#EnvHist Worth Reading: December 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 December 2025.

1) Fish Hacks

In this piece for Springs, Monica Vasile traces two parallel stories of wildlife conservation efforts. In the first half of the article, Vasile describes the work of Katya Karabanina, a golden-eagle ringer in Finland and the risks and care inherent in field biology. Vasile then looks at the work of Canadian biologist Andrew Bryant who worked for decades to save the endangered Vancouver Island marmot. Together, their experiences show how conservation science relies not only on numbers but on embodied, intimate, persistent fieldwork that forges deep relationships between people, species, and landscapes.

2) How Quebec Farmers Took On Vermont’s Maple Syrup King—and Won

This article for The Walrus is an excerpt from Peter Kuitenbrouwer’s Maple Syrup: A Short History of Canada’s Sweetest Obsession. In it, Kuitenbrouwer traces the rise and fall of George Clinton Cary, the American “Maple Sugar King,” who built a near-monopoly over North America’s maple sugar and syrup market by exploiting cross-border supply chains and dictating prices to farmers. His dominance strained producers, especially in Quebec, where low prices and poor quality standards prevailed. Resistance emerged through Cyrille Vaillancourt, who organized Quebec maple producers into a co-operative, reframed maple syrup as a premium product, and challenged Cary’s power. Cary’s empire collapsed during the Great Depression, while producer co-operatives—especially Quebec’s Citadelle—endured, reshaping the industry.

3) Visualising Icebergs in the Early Modern Period

Our Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series (Part V concluded in December) has got me trained to perk up at the slightest mention of arctic visual culture, so when I saw the title of this blog post for White Horse Press by Björn Billing, which introduces his recent article in Environment and History, I clicked immediately. In it Billing examines how icebergs have been imagined and represented long before modern climate discourse, using the contemporary movement of iceberg A23a as a starting point. He explores early modern European encounters with polar ice, when the Arctic was largely unknown and icebergs were described as wondrous, monstrous phenomena rather than clearly defined scientific objects. Lacking precise terminology, Billing argues that explorers relied on evocative language and visual representations. Early illustrations by figures such as Thomas Ellis, John Cleveley Jr., and William Hodges show how images became central to empirical knowledge. These artworks now also serve as historical evidence of climate-driven glacial retreat.

4) Of Rust and Mold—The Insect Pin as a Token of Transimperial Cooperation

In this Arcadia article, Alina Marktanner examines how tropical humidity shaped colonial entomology through the correspondence of Walther Horn and Heinrich Hugo Karny in the 1920s. Their struggle to preserve insect specimens in Southeast Asia, Marktanner demonstrates, reveals how rust and mold limited what could enter European scientific collections. Horn’s decades-long search for rust-proof insect pins, prompted by Karny’s failures in humid Bogor, highlights the material and environmental constraints of colonial science. Despite extensive testing, chemical treatments, and imperial knowledge networks, humidity resisted standardization. The eventual development of rust-resistant needles marked a partial adaptation, exposing both the reach and limits of European scientific control.

5) American Ecofascism: A Conversation with Alexander Menrisky

In this episode of Edge Effects, Sarah Ray interviews Alexander Menrisky about his new book, Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which argues that ecofascism is embedded in everyday U.S. consumption and cultural narratives, not just far-right violence. Through “threshold objects” like land, food, and tools, Menrisky shows how ecofascist ideas emerge across political lines, shaped by stories of crisis, purity, and rebirth. Drawing on fascist studies and American literature, the book frames ecofascism as a storytelling pattern that normalizes exclusionary responses to environmental anxiety, often invisibly shaping attitudes and behaviors in daily life.

Feature Image: “Pure Q Maple Syrup” by susanvg is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 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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