#EnvHist Worth Reading: October 2025

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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 2025.

1) Blessed is the Spot

In 1991, Julian Aguon’s family tried to comfort his dying father by taking him to a beach later revealed to be lethally contaminated by military-dumped PCBs. In this article for Places Journal, Aguon’s father’s death becomes one thread in Guam’s broader story: centuries of colonization, political disenfranchisement, environmental poisoning, and extraordinary cancer rates linked to U.S. military activities. Aguon describes growing up surrounded by funerals, navigating grief, faith, and his mother’s suffering. He later learns of radioactive ships in Apra Harbor and relatives exposed during nuclear cleanup in the Marshall Islands. Aguon provides a loving and real portrait of Guam— a place where beauty, brutality, loss, and resistance constantly collide.

2) Healing Wounds of Light: Birds, Cities and the Fast, Slow, and Forgotten Violence of Artificial Illumination

In this piece for The Metropole, responding to the theme of “light,” Charlotte Leib investigates how early kerosene and electric lighting systems in the New Jersey Meadowlands harmed birds. Leib discusses relying heavily on the findings of ecologists, like Joanna Burger, whose research explains how nineteenth-century electric light and oil spills created “no-analog situations” that disrupted avian behavior and reproduction, linking this to global histories such as the mass slaughter of penguins for lighting oil on Macquarie Island. Leib argues that urban historians overlook how lighting technologies damage ecosystems and urges writing from a bird’s-eye view, recognizing artificial light as slow violence, and adopting practical measures—bird-safe design, healthier lighting, and turning off lights—to protect humans and wildlife. If you want more urban environmental history, look out for our co-series with The Metropole, Urban & Environment Dialogues, in January 2026!

3) The “Cows and Plows” Treaty Settlement: Overview and Implications

In this brief for the Yellowhead Institute, Gina Starblanket and Courtney Vance examine Canada’s “Cows and Plows” process, which addresses long-unfulfilled agricultural promises in the Numbered Treaties, offering one-time compensation to First Nations for missing livestock, tools, and supports intended to help communities transition to new livelihoods while protecting existing ways of life. “All treaties include some form of reference to agricultural benefits and/or assistance,” they explain. Many Nations, they write, are debating whether to accept settlements, which require releasing Canada from future claims and rely narrowly on the Crown’s written treaty texts. Indigenous interpretations emphasize treaties as living, reciprocal relationships meant to be renewed over time, not transactional exchanges. Critics argue that these settlements limit future rights, ignore broader harms, and conflict with treaty spirit.

4) How a 1925 Landslide Reshaped Wyoming Forever

The 1925 Gros Ventre Slide involved the collapse of an entire mountainside in Teton County, Wyoming. It remains one of the largest landslides recorded in North America. The collapse reshaped the valley, created a lake, and led to flooding several years later. In this video from Wyoming PBS, Steve Peck visits the site and talks with Mariah Radue and Todd Stiles of the U.S. Forest Service of Bridger-Teton National Forest about the event and the historical and ecological processes that it spurred.

5) Salmon return to Okanagan Lake after nearly a century

A bit of good news to round out this month’s picks. In the Okanagan, “an Indigenous-led initiative has allowed sockeye salmon free access into Okanagan Lake for the first time in nearly a century.” This short video from CBC News covers this event and shares how a new generation is helping with this spawning and reconnecting to their culture in the process.

Feature Image: “Where the streets have no name” by Smaku is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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Jessica DeWitt

NiCHE Editor-in-Chief, Social Media Editor at Jessica M. DeWitt: Editing and Consulting
is an environmental historian of Canada and the United States, editor, project manager, consultant, 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 and Associate Editor for Environmental Humanities. Closer to home, she is the President of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society, a Coordinating Team member of Showing Up for Racial Justice Saskatoon-Treaty Six, and a Conservation Advisory Committee member for the Meewasin Valley Authority. 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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