#EnvHist Worth Reading: December 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 December 2024:

1. Proxies for Justice

In this article for Science Institute Library, Lina C. Pérez-Angel and Jayson Maurice Porter highlight the wealth of climate history data in tropical regions and how Western researchers and archives have historically given little attention to this data. The archives in question here are not, for the most part, those found in document boxes in temperature-controlled buildings, but rather pieces of the landscape itself. Archives like rocks, tree rings, and bacterial lipids offer insights into historical climate patterns, but, as Pérez-Angel and Porter show, disparities in research funding and collaboration often leave tropical regions neglected. The article also touches upon research initiatives, like the Marine Annually Resolved Proxy Archives (MARPA) that are working to bring more attention to these overlooked scientific and historical resources.

2. ‘We’re just getting started’: from Alberta to Montana, Blackfeet guardians hope to bring back the buffalo jump

In this article for The Narwhal, Jimmy Thomson writes about the Blackfoot Confederacy’s effort to revitalize their cultural connection to buffalo. For centuries, the Blackfeet relied on buffalo jumps to sustain their way of life, but colonial efforts led to near-extinction of both buffalo and Blackfoot culture. Today, with a growing herd of 400 buffalo, Thomson shows how efforts like the Shield Keepers program integrate traditional knowledge with modern science to restore habitats and traditions. These efforts really highlight the artificiality of the US/Canada border both culturally and ecologically, as efforts to restore the buffalo and cultural traditions necessarily include cross-border collaborations and policies.

3. How the Duck Stamp Became One of the Most Successful Conservation Tools in U.S. History

In this article for Scientific American, Daniel T. Ksepka describes the 2024 Federal Duck Stamp Contest and exhibition and outlines the competition’s origins. Ksepka describes his own personal relationship to the duck stamp, as a curator at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. The first duck stamp originated with the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, which required waterfowl hunters to purchase $1 duck stamps to support bird sanctuaries. Today, the Duck Stamp funds conservation, with 98% of proceeds safeguarding millions of acres. The Bruce Museum’s exhibition, Ksepka shares, celebrates this unique art form and its critical role in conservation.

4. New Data Provides First Global Annual Picture of Cultivated and Natural Grasslands

In this report for the Land & Carbon Lab, authors Radost Stanimirova, Lindsey Sloat, Leandro Parente, Steffen Fritz, and Laerte Ferreira write about the ecological importance of grasslands and how this importance stands in stark contrast to how much of this kind of landscape is protected and how much we know about them. The Global Pasture Watch research consortium was established to develop a suite of data sets for monitoring grasslands and pastures. The first four data sets are available now and the article contains some really excellent visualizations of this data, which begins in the year 2000. They also provide suggestions for how researchers can use these datasets.

5. Antarctica Unveiled: From Accidents to Airborne Labs

In this JStor Daily article summarizing a 2008 article from the The British Journal for the History of Science, Danny Robb opens with a story of a plane crash in Antarctica on Christmas Eve in 1959. Caused by faulty radar altimeter readings over glaciers, Robb writes about how this incident spurred groundbreaking scientific advancements. Engineers discovered that certain radio frequencies passed through ice, allowing altitude measurements of the ground beneath. Army engineer Amory Waite and British physicist Stanley Evans developed radar systems for mapping ice depths. From 1967 to 1979, airborne laboratories equipped with radar echo-sounding (RES) devices revealed Antarctica’s subglacial landscapes. This pioneering effort, Robb writes, exemplified Cold War “big science” and laid the foundation for modern remote sensing technologies.

Feature Image: “Alberta” by Vlastula 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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