environmental history 
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SOURCE: The Guardian
2/27/2023
We Can't Leave Climate out of History
by Peter Frankopan
Emerging "climate archives" of precise data about weather patterns can illuminate ways that the environment impacted human history.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
2/27/2023
Phosphorus Giveth (Life) and Phosphorus Taketh Away
by Elizabeth Kolbert
The industrial age miracle of phosphorus fertilizer production revolutionized agricultual yields. Today, humanity faces a twin crisis of the mineral's scarcity and the toxicity of the algae that it feeds with farm runoff.
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SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
2/22/2023
Can the Long-Maligned Cuyahoga River Drive Revitalization in Cleveland?
The river was a central thread in the city's industrial development and growth, and a punchline for its decline. Can it become a place Clevelanders love?
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
2/22/2023
The East Palestine Disaster Echoes 1948's Killer Smog in Donora, PA
by Cassondra Hanna
Despite the decline of rust belt industry, the Ohio Valley remains a backbone of the industrial transportation sector, making its residents uniquely vulnerable to acute toxic pollution if profits are allowed to outweigh environmental safety.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/9/2023
Oil and Spills Have Always Gone Hand in Hand
by Nolan Varee
Transporting a toxic substances quickly over long distances to market will inevitably produce spills. Though the technology of oil transport has changed, this essential fact remains unchanged, and will as long as regulation treats the risk as an acceptable part of the business.
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12/18/2022
We Know About Fire. What Does Ice Tell Us About Humanity's Past and Future?
by Fred Hogge
Harnessing cold – both natural and artificially-created—has been a key support for human flourishing, but also a factor in the consumption of resources that imperils the environment.
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SOURCE: Perspectives on History
12/12/2022
Resisting the Plans for America's "Nuclear Sponge"
by Taylor Rose
An unlikely coalition of conservative "sagebrush rebels" and Native tribal activists opposed a plan to locate the US ICBM arsenal in Utah and Nevada, creating a single nuclear sacrifice zone in the event of an attack.
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SOURCE: ProPublica
12/3/2022
The Cold War Legacy in America's Groundwater
The government has failed to regulate or control groundwater pollution from the uranium mines that built America's nuclear arsenal.
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SOURCE: History Club (Substack)
12/4/2022
Qatar's World Cup Echoes Brutal American Labor History
by Jason Steinhauer
Exposés of the brutal conditions faced by migrant laborers who built Qatar's World Cup facilities echoes the history of American public works, where workers' bodies and lives were subordinated to budgets and timetables.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
11/22/2022
Is Environmental Damage Really Sabotage by Capital?
by R.H. Lossin
The term "capitalist sabotage" describes intentional destructive activity in service of profit, and is a more accurate label than "accident" or "unintended consquence" for the environmental change that will cause a million unnecessary deaths a year over the coming decades.
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SOURCE: Slate
11/5/2022
What Has the Trump Era Done to Wendell Berry?
"The Need to Be Whole once again considers the question that Berry has spent his entire life contemplating: How can we live among our fellow creatures in a way that is honorable, just, and as sustaining of our souls as of our material needs?" A reviewer doesn't think his latest work succeeds.
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SOURCE: Vox
9/23/2022
The 100-Year Old Miscalculation that Drained the Colorado River
The Colorado River Compact is based in an egregious exaggeration of how much water flows through the river—and how much downstream farms and cities have been entitled to use.
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9/25/2022
The History of DDT Shows Government Agencies Have Responsibility for Today's Skepticism about Science
by Elena Conis
The willingness to share information about the toxicity of pesticides has long been compromised by the government's interest in their economic usefulness. From COVID to climate, today's crises show the need for a new balance of transparency and profitability.
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SOURCE: New York Times
9/10/2022
Clover Lawns Replacing Grass in Reversal of Suburban Historical Pattern
Clover lawns are trendy on social media. Historian Ted Steinberg says this is a reversal of a half century of industrial marketing and cultural values that have made the grass lawn a suburban goal. Environmentalists hope it continues.
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SOURCE: ProPublica
8/8/2022
Making a Uranium Ghost Town
Both the Homestake Mining Company and New Mexico state regulators knew almost immediately that a uranium mine opened in 1958 was poisoning local groundwater. They didn't tell local residents, who have been fighting for their lives and for justice.
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SOURCE: New York Times
8/4/2022
How Decades of Coal Mining Left West Virginia Vulnerable to Flooding
For a century, coal mining companies have taken billions of dollars of wealth out of eastern Kentucky, stripped the land of vegetation that can contain flood waters, and contributed to the climate change making severe storms more frequent, while leaving little for the people who live there.
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SOURCE: New Books Network
7/12/2022
David Silkenat Publishes Innovative Environmental History of Slavery
A fateful decision by American slaveowners shaped the landscape of the south: working to maximize the productivity of each enslaved laborer, instead of safeguarding the long-term productiveness of the land.
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SOURCE: Legal History Blog
6/30/2022
Legal Historians as Authority in West Virginia v. EPA
This is a note identifying the legal history sources cited in both Elena Kagan's dissent and Neil Gorsuch's concurrence in the court's ruling limiting the power of the EPA to limit emissions.
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SOURCE: KCUR
5/31/2022
How the Lead Industry Lied to the Public for Decades
The lead industry's trade association encouraged the public to think of lead poisoning as a problem affecting the urban poor as a strategy to stop regulation of their hazardous product, argues historian Gerald Markowitz.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
4/22/2022
Earth Day is a Chance to Win the Messaging War Against Polluters
by Laura J. Martin
Climate protectors are at war with the fossil fuels industry in the arena of public opinion, and they're losing. It's time to stop allowing Earth Day statements of corporate concern to substitute for real change.
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