environmental history

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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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• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  4/18/2022
  

  EPA Will Finally Investigate "Cancer Alley" as a Civil Rights Violation

  The EPA will investigate whethe the state of Louisiana granted emissions permits to chemical producers in ways that exposed Black communities to significantly higher cancer risk. 

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• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  4/21/2022
  

  Peter Algona: How Cities Became Accidental Wildlife Havens

  Algona's book traces the history of land use decisions that inadvertently allowed species, particularly the coyote, to spread across the United States even as the nation became more urbanized.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  3/18/2022
  

  Nuclear Power Plants Aren't Made to Survive War

  by Kate Brown and Susan Solomon

  "It is difficult to believe, but in all the decades of imagining nuclear-emergency scenarios, engineers did not design for an event so human and inevitable as war."

• 
• SOURCE: Vice
  3/7/2022
  

  What Killed Electric Mail Trucks?

  Although the current Postmaster is a fine villain figure for environmentalists, the USPS's failure to move ahead with electric vehicles traces back to the agency's reorganization in the 1970s and restrictions placed on the postal service by Congress. 

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  2/10/2022
  

  Was the Black Death Less Severe and Shorter than We Think?

  by Adam Izdebski, Alessia Masi and Timothy P. Newfield

  "While no two pandemics are the same, the study of the past can help us discover where to look for our own vulnerabilities and how to best prepare for future outbreaks. To begin to do that, though, we need to reassess past epidemics with all the evidence we can."

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• SOURCE: The Metropole
  1/25/2022
  

  Greening Detroit's History

  by Brandon Ward

  Urban historians are starting to recognize something that urban activists grasped in the 1960s: power and inequality are reflected in cities' environments. 

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• SOURCE: The Nation
  1/25/2022
  

  Tularosa Downwinders: a 75 Year Wait for Justice

  Residents of New Mexico's Tularosa basin received no advance warning of the 1945 atomic bomb tests nor of the risks to their health. They've been excluded from relief legislation that has benefitted residents near the Nevada test sites and workers in uranium mines. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/11/2022
  

  The Soldiers Came Home Sick. The Government Denied It Was Responsible

  Veterans of post-9/11 wars are increasingly showing serious lung damage. Is the Pentagon concealing the role of "burn pits" in creating airborne toxins? 

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• SOURCE: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
  12/9/2021
  

  The Industrial Infrastructure Catastrophe Hanging Over the Gulf Coast

  The flooding and destruction of the refineries and storage facilities along 52 miles of the Houston Ship Channel is a matter of if, not when, says environmental lawywer Jim Blackburn. 

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• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  12/1/2021
  

  Australia's Spy Agency Identified Climate Risk 40 Years Ago; The Government Protected the Coal Industry Instead

  "Concerns from high levels of government show that from the beginning, the country was seeing the climate change issue through the prism of its fossil fuels."

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• SOURCE: WBUR
  11/29/2021
  

  What Can 19th Century Whaling Diaries Tell Us About Climate Change?

  Whaling ships' logbooks contain detailed navigational notes and descriptions of wind and weather, which can help construct a picture of climate patterns on distant stretches of ocean.