environmental history

The disparate and intriguing connections found in environmental history, one tree ring at a time.

Whether we consider the sounds of nature to be pleasant or menacing depends largely on our ideologies.

Despite knowing that plastic recycling wouldn't work, new documents show how petrochemical companies promoted it anyway.

Before the Endangered Species Act, the federal government had actually encouraged the killing of certain species.

My dad grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City. His story is a testament to how urban planning shapes countless lives.

Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?

The complicated, ever-changing, millennia-long relationship between insects and humans.

A new history of the environmental movement places too much emphasis on famous figures like Rachel Carson and shies away from confronting failures.

Smell’s diffuse nature requires crossing the boundaries of several subfields within the historical discipline, but also moving beyond the boundaries of history alone.

Today, the holiday is just a chance for ExxonMobil to release nonsensical ad campaigns. But once upon a time, it was a radical success story.

Fire is a planetary feature, not a biotic bug. What can we learn from Yosemite’s experiment to restore natural fire?

Local evidence of the cataclysm has literally washed away over the years. But Oregon’s Douglas firs may have recorded clues deep in their tree rings.

The results of Foote's simple experiments were confirmed through hundreds of tests by scientists in the US and Europe. It happened more than a century ago.

The resurgence of the wild rice harvest seeks to tells the story of settler colonialism, tribal kinship and ecological stewardship.

A nation that identifies itself with nature begins to fall apart when it can no longer agree on what nature is.

Muir's romantic vision obscured Indigenous ownership of the land—but a new generation is pulling away the veil.

Water—who owns it, who uses it—has shaped this landscape from the Paiutes’ irrigation canals to the Los Angeles aqueduct.

Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals that introduce new problems.

Oil companies like to point to the demise of the whaling industry as an example of market-based energy solutions. The reality is much more complicated.

Connecting present-day environmental inequalities to redlining policies of the 1930s.