#EnvHist Worth Reading: August 2024

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Every month I carefully track the most popular and significant environmental history articles, videos, audio, and other items making their way through the online environmental history (#envhist) community. You can read all of our past #EnvHist Worth Reading lists right here. Here are my choices for items most worth reading from August 2024:

1. Seeing Slavery in Eighteenth-Century American Salt-Glazed Stoneware: Richard Williams’ Savings Bank

In this Commonplace article, Elise Lemire weaves an intricate tale around a savings bank given to a two-year old boy, Richard Williams, in New London, Connecticut in 1798, a gift that likely promoted industriousness and hard work. The Williams family, of which the boy was a part, owned a shipyard. Lemire uses the materiality of the savings bank to connect it to salt, and subsequently to the northern cod fishery and enslavement. “It was a relentless circle of brutal exploitation in which the salt raked by Mary Prince and other enslaved people was sold to northern fishermen who sold it back southward in the form of salted fish with which to feed the enslaved who raked the salt,” Lemire writes.

2. Mount Polley disaster was the result of putting resource extraction above all else. Here’s how we change that

August 2024 marked the tenth anniversary of the Mount Polley mine disaster in British Columbia, during which a containment dam failed sending a huge volume of toxic tailings into Quesnel Lake, making it the highest concentration of mercury contamination in Canada. In the article for The Narwhal, Bev Sellars, Neil Nunn, and Sonia Furstenau examine the relative lack of action on the part of the BC government in response to the disaster, connecting it to a long history of ecocidal policy against First Nations in the region. “Instead of viewing the disaster as a symbol of government failure, it’s more productive to see it for what it is: a governance system in B.C. that has always prioritized socially and ecologically destructive extraction,” they write.

3. The Weed Woman: How a sharp-tongued refugee made a forest of the Bangla language

In this beautiful essay for Himal, Sumana Roy looks back on a strange and folkloric figure from her youth, Maya-mashi, and the language that she used to express herself. “Maya-mashi spoke in plants,” Roy writes. “Compulsively, every day, she expressed herself in botanical idioms and proverbs. Her Bangla was a thing of leaves and fruit and stems and roots – her forest.” Roy weaves Maya-mashi and her family’s relationship to her into a personal reflection on her childhood and the thin line between human culture and the natural world.

4. Mimicking Lyrebirds in Multispecies History

This piece on White Horse Press’ Blog by Ruby Ekkel opens with a story of a lyrebird that was broadcast over the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio waves mimicking the sounds of other animals that lived in its home habitat to much popular acclaim. This story is indicative of Ekkel’s main argument, that the lyrebird is a “multispecies historian, whose imitations provide mediated insights into the changing ecosystems of which they are part.” Ekkel provides an overview of the scientific understanding of the lyrebird’s mimicry and how through time the bird has incorporated more human-based sounds, like honking cars, into their repertoire.

5. Hercegovina Kalifornija: Landscape and Legacies in the Neretva Valley

In this Women Write the Balkans essay, which was crossposted to Environmental History Now in August, Mela Žuljević traces some of the visions that planners have had for Hercegovina, focusing on the specific vision of Osman Pirija, who wanted to keep industrialization out of the region in favour of more traditional agricultural planning. Žuljević demonstrates that Pirija was inspired by utopian images of 1970s Napa Valley in California. Žuljević connects this utopic vision to other imaginaries of the region that focused on its barrenness, as well as efforts to change this through irrigation and hydroelectric development. “The vision of Herzegovina as California and its legacies can be traced not only as materials in the landscape but also as past futures that shape how landscape care is articulated in the current moment,” Žuljević writes.

Feature Image: “Truth or Dare” by 350.org is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
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Jessica DeWitt

is an environmental historian of Canada and the United States, editor, project manager, and digital communications strategist. She earned her PhD in History from the University of Saskatchewan in 2019. She is an executive member, editor-in-chief, and social media editor for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). Additionally, she is the Managing Editor for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. She is also a working board member of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society and Girls Rock Saskatoon and a Coordinating Team member of Showing Up for Racial Justice Saskatoon-Treaty Six. A passionate social justice advocate, she focuses on developing digital techniques and communications that bridge the divide between academia and the general public in order to democratize knowledge access. You can find out more about her and her freelance services at jessicamdewitt.com.

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