Environmental History in the 1960s? An Unsuccessful Research Application and the Circulation of Environmental Knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 635-647
Author(s):  
David Larsson Heidenblad
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Research Application ◽  
The 1960S

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

scholarly journals Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950–2000

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iva Peša
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Environmental Aspects ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Central African Copperbelt ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Forestry Policies

Since the early twentieth century, the copper-mining industry on the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt has moved millions of tonnes of earth and dramatically reshaped the landscape. Nonetheless, mining companies, governments and even residents largely overlooked the adverse environmental aspects of mining until the early 1990s. By scrutinising environmental knowledge production on the Central African Copperbelt from the 1950s until the late 1990s, particularly regarding notions of ‘waste’, this article problematises the silencing of the environmental impacts of mining. To make the environmental history of the Copperbelt visible, this article examines forestry policies, medical services and environmental protests. Moreover, by historically tracing the emergence of environmental consciousness, it contextualises the sudden ‘discovery’ of pollution in the 1990s as a local and (inter)national phenomenon. Drawing on rare archival and oral history sources, it provides one of the first cross-border environmental histories of the Central African Copperbelt.

The Challenge of Oral History to Environmental History

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Williams ◽  
Mark Riley
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Environmental Practices ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Colonial Archives ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Key Interventions

Oral history has much to offer environmental history, yet the possibilities and promises of oral history remain underutilised in environmental history and environmental studies more broadly. Through a reflection on work in environmental history and associated disciplines, this paper presents a case for the strength and versatility of oral history as a key source for environmental history, while reflecting on questions of its reliability and scope. We identify three major insights provided by environmental oral history: into environmental knowledge, practices and power. We argue that, rather than being a weakness, the (inter)subjective and experiential dimensions of oral accounts provide a rich source for situating and interrogating environmental practices, meanings, and power relations. Oral history, moreover, provides a counterweight to a reliance on colonial archives and top-down environmental accounts, and can facilitate a renewal - and deepening - of the radical roots of environmental history. Furthermore, as a research practice, oral history is a promising means of expanding the participatory and grassroots engagement of environmental history. By decentring environmental expertise and eroding the boundaries (both fictive and real) of environmental knowledge production, oral environmental histories can provide key interventions in pursuit of a more just, sustainable world.

scholarly journals Man Destroys Nature?

2018 ◽  
pp. 196-221
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Feminist Epistemology ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Environmental Narratives ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
Human World ◽  
Justice Studies

This essay takes up one particular iteration of sustainability discourse, rooted in the American environmentalist tradition: seeing “man,” writ large, as an undifferentiated and usually malevolent force affecting “nature.” While this is but one strand of environmental thought, it is important (and, clearly, enduring). Here, I use this “man destroys nature” framework as a foil for this particular strand of environmental thought. That we often talk about environmental decline as a one-way street, from man to nature, reflects larger problems in how sustainability and justice are imagined. The fields of environmental feminism, environmental history, and environmental justice studies give us the tools to destabilize declensionist environmental narratives, thinking more critically about “man,” “nature,” and “destruction.” I outline key themes and contributions in these fields that offer new insights into how we can understand the complex milieu of our human relationships to the non-human world. What these fields suggest to us is that sustainabilities, like feminist epistemology, must be situated in contingent and intersectional environmental knowledge and experience.

Militarizing Rubber

2018 ◽  
pp. 245-279
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Rubber Plantations ◽  
Northern Latitudes ◽  
War Machine ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Behavior

The extreme violence brought to bear on the Vietnamese society and environment by the American war machine during the 1960s meant that measures taken by South Vietnamese leaders ended up sustaining plantation production. Ironically, the communist insurgency also benefited from rubber plantations, which continued to serve as a valuable source of material and recruits. Meanwhile, North Vietnamese rubber experts worked to extend the range of hevea into more northern latitudes so that latex could flow in the socialist world. Chapter 7 extends the history of rubber to 1975 to show the ways that memories of colonialism continued to structure thoughts and behavior regarding rubber, and suggests why human-environment interactions on the plantations of post-1975 socialist Vietnam often resembled those of their colonial predecessors. This chapter focuses on the degree to which colonial discourse as materialized on plantations was subverted by various actors and revisits the historiography of the Vietnam War by adopting the lens of environmental history to show the unexpected consequences of plantation agriculture. Finally, it considers how the post–World War II development of “synthetic” rubber affected the actions of those associated with “natural” rubber plantations.

A Belated and Tragic Ecological Revolution: Nature, Disasters, and Green Activists in the Soviet Union and the Post-Soviet States, 1960s-2010s

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Coumel ◽  
Marc Elie
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
The 1960S

In the late Soviet period, environmental issues gained an unprecedented media resonance and dramatic socio-political importance. The “Ecological Revolution” took a tragic turn in the Soviet Union, against the background of high-impact industrial and natural disasters. After the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station (Ukraine, 1986) and in a context of increased free-speech, Soviet citizens seized on new and old, covered up or forgotten environmental issues and demanded that a hesitant government put them on the political agenda. In a mixture of media revelations, mass demonstrations, and intense voluntary-sector activity, environmental issues of local, national and global significance ranked high among the main preoccupations of the Soviet population. In this introduction to a special issue of SPSR on the environmental history of the late Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, we explore new avenues of understanding the upsurge of ecological perestroika from the 1960s to the 2010s.

Networks, environments and the American city

Urban History ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-275
Author(s):  
John Hassan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Urban Growth ◽  
The United States ◽  
American City ◽  
Water Supplies ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Way

American fascination with the frontier and concern that economic progress might waste the beauty and vast resources of the wilderness has helped environmental history in the United States to thrive for some time. Many publications tended to be conservationist and ‘foundationalist’ in terms of the lofty place ascribed to nature. These traits were shaped by the subject's formative links with political environmentalism, as both phenomena came to life in the 1960s as self-conscious and independent activities. Even after scholars became more interested in the role played by the capitalist system in conditioning the way that cities made demands on the environment, environmental historians’ study of urban growth, including the search for water supplies, tended to focus upon the impacts on the land or its original Indian inhabitants, on how rural harmonies were disrupted by urban greed – in sum to cede to a ‘broader agroecological approach’ as the dominant orthodoxy within the discipline. American environmental historians, of course, are fixated by these issues and have engaged in subtle and profound debates about the proper purpose and methods of their calling.

DOLI: TRANSLATING AN AFRICAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF LOSS IN THE SANGHA RIVER BASIN OF EQUATORIAL AFRICA

2000 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
TAMARA GILES-VERNICK
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Resource Use ◽  
Central African Republic ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Environmental Interventions ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Past ◽  
Equatorial Africa ◽  
Complex Dimensions ◽  
History Of

This essay is about a conceptual category of historical and environmental knowledge and about how a particular group of Africans use that category to understand and debate change. It is, in effect, an exercise in translation. In the middle and upper Sangha basin forests of the Central African Republic (C.A.R.) and Cameroon, Mpiemu speakers have articulated a broad category, doli, through which they express, debate and make claims of truth about the past and present. Glossing doli as ‘history’ does little justice to the richly complex dimensions of this category, for doli encompasses a multitude of relationships to the past. It can refer to a distant unchanging past, as well as to the knowledge, beliefs and practices associated with that past. Mpiemu people hold up the knowledge, beliefs and practices as an idealized framework to guide their behavior toward one another and their uses of fields, forests, rivers and streams. But doli can also describe and frame the accumulated experiences – identifiable events, people and places – of elderly people. In all of these expressions about the past, Mpiemu use idioms linking persons and their environments, those of cords and vines and of mobility (wandering) and stasis (sitting), to articulate doli's central aim of ‘leaving a person behind’. Tracing doli's different meanings, genres and aims can illuminate how the category has changed over the twentieth century, how Mpiemu have interpreted environmental interventions in the Sangha basin, and why they have engaged in conflicts over their entitlement to valued forest resources. Hence, it offers insights into why people use natural resources as they do and provides an alternative to exclusively materialist explanations for conflicts over resource use.

Decolonization, Environmentalism and Nationalism in Australia and South Africa

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett M Bennett
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Drought Tolerant ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Native Invasive ◽  
Cultural Movement ◽  
National Environmental

Decolonization influenced the rise of environmental activism and thought in Australia and South Africa in ways that have been overlooked by national histories of environmentalism and imperial histories of decolonization. Australia and South Africa’s political and cultural movement away from Britain and the Commonwealth during the 1960s is one important factor explaining why people in both countries created more, and more important, public indigenous botanic gardens than anywhere else in the world during that decade. Effective decolonization from Britain also influenced the rise of indigenous gardening and the growing popularity of native gardens at a critical period in gardening and environmental history. Most facets of contemporary gardening—using plants indigenous to the site or region, planting drought-tolerant species, and seeing gardens as sites to help conserve regional and national flora—can be dated to the 1960s and 1970s. The interpretation advanced here adds to historical research tracing how the former Commonwealth settler colonies experienced effective decolonization in the same era. This article expands the focus of research on decolonization to include environmentalism. The interpretation of the article also augments national environmental histories that have hitherto downplayed the influence of decolonization on the rise of environmentalism. Putting decolonization into the history of the rise of environmental thought and action sheds light on why people in contemporary Australia and South Africa are so passionate about protecting indigenous flora and fauna, and so worried about threats posed by non-native invasive species.

scholarly journals Surviving Fisheries Management: Aquaculture, Angling, and Lake Ahmic

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Michael Del Vecchio
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Fisheries Management ◽  
Ecological Benefits ◽  
Fisheries Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Grass Root ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Village

The vast majority of inland waters in Ontario have been designated as purely recreational fisheries. Environmental historians who study human-fish relations have demonstrated the influence of anglers in the establishment of fishing regulations and fisheries management policies that sought to maximize fish resources for sport fishing and fishing tourism. To achieve this goal, aquaculture programs were conducted throughout Ontario that artificially reared fish and planted them in lakes. For over a century, from approximately 1860-1960, Ontario relied on aquaculture as a blanket solution to all fishery problems. Over the past fifty years, fisheries science has questioned the ecological benefits of stocking programs. Stocking efforts in the province have been drastically reduced since the 1960s but have continued largely because of grass root initiatives from concerned anglers. Lake Ahmic is home to a small cottage community based out of the village of Magnetawan. The lake has been stocked with a variety of fish species for over a hundred years. In addition to this, several species have been accidentally introduced to Lake Ahmic altering its ecological balance. Between 1987 and 2006, a local angling organization was responsible for initiating and running a walleye-stocking program on Lake Ahmic. In 2006, to the disappointment of the local anglers and greater Magnetawan community, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources canceled the stocking program. At the root of the discord between the community and the government is a century long history of efforts to engineer a desirable nature at Lake Ahmic, as well as shifting ideas of what this desirable nature is, and the role that science should play in bringing it about. I argue that a century of stocking fish on Lake Ahmic has reified the practice into the community’s conservation ethos. The environmental history of Lake Ahmic adds insight into the social and political tensions that have arisen as a result of the cancelation of the stocking program.

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