Importing a Warning: Rachel Carson and the Press Reception of Silent Spring in Francoist Spain (1962–1975)
When it comes to the environmental history of the second half of the twentieth century, biologist Rachel Carson is undoubtedly one of the most frequently quoted
Dolphin Hunting in the Southeastern Black Sea: Notes from Fieldwork in Trabzon
A rare and unusually vivid passage in the 1892 Trabzon Provincial Yearbook (Trabzon Vilayeti Salnamesi) offers one of the most detailed late Ottoman descriptions of dolphin hunting on the coast of Sürmene, along the empire’s northeastern Black Sea littoral. Unlike the generally administrative and matter-of-fact style of provincial yearbooks, this passage dwells carefully on a […]
Experiencing the Arctic in the Little Ice Age: The Pioneering Account of Friderich Martens (1635–1699)
When natural philosopher Robert Boyle presented his groundbreaking study of cold in 1665, he criticized the sensationalism in travelogues from the Arctic. Instead of providing useful information for the advancement of science, Boyle argued, these documents mostly narrated ships in peril among masses of ice or life-threatening encounters with polar bears. However, if Boyle, who […]
Zifzif: Zionist Extractivism and the Politics of Sand in Palestine/Israel
Throughout the twentieth century—the century of cement—marine sand, the primary aggregate for concrete, became one of the world’s most critical natural resources. The prodigious global urban population explosion—from about 10% in 1900 to nearly 50% in 2000—fueled massive sand extraction currently estimated at forty billion tons annually from beaches, lakes, and riverbeds. Fears of depletion […]
Against the Tide: Solar Desalination and the Promise of an Alternative Modernity
Across time and space, people have imagined using the sun to turn seawater into drinking water. After the Second World War, this idea—solar desalination—took material form as the quieter counterpart to conventional desalination and to hydraulic megaprojects like dams. Not because it lacked technical ambition, but because it operated at smaller scales, relied on ambient […]
A Case for Meta-Ecosystem Histories: The Example of Pacific Northwest Salmon
As an interdisciplinary field concerned with conceptions and transformations of nature, environmental history has always had a vexed relationship with the discipline of ecology. William Cronon’s battle with Clementsian climax theory in his pathbreaking Changes in the Land (1983) is an early example. Through deep historical research into the New England landscape, he helped demonstrate that the […]
