#EnvHist Worth Reading: October 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 October 2024:

1. These beaches are among LA’s favourites. But they’re fake

In this BBC article, Lucy Sherriff highlights Elsa Devienne’s new book, Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, and the artificiality of the city’s beaches today. Devienne notes that the city’s natural beaches soon became too crowded when the region experience a population boom in the 1920s, which led municipal officials to decide to start bringing in sand to in order to build bigger beaches. “Between 1939 and 1957, 13.4 million cubic metres – or more than 5,000 Olympic swimming pools – of sediment was dumped on Santa Monica Beach,” Sherriff writes. Sheriff also goes into the history of beach grooming and how it is at odds with current efforts to restore sand dunes and nurture biodiversity on the coastline.

2. Big Oil knew monster storms were coming. We have the receipts.

In early October, Florida faced another devastating hurricane, Milton, which led to eleven deaths and severe damage. In this article for Heated, Arielle Samuelson adds to the growing body of literature showing that fossil fuel companies have known about the risks of climate change since the 1970s; internal documents, Samuelson shows, reveal Exxon and Shell scientists accurately predicted storms, sea-level rise, and extreme weather due to fossil fuels. Despite these warnings, executives downplayed their industry’s role, obstructing policy changes. This led to decades of misinformation, with lobbying efforts persisting today, delaying necessary action against climate catastrophes. “These tactics successfully blocked policy over the past 50 years that could have helped prevent climate catastrophes like Milton,” Samuelson writes.

3. Abandoned Lands: A Hidden Resource for Restoring Biodiversity

In this piece for Yale Environment 360, Fred Pearce highlights Gergana Daskalova, who was raised in Bulgaria’s rural village of Tyurkmen after the fall of communism and witnessed abandoned farmland’s transformation as nature reclaimed it. This inspired her ecological studies, focusing on the potential of abandoned lands to aid climate and biodiversity. Daskalova, alongside researchers, highlights the vast, underappreciated potential of these spaces to absorb carbon and support diverse species. Despite challenges like invasive species and increased wildfire risks, she advocates for managing these lands with local involvement. Her work underscores the importance of abandoned areas. “Handing land back to nature is no silver bullet for either the world’s climate or biodiversity ills. But it does have huge potential if properly exploited and managed,” Pearce argues.

4. Envisioning Seneca Village

Seneca Village is the Black community that was razed in order to make way for the development of Central Park in New York City. Envisioning Seneca Village is an engaging digital history project that seeks to depict the community in the spring of 1855, which is about two years before it was eliminated to make way for the park. The 3D depiction has numbered buildings and places that you can click on as you navigate the town in order to learn details about the community. There is a lot that is unknown about Seneca Village and that is not covered in the archival materials available to researchers. “Envisioning Seneca Village addresses these blindspots by creating a visual interpretation of the village that integrates social historical, archival, and archeological evidence into digital cartographic and architectural reconstruction,” the project team writes.

5. Non-Tenure Track Networking and Professional Development

Earlier this fall, ASLE held several online roundtables aimed at environmental humanities scholars working or looking to work as contingent faculty members and outside of academia. As a scholar who describes myself as “academic adjacent” and somewhat of a networking aficionado, I particularly enjoyed this roundtable – featuring Alison Turner, Anthony Lioi, Ellie Irons, and Juliana Chow – focused on networking and professional development.

Feature Image: “Santa Monica Beach” by szeke 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). She is the Managing Editor for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. She is also President of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society, a Girls Rock Saskatoon board member, 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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