#EnvHist Worth Reading: June 2026

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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 June 2026.

1) Wildfires Across Borders: Comparing Impacts in Los Angeles and Northern Mexico

In this post for Environmental History Now, Alyssa Spence argues that the overlapping 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles and northern Mexico demonstrate that while environmental risks are shared, recovery capacity and media visibility remain deeply unequal. Driven by drought and historic fuel accumulation, the fires in affluent Los Angeles neighborhoods dominated global news, heavily buffered by insurance and federal aid. Conversely, Spence notes that vast fires across northern Mexico devastated communal agricultural lands and long-term livelihoods with minimal global attention or institutional safety nets. “The fires revealed how environmental risk is tied to patterns of wealth, land use, and insurance,” Spence writes. Addressing these crises effectively requires overcoming cross-border political barriers, moving past reactive media spectacles, and framing wildfires as interconnected regional ecological challenges that demand coordinated, equitable long-term resilience strategies.

2) Through the Guts

In this article for Places Journal, Max Liboiron shares how analyzing microplastics in animal gastrointestinal tracts allows researchers at CLEAR lab to forensically construct landscapes of remote environments. By observing materials like coral fragments and industrial plastics under the microscope, Liboiron shows that science is framed as a deeply relational, place-based practice of interpretation rather than mere data extraction. Emphasizing context over abstraction, the lab utilizes participatory statistics and incorporates Indigenous knowledge and the specific geographical backgrounds of its team members. This collaborative, localized approach ensures that the research directly serves the communities it impacts, prioritizing local food sovereignty and long-term environmental relations over generalized regional averages.

3) Trees Across Time: An Arboreal History of the Boston Common

This post for the Leventhal Map & Education Center serves as an introduction to a larger digital project by Amanda Martin called Trees Across Time: An Arboreal History of the Boston Common. The project centers the history of the Boston Common around its trees, framing plants as active historical figures rather than passive background elements. Inspired by the legendary Great Elm—which symbolized Boston’s heritage until it fell in 1876—the Martin uses visual archives and digital timelines to study centuries of changing human-plant relationships. By shifting to a “plant perspective” and considering tree lifespans, the project challenges human-centric timescales. Martin illuminates shifts from agrarian to recreational land use while highlighting continuous connections, such as nineteenth-century urban reformers and modern climate justice advocates both valuing canopy shade for public health.

4) What is this Rock?

Someone on BlueSky (forgive me for forgetting exactly whom!) described this article as yet another geologist just discovering the anthropocene. Which, fair, but it’s also a good read. On a beach in Workington, England, John MacDonald writes, geologists discovered a 20th-century tire and aluminum tab completely fused into a hard rock platform. This “anthropogenic conglomerate” is composed of industrial slag pebbles eroded by natural waves and rapidly cemented by calcite crystals—a mineralization process that takes decades rather than millennia. Challenging traditional, “natural-only” definitions of geology, MacDonald argues that these emerging human-made geomaterials blur the line between the natural and unnatural. Ultimately, these rapid formations serve as tangible, long-lived physical markers of the Anthropocene, containing modern artifacts that future geologists may study as fossils of our civilization.

5) Dolly Jørgensen Always Has Another Project Up Her Sleeve – Drafting the Past

And finally, I suggest everyone take some time to listen to Kate Carpenter’s conversation with Dolly Jørgensen about her writing practice. Having developed her career in Scandinavia under cyclical, project-based funding, Jørgensen discusses how she primarily wrote academic articles before releasing monographs like her latest book, Ghost Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums. Jørgensen shares her highly structured, concise writing process, which has been influenced by her former background as an environmental engineer, her collaborative relationship with her family, and her reliance on peer feedback. Her overarching advice to scholars is that “done is better than perfect,” encouraging continuous progress over static completion.

Feature Image: “Port Burwell Junkyard Boat (Ontario, Canada)” by @CarShowShooter 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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