environmental history

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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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• 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."

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• 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.