environmental history

• 
• SOURCE: TIME
  6/25/2020
  

  21 Lessons From America's Worst Moments

  Historians reflect on the lessons to be learned from the worst episodes of American history (if Americans can look unflinchingly on them). 

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• SOURCE: ABC (Australia)
  5/25/2020
  

  Australia Heading Into New 'Fire Age', Warns Global Fire Historian

  Thirty years ago, Stephen J. Pyne wrote the definitive history of fire in Australia and has just released an updated version of his book, Still Burning Bush.

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• SOURCE: West Virginia Public Broadcasting
  5/15/2020
  

  What History Tells Us About Building Climate Coalitions

  Author Matto Mildenberger has examined how politics have shaped decades of climate policy in his new book, "Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics."

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• SOURCE: The Spokesman-Review
  5/10/2020
  

  New Book Details History of Contentious Cascade Mine

  Historian Adam Sowards' most recent work "An Open Pit Visible from the Moon" delves into the effort to block the mining of Miners Ridge in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/22/2020
  

  Earth Day 1970 Was More than a Protest. It Built a Movement.

  by Adam Rome

  How can environmentalists create space for people on the sidelines to ask what a changing climate means for their hopes and dreams? And how can they encourage everyone on the field to do more?

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/22/2020
  

  What The Older Generations Owe The Young 50 Years After The First Earth Day

  by Matthew D. Lassiter

  While we cannot commemorate Earth Day 2020 through mass public demonstrations, it is now more urgent than ever to listen to young activists' demands for a safer future and a more just world.

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• 4/21/2020
  

  After 50 years of Earth Day, Will we Have 100?

  by Kimberlee Hurley

  This fiftieth celebration of Earth Day should serve as a celebration of the work that has been done. However, it should also serve as a wake-up call for the work that still needs to be done.

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• 4/21/2020
  

  50th Anniversary of Earth Day, Occasion for Hope and Action

  by Fred Zilian

  Organized by Denis Hayes, the first Earth Day was celebrated in ceremonies at some two thousand colleges and universities, ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the U.S.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/16/2020
  

  The Western U.S. is Locked in the Grips of the First Human-Caused Megadrought, Study Finds

  Unlike historical megadroughts triggered by natural climate cycles, emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have contributed to the current one, the study finds.

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• SOURCE: New Yorker
  4/13/2020
  

  The Pandemic Is Not a Natural Disaster

  by Kate Brown

  Zoonotic diseases can seem like earthquakes; they appear to be random acts of nature. In fact, they are more like hurricanes—they can occur more frequently, and become more powerful, if human beings alter the environment in the wrong ways.

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• SOURCE: Washington Monthly
  4/7/2020
  

  When Environmentalists Won Over the Supreme Court

  How one improbable legal case drove the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases.  

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• 4/5/2020
  

  Historian William McNeill Warned in 1976 that a Mutated Flu Virus Could Cause a Pandemic

  by James Thornton Harris

  McNeil’s major achievement was to incorporate developments in microbiology, anthropology and archeology and synthesize them in a popular world history that identified disease as a primary shaper of world history.  

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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."

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• 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?

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• 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.

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• 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.