Exploring Environmental History

This edition of the podcast reports on a conference entitled History and Sustainability which was held at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences on 6 and 7 September 2007. The podcast explores how history can make contributions to the debate about sustainability and the education of sustainability. This is an exercise in thinking about the theoretical and methodological challenges that the discipline faces as well as the question of the place of environmental history in the academic spectrum and curriculum. Paul Warde, co-organiser of the conference, explains the rationale of the meeting, which is that sustainability, as a concept can only be understood historically because it is about survival over time. Sverker Sorlin, explains why we need to infuse the environment as a concept into historical thinking and that environmental historians play a crucial role in this process. Kate Showers, Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, talks about the importance of disciplinary synthesis for environmental history. Finally, Libby Robin of the National Australian Museum explores the the long now and the big here.

Websites mentioned in this podcast: Long Now Foundation website, www.longnow.org; Missing link podcast, missinglinkpodcast.com

Mark Levene, founder of Rescue!History, discusses why historians and other humanities scholars should get involved and contribute to the debate and understanding of global warming. Bill Turkell, environmental and digital historian at the the University of Western Ontario, explains how historians can make better use of the web, looks at the developement of an online environmental history research infrastructure in Canada and how the use of programming languages can improve historical instruction.

Websites mentioned in this episode include: rescue-history-from-climate-change.org, www.crisis-forum.org.uk, digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com.

This special edition of Exploring Environmental History reports on the fourth conference of the European Society for Environmental History which was held at the Free University Amsterdam from 5 to 9 June 2007. The podcast will highlight some of the themes of the conference and includes interviews with presenters on the following topics: the history of pollution in the Franco-German border region, environmental history of the polar regions, marine environmental history and environmental history of war.

Podcast exploring recent developments in Scottish Environmental History. Richard Oram, Director of the Centre for Research in Environmental History, University of Stirling, talks about how the entire Scottish landscape has been exploited for hundreds of years; the transformation of land management practices; energy resource management, including wood, peat and coal and how people responded to fuel shortages in the past; woodland management; the organisation of the landscape into Davochs and urban environmental history.

This podcast is entirely devoted to Australian environmental history. Libby Robin talks about the unique nature of Australian environmental history including the connection between deep and modern history, poor soils, fire, Aboriginal history and European settlement. John Dargavel, former president of the Australian Forest History Society discusses the issues and interests in Australian forest history.

In this episode climatologist Dennis Wheeler discusses the use of 18th and 19th century ship logs for historical climate reconstruction. In the second half of the podcast John Perlin talks about world forest history and the publication of the second edition of his book A Forest Journey.

In this edition Poul Holm talks about the development of the new sub-field of Marine Environmental History and the History of Marine Animal Populations Project. The second part of the podcast explores the history of fisheries on the River Forth at Stirling in Scotland. Finally, Petra van Dam talks about the fourth conference of the European Society for Environmental History, which will be held in Amsterdam in 2007.

This podcast looks at the thousand year history of river flood protection in the Netherlands and reports on a conference exploring the complex nature of the relationship between modernity and waste.

Report on the annual meeting of British Environmental Historians held at the Open University in Milton Keynes on 19 May 2006. The theme of this day conference was the use of sources in Environmental History. Interviews with participants cover the use of historical records in modern resource management, the Soil Association and Lady Eve Balfour and the history of the stratosphere.

Joint meeting of the American Society for Environmental History and Forest History Society held in St Paul, Minnesota, 29 March-1 April 2006. Snapshots of some papers presented and interviews with the president of the Forest History Society, with some participants and a short report on one of the field trips.