makers or even, businesses. We assume, and hope to explore in greater detail, that despite the absence in most cases of formal decision-making powers, IOs have been able to play a key role in the diffusion of ideas and policy concepts drawing upon crucial competences such as information gathering and diffusion and translating ideas and concepts across institutional and cultural divides, for example.

Strategically, the proposed conference has three main objectives. The first objective is to de-center the EU as a transformative power by embedding the analysis of its role in environmental protection within a broader study of the transnationalization of this policy field which includes other IOs (including those operating globally and in other world regions) and the EUs relations with them. The second aim is to connect historical research, which so far has mainly focused on the history of the environment rather than of environmental protection, with social science research on regional and global environmental policy and politics. The third objective is to broaden the study of IOs and environmental protection in Europe to a comparative regional and global analysis which begins to address the question to what extent "Europe" and its regional integration institutions have been the recipients of ideas and policy concepts downloaded from global organizations like the UN or other non-European national or regional actors like the US, and to what extent more recently, "Europe" and the EU have also increasingly acted as norm entrepreneurs and exporters in this policy field.

Historical research on Europe and other world regions in the twentieth-century is currently beginning to develop an interest in the multiple roles of IOs including those with limited policy-making powers, but manifold other functions. At a global level this type of research appears to be even less developed. The initial purpose of the conference is, therefore, to identify and mobilize researchers, research projects and avenues of further enquiry regarding IOs and environmental protection, and bringing these researchers in dialogue with social scientists who work in the field.

We invite paper proposals on any topic or period, which address the role of IOs, experts and networks in the diffusion of ideas and policies of environmental protection. All papers must be based in original research drawing upon archival sources, interviews, media reporting etc. Paper proposals must include the name of the paper-giver, a short CV and a paper abstract of no more than 250 words. The deadline for the submission of paper proposals is 15 January 2012. Paper proposals have to be sent simultaneously to Wolfram Kaiser, Wolfram.Kaiser@port.ac.uk and Jan-Henrik Meyer, jhmeyer@gmx.de

Successful applicants will be informed on or shortly after 31 January 2012. The KFG "The Transformative Power of Europe" will cover their overnight accommodation in Berlin and reasonable travel costs.

Wednesday, 24 November 2010

Rethinking History in the Light of Anthropogenic Climate Change: A model syllabus for historians and students

The Higher Education Academy (HEA) has published a model syllabus for historians and students to engage with issues of anthropogenic climate change and to place it in a wider historical context. The guide includes the following topics:

How do we know the Climate is Changing? An Historical Outline
Climate Change and the Emergence of Human ‘History’: The Development of Agriculture in the Old World
Climate Change as Harbinger of Disaster: Population, Famine and Disease in the 14th Century
The Coming of the Anthropocene
Capitalism and the Organization of Nature
The Acceleration of the Anthopocene: Oil
Dealing with Climate Change, The Economic Dimension
Dealing with Climate Change, The National and International Arena
Dealing with Climate Change, The Drive to Technological ‘Solutions'
Dealing with Climate Change, Discourses of Denial
Transcending Climate Change? Religion, Spirituality and Redefining the Human-Nature Relationship
Transcending Climate Change? A Return to Politics

The guide was written by a team associated with the Rescue!History network and can be downloaded from the HEA website.

Environmental History Resources