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The power of legend

Posted: August 17, 2015 | Author: Dolly Jørgensen, The Return of Native Nordic Fauna | Filed under: Syndicated | Tags: beaver, envhist, Syndicated | Comments Off on The power of legend

I was thinking this weekend about the repetition of stories. There was some discussion on twitter about whether or not the history of the conservation movement is the same thing as the history of the environmental movement (which came up in the context of an article in the New Yorker, “Environmentalism’s racist history”). While I can sympathise with the desire to make a distinction, I think it matters more how the histories are invoked by people as foundation legends. As humans reflect on themselves, they tell stories to make sense of the world. It seems to me that there is a tendency for people today to judge the past by whether the story turned out to be ‘true’ or not, rather than on what the story did for the people of the past (or people of the present, for that matter). Yet even untrue stories may hold truths of a kind.

The legend of the beaver is a case in point. One of the most influential encyclopaedic natural history texts ever written was penned by Pliny the Elder (AD23-79) during the last two years of his life. Book VIII is dedicated to terrestrial animals, with Chapter 47 dealing with beavers and other amphibious animals. He begins with the later oft-repeated legend of the beaver’s testicles:

The beavers of the Euxine, when they are closely pressed by danger, themselves cut off the same part [the testes], as they know that it is for this that they are pursued. The substance is called castoreum by the physicians.

A stuffed beaver showing off his massive teeth at the Skogsmuseum in Lycksele, Sweden. Photo by D Jørgensen.

This legend became the standard story about beavers until the early modern period. You might just chalk up Pliny’s story to the uninformed ancient Romans, but few have thought about the context of this story in the Natural History. Immediately after the section about biting off the testicles Pliny goes on for several sentences about the beaver’s teeth and how dangerous they could be because of their bite. When read together, the story about the beaver biting off his testicles becomes a tale about the danger of the animal’s sharp teeth. The teeth, not the castoreum, are the point of the story. And for anyone who has seen beaver teeth, they can understand Pliny’s obsession with the teeth.

Pliny in fact had information contradicting the testicle-biting tale. In Book XXXII, Chapter 13, Pliny takes up the uses of castoreum within a broader discussion of medicines extracted from amphibious animals. In this chapter he writes:

Sextius, a most careful enquirer into the nature and history of medicinal substances, assures us that it is not the truth that this animal, when on the point of being taken, bites off its testes: he informs us, also, that these substances are small, tightly knit, and attached to the back-bone, and that it is impossible to remove them without taking the animal’s life.

Sextius clearly knew his castoreum. He even rightly noted that true castoreum is contained in two pouches attached by a single ligament – so anything else is false. Pliny’s use of Sextius as expert testimony reveals that Pliny was not oblivious to castoreum’s true source. In this section on medicine, Pliny may have been trying to be as accurate possible in order to have people avoid being duped by false castoreum, but in the section on animals, the key attribute of each animal was in focus.

Beaver chase. British Library, Harley MS 4751 fol. 97. Image in public domain, provided by BL.

I’ve also read medieval bestiaries chided for their ‘silly’ stories of beaver behaviour, but these too have a purpose. In the bestiaries such as the Aberdeen Bestiary, the beaver is pursued by hunters, so he bites off his testicles and throws them to the hunter who then calls off the chase. Every image of the beaver shows some part of this story. Sometimes, there is even a beaver who has been a previous victim who lays on his back to prove to the hunter that he no longer has the precious jewels. The legend repeated over a thousand years before in Pliny was clearly still alive and kicking in the late Middle Ages.

But we have to remember that these texts were not just natural histories, but also moral histories. Immediately following the explanation of the beaver’s tactics, the application to a good Christian life is drawn:

Thus every man who heeds God’s commandment and wishes to live chastely should cut off all his vices and shameless acts, and cast them from him into the face of the devil.

So stories aren’t always what they seem. The person telling the story has a goal in mind. A legend or myth holds truth as well. If we analyse those stories we can find out what the people of the past valued—what they thought was important about their world.

— Dolly Jørgensen, The Return of Native Nordic Fauna

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Google Street View Cars are Mapping City Air Pollution

Posted: August 14, 2015 | Author: Ant, Spider, Bee: Exploring Digital Environmental Humanities | Filed under: Syndicated | Tags: cartography, envhist, Maps, Pollution, public, Syndicated, The Ant | Comments Off on Google Street View Cars are Mapping City Air Pollution

In Smithsonian Magazine, Heather Hansman reports on how Google, environmental monitoring startup Aclima, and the EPA have partnered to monitor air quality by adding sensors to Google’s Street View cars:

The mobile sensors monitor a host of environmental pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, nitric oxide, ozone, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, black carbon, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds. The goal is to track the density of these pollutants and how they change during the day, so that city residents have a sense of what they’re inhaling and can adapt their habits.

In the Wake of the Ottumwa Belle: From Crisis to Conservation

Posted: August 13, 2015 | Author: Peeling Back the Bark | Filed under: Syndicated | Tags: conservation, envhist, environmental movement, guest contributor, log rafts, logging, Syndicated | Comments Off on In the Wake of the Ottumwa Belle: From Crisis to Conservation

On the 100th anniversary of the last log raft floated on the Upper Mississippi River, scholar and Aldo Leopold biographer Curt Meine reflects upon conservation efforts over the last century and the challenges that lay ahead.

This summer marks an obscure anniversary in the history of conservation. In August 1915 a large raft of white pine lumber was floated down the Upper Mississippi River from Hudson, Wisconsin, to Fort Madison, Iowa. For those on board and those watching from shore, it was a ceremonial occasion, an elegiac gesture. For decades, from Maine to western Ontario, white pine logs and lumber had been transported by water to downstream sawmills and rail towns. In northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan the cut crescendoed in the decades after the Civil War. At the peak of the industry in the 1880s, some 500 rafts of white pine came down the Mississippi each month. But with the exhaustion of the “inexhaustible” pineries, there was no more big pine to float. The pine boom was over.

And so the lumbermen organized one last raft for nostalgia’s sake. The steamboat Ottumwa Belle, under Captain Walter Hunter, guided the raft around the great river’s bends. At Albany, Illinois, it paused to take aboard 93-year-old Stephen Beck Hanks, famed riverman and cousin to Abraham Lincoln. In 1843 Hanks had guided the first raft of white pine logs downstream, from the St. Croix River pinery at Stillwater down to St. Louis. In the words of river historian Calvin Fremling, “Hanks has seen the whole thing—the beginning, the culmination, the end—all in one man’s lifetime.”

The Ottumwa Belle and lumber raft at Davenport, Iowa, August 20, 1915
Source: Putnam Museum, Davenport, IA

As that final raft slipped downriver, it left in its symbolic wake a region of ruin: some 50 million acres of cutover and burned-over stump fields; soils sterilized by fire and eroded into gullies; streambeds and riverways altered by scouring and heavy sediment loads; disrupted and depleted fish and wildlife populations; a scattering of boom-and-bust work camps and abandoned lumber towns; and a legacy of concentrated wealth, political power, and corruption. The very landscape of unsustainability.

The story of the white pine was remarkable but not unique, even in its time. The lumber barons of the Midwest had their equivalents elsewhere: yellow pine barons in the South; Douglas fir barons in the Northwest; wheat and cattle barons in the Plains; copper and iron barons in the upper Great Lakes; steel barons in the lower Great Lakes; coal barons in Appalachia and Illinois; gold and silver barons in the Rockies and California; oil barons in the newly tapped petroleum districts; and railroad barons tying them all together.

Across the continent the pattern repeated itself, varying by landscape and resource: the alienation and removal of Native American people; an advance wave of speculation and maneuvering; an onrush of hopeful opportunists; the manipulation of laws and courts; the recruitment of cheap, abundant labor; the winnowing of economic winners and losers; the consolidation of wealth into cartels; the channeling of that wealth into political power and authority; a compliant host of publicists and newspapers; the co-opting of the mechanisms of representative government. And always the same legacy: degraded landscapes and exhausted sources of wealth; communities inflated by the booms and drained by the busts; citizens left to clean up the messes and to create more sustainable places and economies.

And, finally, always, the same question: can democracy find a way out of the crisis, right itself, reclaim some equilibrium between private wealth and commonwealth, between self-interest and the general welfare? Like the other booms, the pine boom yielded immediate prosperity, but at the price of destabilized and distorted ecosystems, social systems, and political systems. All too many of those who had reaped the quick profits had scant concern for the vitality and resilience of the forest (or prairie, or river, or range, or fishery) or the health of the democracy that provided their opportunity. In the absence of economic self-restraint, social constraint became inevitable. In the face of crisis, there was no alternative. Reckless economics and devastated landscapes will do that to an ideology.

White pine stump and seedlings, Vilas County, Wisconsin. (Photo by author)

Now, as the full scope of the climate crisis becomes evident, the question arises again: Can democracy respond? The story of the white pine offers some hope. As the big pine (and redwoods, and passenger pigeons, and bison) dwindled, reformers of varied political backgrounds and stripes found common cause and enacted reforms. We called it conservation. Over time the forests of the Upper Mississippi River and Great Lakes returned as the soils, waters, plants, and animals went about their collective work of self-renewal. That recovery continues, more than a century after the Great Cut. The region has hardly achieved sustainability. There is always some short-term economic fix, some new scheme to begin yet another round of heedless exploitation of the waters, the minerals, the forest. Yet, starting a century ago, citizens overcame political inertia in a way that made long-term positive change possible, and inaugurated the modern search for what George Perkins Marsh called “a wise economy.”

Climate disruption, though, is a crisis of a different order and magnitude. It is not local or regional in scope, but global. It is a crisis, not of a certain stage or kind of economy, but of the entire fossil-fuel-dependent meta-economy that spans the globe, that has been expanding since the dawn of the industrial age, and that actively resists envisioning alternatives to its own continued domination. The resulting concentration of wealth now flows directly toward unprecedented political power. Especially in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, that power has few institutional checks on its momentum or direction. The climate crisis and the democracy crisis are now two names for the same thing.

Just as the Ottumwa Belle’s historic journey signified change in its time, indicators of transformation mark our moment: activists gathering by the thousands to speak out against the epic exploitation of Canada’s tar sands; Pope Francis releasing his encyclical Laudato Si’, defining a moral imperative in the Catholic tradition to conserve “our common home”; international climate policy negotiators making plans to gather in Paris later this year; presidential candidates calibrating their messages and calculating their impact. All, in their way, reveal that the fate of our democracy and the future of our climate are inseparable. If there is any positive side to all this, it is that as we work to address the one, we must inevitably deal with the other.

Curt Meine is senior fellow with the Center for Humans and Nature and the Aldo Leopold Foundation, research associate with the International Crane Foundation, and associate adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is editor of the Library of America collection Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation (2013). This essay is a contribution to the Center for Humans and Nature’s “Questions for a Resilient Future” series, “Can democracy in crisis deal with the climate crisis?”

Sources

Blair, Walter A. A Raft Pilot’s Log: A History of the Great Rafting Industry on the Upper Mississippi, 1840-1915 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1930).

Fremling, Calvin R. Immortal River: The Upper Mississippi in Ancient and Modern Times (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

Jones, Joseph J. “Transforming the Cutover article: The Establishment of National Forests in Northern Michigan,” Forest History Today 17 (Spring/Fall 2011): 48-55.

“Last Raft Leaves Hudson.” Duluth Evening Herald (23 August 1915).

Marsh, George Perkins. Man and Nature or, The Earth as Modified by Human Action. 2003 edition by David Lowenthal, with a new introduction by David Lowenthal and a forward by William Cronon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003).

Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive. Putnam Museum. Davenport, Iowa. http://www.umvphotoarchive.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/putnm

Williams, Michael. Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Filed under: Guest Contributor Tagged: conservation, environmental movement, guest contributor, log rafts, logging

— Peeling Back the Bark

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Breaking the wild with digital devices?

Posted: August 13, 2015 | Author: Ant, Spider, Bee: Exploring Digital Environmental Humanities | Filed under: Syndicated | Tags: envhist, Featured Post, Syndicated, The Bee | Comments Off on Breaking the wild with digital devices?

By Finn Arne Jørgensen

This is the first of two posts on wilderness in the information age. This first post argues that we can best study ideas of wilderness when something breaks – and that it is at these points that we see most clearly how wilderness and information infrastructures are intertwined. The second post will apply this approach to a concrete historical example.

What does the experience of nature look like when filtered through digital devices? How wild is ”wilderness” in the information age? Such questions underpin many current attempts to articulate the authenticity of nature, made urgent by the increasing presence of smartphones, GPS trackers, social media, and other forms of connectivity in nature. Many such stories place nature and wilderness under considerable pressure from information technology, while others bring our attention to potential digital augmentation of nature. See for instance Yolonda Youngs’ digital wonderland and Sarah Wilson’s observations on “the natureness of nature” and the digital, and the Environment and Society Portal’s “Wilderness Babel” for some examples of the last category.

While it may not be all that fruitful to say that one side is correct and the other is wrong, it is obvious that nature is many things to many people. We can focus on a subset of nature in this post – the idea of wilderness, arguably the most ”authentic” form of nature. Even so, wilderness also makes it clear that nature is an intensely mediated space. While there are physical landscapes out there that we designate as “wilderness” we do so in the form of narratives shared in public in a variety of media, imbuing wild landscapes with meaning and significance.

William Cronon’s influential and (for some) controversial 1991 article ”The Trouble with Wilderness” has shaped environmental historians’ understanding of wilderness in fundamental ways. Cronon leans quite heavily on the history of ideas and the history of religion when looking for the historical articulation of a particular idea of the sublime in nature – in other words, the thing we now know as wilderness. And in this process of articulation, wilderness was not only tamed, but also made as a cultural category. While the landscapes we designate as wilderness existed as physical entities before we came up with the modern idea of wilderness, it held an entirely different meaning. This double move is a classic constructivist approach that made Cronon unpopular among nature conservationists and activists. Scholars like Eileen Crist argues that considering nature as socially constructed is an ideological move that is “as dangerous to the goals of conservation, preservation, and restoration of natural systems as bulldozers and chainsaws.”

“Wilderness” as a cultural concept has evolved through this intertwining of landscape and narrative over long time periods, but can also go through rapid changes in short time. At the moment wilderness became a thing, something we as a society would recognize as wilderness – it became so to a large degree through media. What’s more, it was enabled and preserved by particular kinds of infrastructure. As a cultural concept, it is not entirely in our own heads, but shared (if often contested) between us and made material in a variety of ways. If we think about wilderness in these terms, as embedded in media and information infrastructures, seeing wilderness as fundamentally in opposition to digital becomes difficult.

With infrastructure, I here mean particular types of technology; not individual artifacts, but large systems, interconnected and distributed . In the classic study Sorting Things Out by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1999), they pushed against the idea of infrastructures as technology, and instead directed our attention to the way ideas and categories come into being, and how infrastructures make them become ordinary.

Furthermore, infrastructures have spatiality in ways that aren’t as obvious in artifacts. As Paul Edwards writes, “mature technological systems – cars, roads, municipal weather services, sewers, telephones, railroads, weather forecasting, buildings, […]– reside in a naturalized background, as ordinary and unremarkable to us as trees, daylight, and dirt. Our civilizations fundamentally depend on them, yet we notice them mainly when they fail….” (185) Can we say the same thing about wilderness; we tend to notice technology as a threat to nature when the infrastructures that bind nature and technology together break?

Breakages demonstrate how infrastructures are intimately tied up with knowledge. They are both ways of doing and ways of thinking. Yet, infrastructure becomes invisible: when it works, it retreats into the background, and only becomes visible when it breaks. This does of course make breaking points valuable for scholars like us. What can we find the breaking points of the infrastructure of wilderness? I think one place is simply when it becomes visible – as a danger to nature. In order to function as infrastructure that can support and enable the wilderness story, a careful balancing act needs to take place, one that is both practical and rhetorical.

In the next post in this series, I will use a concrete historical case to trace how the increasingly dense web of transportation infrastructures and cultural information layers in the late 19h century Norwegian countryside not only connected the urban and the wild, but also served to define and articulate these as separate categories. I will pay particularly close attention to the tensions between knowing, sharing, and experiencing wilderness that followed new media and new mobility in this period, and how these tensions came into play when wilderness protection became an issue in the beginning of the 20th century. Today, when the wilderness experience seems to be more endangered (or illusory) than ever, it is critical that we pay close attention to how cultural and technological mediation creates connections between landscapes, values, actors, and nations.

Image: Collins overland telegraph line, John Clayton White (1835-1907), public domain, BC Archives.

— Ant, Spider, Bee: Exploring Digital Environmental Humanities

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Pamir the Przewalski and his places

Posted: August 11, 2015 | Author: Dolly Jørgensen, The Return of Native Nordic Fauna | Filed under: Syndicated | Tags: envhist, literature, Syndicated | Comments Off on Pamir the Przewalski and his places

When I was at the Ménagerie in Paris, which is part of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, I found a lovely children’s book in the gift shop: L’histoire vraie de Pamir, le cheval de Przewalski. The book (which you can buy here), written by Fred Bernard and illustrated by Julie Faulques, is a real reintroduction story.

The book begins by backing up in time to present the Przewalski horse as living on the steppes of Mongolia. The Przewalskis were wild, untamable horses, killed as prey by Mongols on the backs of domestic horses. Then the horses are discovered by a colonel named Przewalski in the 19th century. After the discovery scene, the text presents the capture of Przewalski horses which were shipped to zoos “in order to save the species.”

The capture of the Przwalski horses, which were then shipped to European zoos. From L’histoire vraie de Pamir, le cheval de Przewalski.

Some of the 50 horses captured at the turn of the 20th century were shipped to the Ménagerie in Paris. And now we get to Pamir, who was born in the zoo and is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of animals caught in the wild.

After the Przewalski horses were captured, the species became extinct in the wild. But the zoo populations were carefully bred and grew in numbers, from 13 founding population animals to over 1000. In 1993, when a scientific reintroduction project was begun, the two-year-old stallion Pamir was selected for the program. He was released into a large enclosure on the Méjean Plateau in France along with horses from other zoo collections. The horses had to adapt to wild living, including finding their own food sources and reproducing freely within the herd. In 2003-4, 22 horses were then taken to Mongolia and reintroduced in their prior range — some of these were Pamir’s descendants.

It’s a beautifully illustrated book with a positive story. But as a historian thinking about belonging and reintroduction, a couple of things struck me.

First, there is a claim about the role of France as place in the story. While the book places the Przewalski horse in Asia, one page is dedicated to the horses in the caves of Lascaux in France. “The small horses have a remarkable resemblance to Pamir,” which is an ingenious way of linking this Asian species to France where the Pamir story takes place. The place of the Ménagerie zoo also matters in the story because it was here that Pamir was born — three double page scenes show him in his zoo enclosure. Placing Pamir specifically in Paris makes him all the more real and important to the French children.

Pamir in the zoo, but still wild. From L’histoire vraie de Pamir, le cheval de Przewalski.

Second, there is a continual insistence on the “wildness” of the Przewalski horse. They are “chevaux sauvages” of the plains. When Mongols tried to domesticate them “c’est impossible!” Although the image shows Pamir in the zoo, the text stresses “Pamir remains wild and very well knows how to defend himself. If he does not feel like a caress, beware!”. He moves to the enclosure to be prepared for “la vie sauvage”. It is through the reintroduction of the Przewalski horse after 100 years in zoos that we proved “it is possible to return an animal to the wild who had not previously known it.”

These are not unusual claims: everyone talks and writes about the Przewalski horse as “the last wild horse”, meaning specifically the last undomesticated horse. But I have to wonder how true that claim can be. The horses eventually reintroduced into Mongolia were descendants through many generations of animals that had only ever lived in zoos and were purposefully bred in extremely controlled ways. The stud books of the horse were carefully recorded and managed. Moreover, the horses were bred to look a particular way.

Image of some of the Przewalski horses in the early 1900s shown by Sandra Swart in a talk at ASEH 2015.

Sandra Swart from Stellenbosch University talked about this in her paper at the American Society for Environmental History meeting in March 2015. She showed a picture of four of the scraggly horses originally from Mongolia, which we can compare to the images of Przewalski horses today which shows extremely consistent animals. (See also another photo taken before 1901 of a captured animal)

Google image results for Przwalski horse

Visual consistency is a trademark sign of intentional breeding. Kate Christen of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute also discussed this in a paper at the World Congress of Environmental History in 2014, noting that Przewalski breeding was conducted to produce offspring “conforming to their European handlers’ imagined preconceptions about wild, primitive horses such as those in the cave paintings.” If domestic animal implies one bred for a specific purpose, these horses are no less domestic than fjord horses or shires or shetland ponies. The claim of wildness is a rhetorical one to place this horse as belonging on the Mongolian steppes.

So Pamir is a story about how an animal can belong in two places at once. Reintroduction causes a shift of physically belonging from one place to another, but the ontological belonging to both places remains.

— Dolly Jørgensen, The Return of Native Nordic Fauna

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Honoring America’s First Forester on His 150th Birthday

Posted: August 11, 2015 | Author: Peeling Back the Bark | Filed under: Syndicated | Tags: Biltmore Estate, Carl A. Schenck, conservation, Cradle of Forestry, envhist, Gifford Pinchot, Historian’s Desk, North Carolina, Pisgah National Forest, Syndicated, Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. Forest Service | Comments Off on Honoring America’s First Forester on His 150th Birthday

The following is an op-ed piece by FHS staff historian James G. Lewis that appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on August 9, 2015, in honor of Gifford Pinchot’s 150th birthday on August 11.

Born just after the guns of the Civil War fell silent, he died the year after the first atomic bomb was dropped. He was, in his own words, a “governor every now and then” but a forester all the time. Indeed, Gifford Pinchot, born 150 years ago on Aug. 11, served two terms as Pennsylvania governor but is best known as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service (established 1905), which today manages 192 million acres. He also created the Society of American Foresters (1900), the organization that oversees his chosen profession, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (1900), the oldest forestry school in America. And just south of Asheville, in the Pisgah National Forest, is the Cradle of Forestry in America, both of which exist in part because of him.

But perhaps his greatest legacy is his prescient call, made 75 years ago, for conservation as the foundation for permanent peace.

Gifford Pinchot during his tenure as Forest Service chief.

When Pinchot enrolled at Yale College in 1885, his father encouraged him to pursue forestry. It was a radical idea. The United States had no forestry school, no working foresters, no land being managed on scientific principles. To become a forester, in 1889 Pinchot traveled to Europe. There he met Sir Dietrich Brandis, who was leading British forestry students on tours of sustainably managed forests in Germany. The best way to introduce forestry to the United States, Brandis told him, was to demonstrate that scientific forest management could earn a private landowner a steady income.

Pinchot came home in 1890 full of ideas but few job prospects. Through family connections, he learned of George Vanderbilt’s great undertaking in Asheville. Vanderbilt hired him to be his estate’s—and thus the nation’s—first working forester. When some of Pinchot’s employees began asking why he did things a certain way, like selecting only some trees to cut instead of cutting them all, he decided to teach them in the evenings.

Pinchot didn’t have the temperament to be a teacher, and the classes, such as they were, didn’t last. But fortunately for America, his forestry exhibit at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and accompanying booklet, Biltmore Forest, attracted wider attention, and he left Biltmore in 1895. On his recommendation, Vanderbilt hired Carl Alwin Schenck, another Brandis protégé, who in 1898 established the Biltmore Forest School, the first forestry school in America.

In 1898, Pinchot was appointed chief of what would become the U.S. Forest Service. He and his friend President Theodore Roosevelt made forestry the focus of a national conservation movement. The two held national and North American conservation conferences before Roosevelt left office in 1909. An international one was scuttled after Pinchot was fired by President Taft in 1910.

A political progressive, Pinchot next plunged into politics. No matter what office he ran for—governor, senator, representative—he advocated for human rights and sustainably managed natural resources. In the 1930s, he watched as Europe and Asia waged wars in large part over access to natural resources. His 1940 observation that “international co-operation in conserving, utilizing, and distributing natural resources to the mutual advantage of all nations might well remove one of the most dangerous of all obstacles to a just and permanent world peace” rings louder even today and is a premise of the just-released UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Although planting a tree or visiting the Cradle of Forestry are good ways to commemorate Gifford Pinchot’s 150th birthday on Aug. 11, the best way to honor America’s first forester is to continue working for conservation and, by extension, world peace.

James Lewis is the staff historian at the Forest History Society in Durham and an executive producer of “First in Forestry: Carl Schenck and the Biltmore Forest School.” The film will have its world premiere at Brevard College on Aug. 30 and its television premiere on UNC-TV in 2016.

Filed under: Historian’s Desk Tagged: Biltmore Estate, Carl A. Schenck, conservation, Cradle of Forestry, Gifford Pinchot, North Carolina, Pisgah National Forest, Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. Forest Service

— Peeling Back the Bark

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Remote Silvertown Transforms Again

Posted: August 10, 2015 | Author: ActiveHistory.ca | Filed under: Syndicated | Tags: Does History Matter?, envhist, Environment, European History, Syndicated | Comments Off on Remote Silvertown Transforms Again

By Jim Clifford

Industrial Silvertown is not a standard tourist attraction in London, though in recent years thousands of people have peered down on the remaining factories from the Emirates Air Line cable cars as they descend toward Victoria Dock and the ExCel convention centre. It was nonetheless a really important region of heavy industrial development during the late nineteenth century and is again on the frontline of rapid development. Most waterfront property in East London, from the banks of the Thames to the Limehouse Cut canal and the Lower Lea, are undergoing redevelopment as glass towers transform urban landscape. This is not the first time waterfront property underwent rapid transformation, as many of London’s nineteenth century factories required access to rivers or canals to carry coal and other raw materials.

At the start of the nineteenth century Silvertown did not exist. It was simply the southern edge of Plaistow Level, a large marsh on the Essex side of the Lea River and well beyond the eastern edge of London’s outskirts in Poplar. The first Ordnance Survey for the region, from 1805, shows extensive marshlands from the Redriff Marsh that later became the Surrey Docks through to the Roding river and beyond. Industrial development, more docks and working class residential districts spread throughout much of these wetlands in the century that followed.

Ordnance Survey First Series, 1805

The Environs of London. 1855.

Silvertown was created with the construction of Victoria Docks, completed in 1855, which divided a southern strip of marshlands from the rest of the parish of West Ham. A few years earlier, in 1852, S.W. Silver established the first factory on the land south of the docks and facing the Thames. A railway built to North Woolwich established transportation link to the region and in the decades that followed other industrialist followed Silver to this isolated region. Silver’s early rubber factory developed into a major underwater telegraph cable company and he lent his name to this remote region. Beyond rubber and telegraph cables, Silvertown was home to John Knights Royal Soapworks, two competing sugar factories, one established by Henry Tate and the other by Abram Lyle, along with a variety of chemical works and lubrication refineries. Scattered housing developed between these factories and the docks, but the region remained remote to the vast majority of Londoners. J.J. Terrett, a socialist and local politician described the environmental conditions during the first years of the twentieth century.

In the south of the borough are Victoria and Albert Docks, with their huge attendant army of semi-casual workers, and beyond that the industrial district of Silvertown with its collection of immense factories and wharves fronting on the River Thames – a desolate region…. The atmosphere is blackened with smoke and poisoned with the noxious fumes of chemicals, and the stench of bone manure and soapworks, and the only sounds to be heard are the shriek of railway engines and the mournful foghorn hoots of the steamboats coming up the river.[1]

The rapid development of heavy industry completely transformed the marshlands of the estuary and created an industrial landscape. These factories created hundreds of jobs and contributed to London’s economic development. The environmental regulations were limited and not well enforced during the later nineteenth century. Newspapers reported on the occasional prosecution of factories dumping chemical into the sewers and complained that the borough council turned a blind eye all too often. This little known strip of land, located beyond a major set of docks and miles east of central London was scarified to economic progress.

A few small redevelopment projects transformed small sections of Silvertown in recent decades, but the remaining large factories reduced the attractiveness of the region for waterfront property development. The promotional video at the top of this post suggest the Royal Wharf development is replacing one of these few remaining large factories. News reports suggest the Tate & Lyle factory, located a little further east, might also close in the near future. The Royal Wharf project will improve the local environmental conditions, as redevelopment presumably begins with major environmental remediation work which will clean the residual pollution from the past century and a half. However, it remains a little disappointing to see Silvertown complete the process of deindustrialization and for this distinct region of London to transform into yet another landscape of mixed use waterfront glass towers.

[1] 1. J. J. Terrett, “Municipal Socialism” in West Ham: A Reply to “The Times,” and Others (London: Twentieth century press, 1902), 4-5.

— ActiveHistory.ca

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Podcast 67: Out of this world: environmental history of near-Earth space

Posted: August 10, 2015 | Author: EH Resources | Filed under: Syndicated | Tags: envhist, Podcast, Space, Syndicated | Comments Off on Podcast 67: Out of this world: environmental history of near-Earth space

Sphere of satellites and space junk
surrounding Earth. Image: NASA

Since the early days of the Space Age spent rocket stages, decommissioned satellites, and rubbish of all kinds have contaminated near-Earth space. At present more than 100 million pieces of human-made debris ranging in size from dead satellites to flecks of paint whiz around the Earth at incredibly fast speeds. This cloud of space junk poses a threat to our space infrastructure on which we now depend so much for navigation, communication, Earth surveillance, and scientific and industrial data collection, because even small fragments of a disintegrated spacecraft can seriously damage other satellites.

Does the creation of space debris mean that humanity has extended the “industrial sphere” into near-Earth space? Historian Lisa Ruth Rand, A PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses this question on episode 67 of Exploring Environmental History. She also examines why environmental historians should study the expansion of humanity beyond earth and other space environmental history related issues.

Further reading & resources

Lisa Ruth Rand, “Gravity, the Sequel: Why the Real Story Would Be on the Ground”, The Atlantic, 28 February 2014.

Lisa Ruth Rand, “How Apollo Astronauts Took Out the Trash. One small step for garbage. One giant leap for garbage-kind”, Popular Mechanics, 21 July 2015.

Website of Lisa Ruth Rand

Jan Oosthoek, “New horizons: space, a new frontier for environmental historians”, Environmental History Resources, 16 July 2015.

NASA Orbital Debris Program

Pyne, Steve. “Extreme Environments”, Environmental History 15 (2010) 3, 509-513.

Music credit

“The Astronaut” by timberman, Available from ccMixter

The post Podcast 67: Out of this world: environmental history of near-Earth space appeared first on Environmental History Resources.

— EH Resources

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CFP Earth, Air, Water & Fire sessions at Kzoo 2016

Posted: August 8, 2015 | Author: ENFORMA | Filed under: Syndicated | Tags: conference, envhist, Syndicated | Comments Off on CFP Earth, Air, Water & Fire sessions at Kzoo 2016

ENFORMA would like to announce that we have received four (!) sessions for the 2016 Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies (12-15 May 2016). We are looking for presenters from across the spectrum of medieval studies for sessions organized around the medieval elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire.

Hopefully each session will involve cross- and trans-disciplinary connections. This elemental organization encourages both a focus on medieval understandings of the world (rather than just modern ecological ones) and a creative re-arranging of some of the traditional ways of grouping sessions. For example, a paper on medieval water management could now productively share session space with a paper on medieval religious ideas about water as a purifying agent. So in addition to environmental historians, we invite religious scholars, literary scholars, art historians, and others who are actively connecting their own work to that of the increasingly deep and relevant field of medieval environmental history to propose papers.

ENFORMA and the environmental history sessions have a long history at the Medieval Congress, and a presence that is increasingly visible and valuable. In 2013 our two sessions each had over 40 people in attendance (standing room only!). Eager to encourage a wider conversation about how environmental history matters to medieval studies, we are not pre-filling sessions, and open them to all interested parties. Information on the requirements for application will be available through the International Congress website (http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/).

Contact Ellen Arnold (Ohio Wesleyan University) directly at efarnold@owu.edu with questions and proposals. Proposals are due to Ellen no later than 15 September 2015.

— ENFORMA

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Biodiversity Heritage Library: The Arcadia Fund Awards Grant to Support The Field Book Project

Posted: August 8, 2015 | Author: Ant, Spider, Bee: Exploring Digital Environmental Humanities | Filed under: Syndicated | Tags: envhist, Syndicated, The Ant | Comments Off on Biodiversity Heritage Library: The Arcadia Fund Awards Grant to Support The Field Book Project

The Biodiversity Heritage Library blog reports great news in the field of the digitization of primary sources.

The Smithsonian Libraries received a $511,200 grant from the Arcadia Fund for The Field Book Project to provide free, online access to the Smithsonian’s field books on biodiversity research.

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