This blog is the editorial to the just-published 30th anniversary issue of Environment and History. The issue contains loads free-to-read and Open Access content so do take a look. Here’s to the next 30 years!
This issue marks the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Environment and History, one of the longest established international journals in the field of environmental history. The editorial opens with a look back to the past to show how far the journal has come since 1995. This section is authored by Sarah Johnson from The White Horse Press, which has published the journal over the three decades of its existence. The middle section, written by the current Editor, David Moon, considers where the journal is in the present by introducing the contents of this issue. The editorial concludes with a look to the future by the Deputy Editor, Leona Watson (formerly Skelton). We would like to take the opportunity of this special issue to express our deep gratitude to all the anonymous readers whose assiduous, unacknowledged and unpaid work has contributed so much to the quality of the research published in this and all issues of the journal.
The Past: Sarah Johnson, Publisher
Environment and Historywas founded in 1994 as an interdisciplinary journal, aspiring to bring scholars in the humanities and natural sciences closer together, with – as its aims still state – ‘the deliberate intention of constructing long and well-founded perspectives on past and present day environmental problems’. Thirty years on, it is a field-leading journal in terms of reputation, Impact Factor and global scope – both of author base and subjects addressed. The journal emerged almost in tandem with the European Society for Environmental History – with which its unofficial but valued relationship has always been one of affinity and mutual support. A defining event for ESEH, just as Environment and History was becoming established, was the conference held in St Andrews in 2001, entitled ‘Environmental History: Problems and Potential’. A quarter century on, the ‘potential’ of environmental history has certainly been fulfilled and is constantly being redefined and renewed, not least in Environment and History, while its problems – discursive, ethical and interrogating real-world issues – remain the stimulus for the best scholarship in these pages.
Environment and History was the brainchild of founding editor, the late Richard H. Grove, materialised by The White Horse Press and animated by a host of collaborators passionate about the then-new field of environmental history. Grove was determined to challenge the prevailing US-centrism of early 1990s environmental history and to ʻmove the environmental history of the rest of the world closer to centre stage’ (Editorial, E&H 1 (1) 1995); and a scattergun survey of some of the journal’s early supporters shows the journal’s foundational and continuing global vision. Grove himself was a distinguished historian of imperialism (initially in Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean islands), with strong connections in India, Australia and South Africa, and brought on board scholars as Mahesh Rangarajan, Ramachandra Guha, Mark Elvin, Libby Robin, William Beinart and Jane Carruthers; the British environmental history community (including such figures as Bill Adams, Peter Brimblecombe, John Sheail and Christopher Smout) was generously supportive; the USA was represented on the founding editorial board by no lesser figures than Alfred Crosby and Donald Worster; and Environment and History’s early relationships with such European scholars as Verena Winiwarter, Petra van Dam, Christof Mauch and Peter Coates, cemented at the St Andrews conference, endure to this day.
After Richard Grove, the editorship of the journal passed to a collective graciously chaired by eminent colonial historian John Mackenzie – who had been on the editorial Board since day one – with editors Fiona Watson, John Clark and Georgina Endfield. The collective evolved in 2010 into an advisory committee, always including a representative from the European Society for Environmental History, with editors Stephen Mosley and Karen Jones. David Moon, with deputy Leona Watson (Skelton) took up the editorial baton in 2022. Each of these editors has made her or his mark on the journal through personality and academic interests (ranging from Russia to Latin America, from multispecies histories to industrial pollution); under their successive guardianships, it has reached new communities, gained strength and energy and co-evolved with the discipline while remaining true to its founding principles. For that we thank them wholeheartedly. Board members and a host of peer reviewers are also integral to the journal’s smooth functioning: our thanks to them too.
Environment and History has a rich tradition of publishing book reviews, which are free to read online, providing a valuable resource to scholars. The fact that the journal made an early move to online as well as print publication in 2000 has amplified the significance of this review section and we are grateful to many willing reviewers over the years, and most of all to the book reviews editors. Mark Riley has fulfilled this role with calm efficiency since 2007 and surely deserves a medal.
This year, Environment and History moved to a new online platform, supported by the wonderful team at Liverpool University Press, but it is still entirely independent, as part of the White Horse Press ‘stable’. Publishing changes – for example in the strong move towards online publication and the development of Open Access – and Environment and History has adapted and will continue to do so. Thirty years into its journey, I would like to end by saluting the journal’s part in catalysing and consolidating global environmental histories to date; its future at the ‘sharp end’ of their continuing diversification and evolution is, I think, assured.
The Present: David Moon, Editor
We have put this issue together to illustrate some of the key features and aims of the journal: global coverage; promoting the work of the coming generation of scholars who will shape the field in the future; and the scope and range of environmental history. Environmental history can only be global in coverage and, notwithstanding its close and valued collaboration with the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), the journal aims to cover the entire world. Thus, reflecting the geographical range of articles submitted to the journal, this issue features research on Africa, the Americas, the Arctic, Asia, as well as Europe. Innovative research on Australasia features regularly in the journal on account of its close connection with environmental historians in that part of the world.
Taking advice from our Editorial Board, we commissioned articles for this special issue on the environmental history of parts of the world that we think merit more attention and are currently the focus of stimulating work. To this end, we invited Tetiana Perga (the ESEH regional representative for Ukraine) to contribute an article to demonstrate the vitality and potential of environmental history of and in Ukraine. Drawing on under-used Ukrainian archival sources, she analyses waste recycling in the Ukrainian Republic of the Soviet Union. Perga’s article also contributes to the current need to present the history of Ukraine from a Ukrainian perspective as part of a wider project to decolonise the history of the former Soviet Union and the Russian Empire that preceded it. Decolonising history runs through a series of short articles presenting current and innovative research on Caribbean environmental history by representatives of the newer generation of scholars. Spanning the region from Panama to the islands of the former British Caribbean and the US Virgin Islands, and covering the period from slavery to the present, Mary Draper, Matthew R. Plishka, Francisco Bonilla Garcia, Jessica S. Samuel and Lauren Prince address such topics of global significance as climate, health, disaster, drought and the lasting legacies of colonialism and outside interference in the region.
Research by members of the new generation of scholars is also showcased in the ‘Snapshots’ that open this issue. Nabaparna Ghosh’s work on the land-water binary in colonial South Asia and Dimitris Bormpoudakis’ research into more-than-human ecologies of forced displacement of people in Cold-War Greece both show the value of detailed case studies in addressing issues of wider importance.
The scope and range of environmental history published in this journal is further demonstrated by the remaining articles in this special issue. The next article is by Briony McDonagh, Hannah Worthen, Stewart Mottram and Stormm Buxton-Hill, who are all based at the University of Hull. From their vantage point on the estuary of the River Humber in low-lying eastern England, and drawing on rich, local records spanning the thirteenth to the start of the eighteenth centuries, their exemplary work of public environmental history shows how the population learned the resilience to live with water and the ever-present risk of flooding. Another challenge to urban life, air pollution, is examined by David Jones and Xiaojie Li. Also drawing on rich, local sources, they analyse various obstacles encountered in efforts to control urban smoke in industrialising Shanghai between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In the following article, Elijah Doro takes us to colonial Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) in the first half of the twentieth century. The author moves beyond colonial narratives that centred on the interests of white settler farmers to develop multi-species toxic histories exploring connections between the settlers’ livestock, other species including humans, and landscapes. These articles’ focuses on China and Southern Africa exemplify Environment and History’s commitment to emerging environmental histories beyond the global north. The final article is a North American case with global and theoretical resonance, as Andrew Stuhl analyses ignorance, the oil industry, governments, Indigenous peoples, and the approval of offshore drilling for oil in the Canadian Arctic in the 1960s and 1970s. His conclusions are of great importance not just for environmental historians, in considering the consequences of the construction and manipulation of knowledge, and ignorance, by the rich and powerful.
This special issue concludes with an article by the journal’s Deputy Editor, Leona Watson (Skelton), that draws important and wider lessons and conclusions from her considerable experience of and deep commitment to interdisciplinary research. She has collaborated with civil engineers, geographers, social scientists, literary scholars, artists, hydrologists, economists, creative writers, architects, ecologists and surveyors in exploring significant aspects of the environmental history of Britain, and in drawing lessons from past experience to present them in a meaningful way to regulatory, charity and business stakeholders. Using our historical expertise to make an impact on current and future environmental challenges is one direction in which environmental history and this journal may develop in the future. For more detailed discussion of ‘the future’ I pass the baton to our deputy editor.
The Future: Leona Watson (formerly Skelton), Deputy Editor
It’s impossible to predict precisely how Environment and History will continue to grow, thrive and develop over the next decade. Many environmental histories inform one or more global inequalities, even when all the people under study are no longer alive. By liberating a fuller, diverse range of suppressed voices, stories and evidence, and disseminating it widely, environmental historians are making a positive impact on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in a global context. We are very keen for the journal to provide a welcoming and supportive platform for even more globally diverse authors in the future. We are also committed to broadening the diversity of our peer reviewers, who play such powerful roles when they consider carefully how our articles intersect with the EDI agenda in a global context. Academic publishing continues to be dominated by the global north, suppressing important, different viewpoints, lived experiences and research conducted in the numerous and expanding universities of the global south. However, that is far from inevitable and it is absolutely inexcusable. Sharing many more perspectives on discontinuities in environmental relationships from the global south is a vital priority. The importance of that endeavour cannot be exaggerated and we are doing everything we can to support it.
As I have elaborated more fully in my article on interdisciplinarity, I hope to see a careful and gradual, but nevertheless positive, move towards working more closely with environmental experts from disciplines beyond history. These critical friends have much to teach us about the environments under our study and they can help to inspire greater reflection, criticality and methodological experimentation which underpins our developing ideas and theoretical frameworks. The relatively new, shorter Snapshots articles, which were originally intended to showcase the work of Early Career Researchers, continue to thrive. They have attracted some standalone, smaller case studies by more established scholars too. Even more excitingly, we have received many proposals for Snapshots from scholars working in disciplines other than history, which is promising because it tells us loudly and clearly that the journal’s readership extends to environmental scholars working outside of history. We have successfully published a handful of Snapshots authored by scholars who are not historians, and we are more than happy to work with others to improve the disciplinary diversity of our environmental histories. The recent Snapshot by an academic in Law, Dr Thomas Cheney, on space mining is one of the most inspiring environmental histories I’ve ever read. However, the majority of such proposals, while presenting fascinating and important environmental case studies, unfortunately did not constitute environmental history. Most often this is because they failed to evidence their argument substantially with archival documents or oral history testimonies. While we must continue to publish environmental history, I can see increasing opportunities over the horizon for publishing the work of scholars from other disciplines if we communicate more clearly what environmental history is and more clearly define the line between what we will and what we will not publish.
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